Chapter 31 #3
“So get her out of here,” Morgana said between her teeth, just on the periphery of Nyneve’s awareness.
A muscular arm banded around her waist. “Please do not bite me,” came Mordred’s voice in her ear. Then he swept her up into his arms, like she was a damsel in distress.
Her vision blinked in and out. Her ears felt as though they were filled with wax. At one point, she thought perhaps Mordred was speaking to the guards, but concentrating on more than three or four words at a time felt impossible.
An indeterminate amount of time later, she was moving, Mordred’s long strides carrying her out of the cursed room, away from the blood and the men with the questions and the heavy stench of Merlin’s magic.
“Why are you helping me?” Nyneve asked, looking up at him just as they crossed into the hallway.
The torchlight illuminated half his face, the other still cast in shadow, as Mordred glanced down at her, lips parted.
He said nothing, though the pad of his fingertips ghosted the curve of her jaw and then the bow of her lips.
A sorrowful, looping melody slunk in from some faraway corridor.
She could not imagine who would be playing the lute at this hour.
“Camelot was a much different place once,” Mordred murmured, holding her gaze. “I, too, have found myself covered in the blood of people I wished I could have saved.”
That ever-present ache in her chest unfolded, like a letter finally in the hands of its intended recipient. “Oh,” Nyneve whispered, her eyelids growing incredibly heavy. She decided to rest her head on his shoulder. Just for a moment.
Heart thrashing against her ribs, Nyneve awoke paralyzed by a jolt of fear she could not place.
Unfamiliar surroundings greeted her: a small hearth across from the bed, a wardrobe, moonlight spilling across the stone floor.
She threw off the linens and scrambled to the side of the pallet before a familiar voice said her name.
“Steady, Nyneve,” Mordred said. “You are safe.”
She blinked, her eyes adjusting in the low light. Pain banded her skull. She raised her hands to massage her temples, horrified to find they were covered in blood. Everything came flooding back to her—the brown-cloaks, Merlin’s sneer, Elaine bleeding out in her arms.
“Oh, gods,” she whispered.
Mordred knelt beside her. “If you wish, I could help you bathe,” he offered, his usual half-smiles and double meanings nowhere to be seen. “It will help.”
“How could it possibly help?” she demanded, harsher than she meant.
“Because it is something to do until tomorrow comes,” Mordred replied, so gently that she distrusted it for a moment. “Tomorrow will not be easier. But it will not be the day you were covered in your friend’s blood, and it will not be the day you could not save her.”
Nyneve’s stomach dropped as she bit back a sob. “I was supposed to be in the village,” she confessed. “But I ended up staying behind with Lady Gwendolen. It could . . . I would have done the same. It should have been me.”
She deserved such a punishment. But Elaine did not.
Mordred studied her with those dark, fathomless eyes. Though she could not bring herself to meet his gaze, she felt his attention on her, as clear and sure as the charge of an incoming thunderstorm.
“But it was not you,” he said. “It was not you, and so you must live because Elaine cannot.”
She let out a long breath, tears streaming down her face, but she looked up at him and nodded.
He stood and took a step back. Numbly, she swung her legs over the side of the pallet.
There was nothing but blood—blood streaked across the linens, blood staining the front of her gown like some terrible floral pattern. Her stomach roiled.
The knight held his hands out to her, and she took them, pulling herself to her feet. Once standing, Nyneve glanced around the room, eyes falling on a familiar storm-blue aketon thrown over the back of a chair by the hearth.
“Oh,” she murmured, finally looking him in the eye. “These are your quarters. I am sorry for ruining your linens.”
“Do not trouble yourself,” he replied, catching her when she swayed. He stepped away again and paused, his gaze boring into hers. “Did you try to heal her? Once she had already gone into Annwfn?”
Nyneve nodded, biting down on her lip. “Yes. And I know—”
“That you can kill yourself doing that?” he asked, his voice lower now, sharper. “That someone with your power and skill can easily pour their own life into another’s empty husk?”
“Why are you scolding me?” Nyneve asked tiredly, ashamed to find that hot tears dripped down her face.
Mordred lifted his hand, almost as if to reach for her, but instead he gripped the headboard at her back so hard that his knuckles went white. “Because when I walked into that chamber,” he replied, “I thought you might be dead.”
She threw up one hand, her thoughts stilted and ungainly, not able to grasp why he cared. “I am terribly sorry to disappoint you,” she scoffed weakly.
His full lips parted, something fierce in his expression, but then he closed his mouth. When he spoke again, his tone was flat. “Lysanor brought over some clean garments while you were resting. May I take you to the baths? There is a private section.”
Nyneve thought of the massive stone chamber beneath the castle, natural hot springs filling carved stone pools, the steam dense as fog.
She’d taken salves there and checked the minor injuries of knights soaking their tired bodies, but had never been in the waters herself.
Gods, what she wouldn’t give to be enveloped in hot water like that, to scrub the blood and shame and guilt and terror from her skin.
“All right,” she conceded.
Without another word, Mordred swept her off her feet.
Nyneve let her heavy eyelids close as the knight carried her through the corridors, her face resting against the hard muscle of his chest. Time stretched strangely, and then she was sitting on a low wooden bench, propped up against his sturdy frame.
A tall screen closed them off from the rest of the baths.
Just a few paces from where they sat, steam drifted from the surface of a small pool.
“Do you want help undressing?” Mordred asked. “Or would you prefer I turn my back?”
“Just help,” she replied, her tongue thick in her mouth. “Not like you haven’t seen it all anyway.”
She rubbed her eyes and struggled to kick off her boots.
When Mordred knelt in front of her, the animal part of Nyneve awoke, blood pounding in her ears.
He averted his gaze as he stripped her blood-soaked gown from her skin, and then her shift and smallclothes.
Carefully, he draped her in a cut of coarse wool.