Chapter 33
Chapter Thirty-Three
Nyneve
Nyneve braced herself against the massive kelpie’s shoulder as Mordred let that hungry darkness wash over the cliffside.
Despite the high noon hour, she saw the shadows beneath the rocks and gorse lengthen, as though a thousand black doors had opened in the dry soil.
A lonely melody slipped into her mind, the wind distorting the call of a bird. She clenched her teeth and focused.
Whatever lived inside Mordred, it seemed perfectly happy to devour its host. She called to the water at the bottom of the cliffs, trying to form her own current to pull the changeling back, should she need it.
Breathing deeply, her body trembling with effort and exhaustion from all the energy she had spent yesterday, Nyneve clung to the knight’s hand.
This darkness, she decided with a sudden fierceness, could not have him. Not now. Not ever.
Mordred’s magic slunk over the side of the cliffs, reaching down to the ocean floor.
It was almost as if their magics had intertwined, shadow and water flowing together in a swift current.
Damp stone and woodsmoke flooded her senses, so similar to when she had turned her face into his tunic and wept last night.
Shakily, Nyneve banished her feelings—emotions as great as the ones she currently harbored were dangerous to involve in a working.
Instead, she clung to the changeling’s side like a burr.
The deeper he reached into the land beneath their feet, the more an awareness washed over her, like all of the goddesses had turned their eyes to her, quiet, expectant, waiting. With that searing attention flooding her entire body, Nyneve heard the thrum of something.
A heartbeat. Almost—too fast and strange in timbre, an unusual ticking instead of a thudding, but the heart of some great thing, nonetheless.
She tasted the bitterness of old wards, layered over each other throughout what had to be centuries.
Just as Nyneve looked closer, she felt Mordred’s magic bare its fangs and immediately began to pull him back.
She had been there the whole time, she tried to remind him.
She knew the way home. He could follow her back to the light.
For a long, terrible moment, Nyneve was sure he would refuse and sink his teeth into whatever slept beneath the cliffs instead.
But then his fingers tightened around hers, and she opened her eyes.
Mordred’s free hand was pressed to his chest, his eyelids fluttering open.
He stared straight ahead, Rook solid as a statue beneath him.
When he finally spoke, he said a single word, but too quietly, the wind stealing it away. Nyneve exchanged a glance with Morgana and squeezed Mordred’s hand. When he turned to look at her, there was nothing in his expression but horror.
“Kronos,” he rasped. “We have found Kronos’s prison.” Mordred cast his eyes back out toward the sea, his hand sliding out of hers. “He no longer sleeps.”
Fear rattled through Nyneve, rooting her to the spot. Rook let out a long sigh and shook his head, the way any person might. Keeping one hand on the kelpie’s neck for balance, Nyneve turned toward Morgana, seeking any sort of wisdom from the powerful sorceress.
Morgana’s eyes were downcast as she stared at her hands. She must have sensed Nyneve’s attention, for she turned her head to the side to meet her gaze. Tears glimmered in her eyes.
“So it begins,” Morgana whispered. Her voice was weary, wind-worn, her expression haunted.
“What?” Nyneve asked, unsettled.
But Morgana just straightened, her usual sly smile back in place quicker than Nyneve could blink. “So it is,” the sorceress said with a shrug, her words tumbling away with the wind.
Nyneve turned as Mordred dismounted Rook, coming to stand beside her. “I knew Caledfwlch felt like sainted iron,” he said. He pinched the bridge of his nose. “Gods, I am a fool. I thought—I thought it was just a stolen faerie blade, warped by Merlin. I thought that explained why it made me so ill.”
With a sigh, Morgana dismounted her kelpie, brushing out her skirts.
“To be fair, Mordred,” the sorceress said, “I examined the sword when I first arrived. I thought the same. I did not see—I should say, I did not think it could be sainted iron. Not in this day and age. It is not like you or I have encountered it before.”
Silence hung between the three of them, only interrupted by a great gust of wind.
“What are we going to do?” Nyneve asked.
“We are going to go see for ourselves,” Morgana said, pulling a shortsword from the scabbard at her waist and setting off for the edge of the cliffs, gesturing for her kelpie to follow.
“It is all right if you cannot do this,” Mordred murmured in her ear. The lithe length of his body was so close, and yet, he did not touch her. “You need not be like Morgana. You need not close off your heart.”
Tears pricked the back of Nyneve’s eyes. Her heart and her mind warred within her body, making her stomach flip. Letting out a long breath, she shoved the tears away with the back of her hand and then checked her belt for both daggers.
“Today is not better,” she said haltingly, looking up at him, “but it is not the day I could not save my friend.”
A single tear tumbled down her cheek, the wind drying it almost immediately. Mordred held her gaze for what felt like an age, and then he nodded, looking off into the distance toward where Morgana trampled across the gorse.
It was strange. Following Morgana into the failing prison of an ancient god somehow felt like the easiest road Nyneve could take.
The other options were terrifying. She could say, “No, I cannot do this, my grief is tearing me into a thousand pieces,” get on the kelpie, and ride back to the citadel.
She could grab the front of Mordred’s tunic and kiss him until he understood that he was ruining her life with his coiled muscle and dark hair and powerful hands and she never wanted him to stop.
“It is, however, the day I follow your aunt into a god’s mouth,” Nyneve said with a shrug. Then she turned and walked into the wind, toward the sheer drop of the cliffs.
The echoing drip of water in the cave seemed distant compared to how loudly Nyneve’s heart was beating.
The kelpies had guided them down the bluff and into the mouth of a cave.
The curve of the headland obscured it almost entirely from both the land and the sea.
When they had reached the entrance, the small spit of sand in front of the cave was covered in footprints.
Mordred came to a harsh halt, holding his arm out in front of Nyneve and Morgana. She peered into the darkness up ahead, realizing she was looking at the shadow of a fire. When she strained her ears, she could hear men’s voices.
“Get back,” Mordred whispered, shoving both of them into a damp crevice that smelled of brine.
Morgana pulled a thin, subtle working over them just as a group of brown-cloaks turned the corner. Nyneve held her breath as the men marched by, seemingly headed to the mouth of the cave.
“Are there more?” Morgana asked.
Mordred did not answer, but in the dim light filtering through the small opening far above their heads, she watched him tilt his head back and scent the air like a wolf. It made her heart beat quicker, and not because she was afraid of the monks—though perhaps she should have been.
“I do not believe so,” Mordred replied, stepping back out into the chamber. “Quickly, then.”
They crept through the warren of chambers, moving deeper and deeper into the ancient land of the Isles.
To Nyneve’s dismay, they found a good deal of provisions and pallets in the drier sections.
At the edge of one large cavern, her teeth suddenly began to hurt.
A few paces ahead, Mordred came to a halt, gazing up at something she could not see.
“Good goddesses,” Morgana whispered, moving to stand next to Mordred.
“What?” Nyneve asked. “I can feel it, but I cannot see it.”
“It is a . . . gate,” Mordred said. “A ward, but more than a ward.”
“The Morrigan made this,” Morgana whispered in awe.
When Nyneve stepped closer, her teeth rattled, and the sound of that oddly beating heart filled her head, fighting with the pounding of her own pulse.
“It is ajar,” Mordred said, his gaze sweeping over the magical working Nyneve could not see. “Or perhaps I should say one of its many locks is undone.”
“Something is flowing out of it,” Nyneve warned, tucking her head to her chin and clamping both hands over her skull as a sudden and splitting headache hit her.
Squeezing her eyes shut, she tried to push the pain aside, weaving a quick healing charm.
That quieted the headache enough for her to glance up through narrowed, sensitive eyes.
And then she saw it. The gate stretched from the sandy floor to the top of the cave, which soared far above their heads.
It looked like nothing Nyneve had ever encountered before, shining with what she supposed had to be divinity.
Even if she had the time to study it for a hundred years, Nyneve knew she would never uncover the workings behind it.
There was mortal magic—the charms and incantations, the manipulation of the Threads, the offerings and pleas to gods—and then there was this.
“Do you see these?” Mordred asked suddenly, standing in front of a large rock slab at the edge of the chamber.
Strengthening the healing charm, Nyneve picked her way over, Morgana at her heels. She came to a halt beside Mordred and peered at the small objects on the rock.