Chapter 32 #2
Rook gnashed his jaw, the three hundred years he had walked this land suddenly evident in his dark, toad-like eyes. “Yes,” the kelpie replied. “Yes. I am terrified that I do. For now, I need water, faerie child.”
Mordred left Rook in the stableyard, throwing the reins over a fence, and ran to the well.
A few grooms looked his way in concern, but no one got in his way as he filled two large buckets with water, returning to Rook’s side.
He recruited one of the grooms to help him remove Rook’s barding and tack.
Mordred had just drenched the kelpie with the second bucket when two women came rushing up the hill into the stableyard.
“Two horses, now!” Morgana commanded. The grooms pitching hay in the yard looked at each other. “I said now,” the sorceress snapped. “And do not give me bloody palfreys. I do not require destriers, but they must be fast.”
Satisfied when the grooms scampered away into the stable block, Morgana took a deep breath. At her side, Nyneve had already sighted Mordred. His breath caught as he remembered this morning, her head pillowed against his shoulder, the curves of her body pressed into his.
There had been a moment right when she awoke.
Nyneve had raised her head, those meadow eyes like daylight dancing on the surface of a stream, and looked at him as though she could see into him.
He had stopped breathing, his hands closing in fists because he could not tangle them in her hair and kiss her until she forgot the horrors of their world.
For the barest of seconds, Mordred had thought she might bring her mouth to his, or perhaps grab him by the tunic and draw him close.
But then a knock sounded at the door, and none of those things had happened.
Now, the Druid girl made her way over, cool and collected, as though only he was still impacted by the night they had shared.
“Did you feel it?” Nyneve asked in a low voice, scanning the yard.
Mordred nodded. “Rook and I are going back out. Do you have any idea where it came from?”
Morgana strode over to his side, gathered up her long hair, and began to braid it into a single plait.
“We were practicing some scrying and wanted to make sure Merlin and his murderers had gone to the outpost as ordered,” she whispered.
“It will not surprise you to know they did not. So we looked for them. And Nyneve found them, somewhere out by the chalk cliffs.”
“The chalk cliffs? That is incredible,” Mordred replied in awe, looking at Nyneve with a start.
That was a vast distance to scry for a mortal.
The Druid girl’s face flushed, but he told himself it was the oppressive heat and not his praise.
He nearly forgot about the deeply troubling thing they had all just felt until Morgana spoke again.
“Evidently, something quite powerful was displeased when we found their true location,” she said. When a stable boy approached, leading a sensitive chestnut mare, Morgana snatched the horse’s reins.
“Terrible idea,” Mordred interjected, taking the reins back from Morgana and handing them to Nyneve, who accepted them without a word.
“Falcon will not tolerate your riding, Morgana. Take King instead.” He gestured to the amicable bay gelding with a wide white blaze down his face that another stablehand was leading from the stable block.
His guardian scoffed but relented, accepting the gelding’s reins.
As the women mounted, Mordred re-tacked Rook, though he left the barding on the fence.
It was a difficult thing to act as though he had not felt a god-like power roil beneath his feet.
They rode out of the citadel at a tame trot, only breaking into a gallop once reaching the cover of the King’s Wood.
Rook, insulted by the presence of the horses, made them stop at a streambed. He called on two of his fellows to carry Morgana and Nyneve. They left Falcon and King in the clearing, glamoured to divert unwanted attention.
“I hate riding kelpies,” Morgana moaned as she swung onto the back of Rook’s slim friend, its coat silvery in hue instead of brackish green.
Nyneve, on the other hand, looked positively thrilled to mount the larger of the two kelpies, who had a roached mane and a long scar along its flank.
She was a magnificent thing, her skirts hiked up to ride astride the kelpie, a dull slant of sunlight turning her hair to an inferno.
His heart pressed against his ribs in heavy beats, as though it were reaching for the Druid girl.
It was a desperate thing to live in a world so broken that the fierceness with which he loved Nyneve Or’Afon was meaningless.
It would not keep her safe or mend her heart.
It would not re-weave his Threads or alter his fate.
He was always going to leave her in the end.
Thank the gods she felt nothing for him.
With one last look over his shoulder at the Druid girl, Mordred closed his legs around Rook. The kelpie leapt forward, thundering out of the forest and then moving into that slippery, river-quick gait.
He could not have said how long it was before Rook slowed beneath him.
The smell of sea salt filled Mordred’s nose as he held up one arm to shield himself against the battering winds of the coastline.
Judging by the position of the sun and the few stars the knight could see, this was a remote part of the Isles, just outside the lands under Arthur’s rule.
“Well?” he asked Morgana, turning to look at the sorceress. Her eyes were narrowed as she peered at the cliffs.
“If we had not experienced what we did,” Nyneve called, raising her voice above the wind, “I would never think there was anything here at all.”
“Precisely,” Morgana agreed, giving her new pupil a little smile. “Mordred? Perhaps put your Fey senses to use?”
It was difficult with the wind and the way he felt around Nyneve, wound so tight and completely out of control.
Mordred had been hoping the sorceresses would be able to guide this endeavor, leaving him to simply swing his sword at anything that bothered them.
Instead, he dropped Rook’s reins and closed his eyes.
He let his glamour slip away, announcing to the landscape around him that he was part of it.
Often, the woods and mountains and rocks would hide things from those with mortal blood.
But the cliffs remained recalcitrant even for him, the grass blowing in just the same way it had when they arrived.
Mordred strained his ears next, opening his senses. He had to shut off so much of what he was to survive in Camelot; he could not imagine hearing every mortal clamor and clang. But he found nothing amiss, and certainly nothing that would indicate the awakening of some terrible power.
“It was the first time you scried so far,” Rook commented. “Perhaps we have the wrong location.”
“Wait!” Nyneve called, scrambling off her kelpie. Fighting the wind, she trudged toward a large gorse bush, reaching into its branches. She pulled out a scrap of fabric, holding it up to the dull, cloud-covered sun.
Coarse. Heavy. Brown.
“It is likely a coincidence,” Mordred said, beginning to close his senses down again.
“It is not,” Nyneve shouted over the wind. “It cannot be.” She strode back to them, her gaze never leaving Mordred’s. “I have felt the touch of whatever you harbor in your chest. It is very hungry. If there is something here, it will know.”
In his peripheral vision, he saw Morgana sit up straighter in her saddle, her gaze sharp on Nyneve before it slunk to Mordred.
“That is incredibly dangerous,” he shouted over the wind.
“It is a very good idea,” Rook said, because apparently the kelpie existed to thwart him.
“If I lose control,” Mordred replied, “everyone here will perish. You understand that, yes?”
Nyneve walked over to Rook’s side, putting her hand on the kelpie’s neck and looking up at Mordred. He drew in a deep breath when their eyes met. The Druid girl did not understand that she must be so, so careful what she asked of him. He did not know if he could say no.
“When we escaped the hill,” she said, her expression fierce and determined, “you almost lost control.”
“You took her under the fucking hill?” Morgana snapped. The knight and the Druid girl ignored her.
“Precisely my point,” Mordred protested.
“I helped you pull it back,” she said, fingers curling into Rook’s mane. The kelpie usually danced away from the touch of mortals, but he had no issue with the Druid girl, evidently. Mordred could relate. “I can do it again.” She straightened and held out her hand.
Mordred was very aware of Morgana’s rapt attention as he took Nyneve’s much smaller hand in his.
“I will pull you back, should you need it,” she promised, the wind tearing at her long curls. He stared down at her, almost unable to comprehend her fearlessness. “Do you trust me, Mordred?”
The changeling and the sorceress held each other’s gazes for a long moment.
A strange, subtle thing washed over him, like Time had curled in on itself, moving backward and forward all at once.
A Fatesong looped in the windswept sky above them, a vast and lonely melody that tasted like blood and ash on his tongue.
“Yes, little thief,” said the changeling. “I trust you far more than I should.” Then he opened the cage in his chest.