Chapter 35
Chapter Thirty-Five
Nyneve
Nyneve roughly shoved the tears from her eyes with the back of her hand and pushed the cross into the soil at the top of Elaine’s grave. Her shift was wet with perspiration beneath her kirtle, but she kept going, fighting the dry, hard-packed soil.
Arthur and Merlin’s lies about Elaine had spread far in only a few days, and people were already desecrating her grave on the southern hillside.
Nyneve understood it was probably a waste of time to keep stubbornly making crosses out of twigs and twine every time someone stole or destroyed the existing one, but it was one of the few things she could actually do.
Eventually, the court of Camelot would grow tired of violating the grave of the kindest person Nyneve had ever known, wouldn’t they?
She sat back on her heels and sighed, pushing damp hair away from her forehead. The ever-present clouds felt too low to the hill, like they were trying to suffocate her. “So many clouds,” she muttered, shading her eyes to look up at the sky, “and never any godsdamn rain.”
The crunch of boots on dry earth pulled Nyneve’s attention away from the heavens. She rose to her feet, hand sliding to her dagger. Merlin’s monks regularly followed her to Elaine’s grave. Perhaps it would make her feel a little better to send one of them off to Annwfn.
Instead of a brown-cloak, she found Sir Lancelot du Lac standing a few steps away.
Surprise rippled through her. He was dressed simply, his tunic marred with sweat, white-blond curls plastered to his forehead.
In his large hands, Lancelot held a single stalk of lily of the valley.
The silk flower looked impossibly small and fragile in his grasp.
Nyneve met his eyes, holding the knight’s gaze wordlessly as anger rose in her, sharp-toothed and hungry for someone she could blame.
“She loved you,” Nyneve spat accusingly. A bead of sweat trailed down her spine.
Lancelot sighed, his broad shoulders drooping. He took another step forward, but Nyneve held her ground. “Yes,” he murmured, his eyes falling on Elaine’s grave. “I know.”
Nyneve reeled back, watching the knight in confusion.
There was a heaviness to him, a sadness, that hadn’t been there before—or perhaps she had simply never noticed.
But still, she pressed on. “Would it have been so hard to love her in return?” Nyneve demanded, her voice hitching, even though she knew perfectly well that was not how anything worked.
Lancelot let out another deep sigh, kneeling beside Elaine’s grave.
He tucked the silk flower into the twine binding the twig cross together and then sat back, his hands on his knees.
“I tried,” the knight murmured, so soft Nyneve barely caught it over the dusty wind. “Believe me, my lady, I tried.”
He finally turned to look at her. With a start, Nyneve realized his eyes were filled with tears. Furrowing her brow, she sank to her knees on the other side of Elaine’s grave. “I do not understand,” she admitted.
In this emotional state, the King’s Champion might confess something that could be useful to her.
But if Nyneve were honest, that wasn’t why she spoke.
It was because, in the past few days spent relentlessly tending Elaine’s grave, she kept finding very similar silk flowers beneath the shattered remnants of broken crosses, tumbling in the wind downhill, or gently pressed into the overturned dirt.
“Elaine and I both love someone who will never love us back,” Lancelot said, surprising Nyneve with the straightforward admission.
“I told myself she would move on one day, have the children I know she wanted, find someone who cared for her as much as she cared for them.” The knight’s callused fingers flexed against his trousers, a hard gust of wind bringing the acrid smell of smoke to Nyneve’s nose. “But now she is gone.”
Sorrow crawled up the back of Nyneve’s throat.
Though she’d never spoken to Lancelot before, she had made some assumptions about the famous knight, and none of them made room for the person before her.
Perhaps that was why, despite wanting nothing more than to trudge home and sit down for a few moments before beginning her rounds, she found herself unable to leave Lancelot here on his own.
She wondered who it might have been that he loved, the person he could never have. She wondered what it would be to love someone so desperately and see none of that feeling reflected in their eyes.
“Now she is gone,” Nyneve found herself echoing. Her mouth twisted, bitterness blooming on her tongue. “And for what?”
Something in Lancelot’s expression crumpled.
He opened his mouth to speak, but whatever words he might’ve said were drowned out by the wild clang of Camelot’s warning bells.
Nyneve scrambled to her feet reflexively as Lancelot went still, head tilted to the side as he listened for the pattern of the bells.
All the world went quiet, even the birdsong—until Lancelot spoke one word, his startlingly bright green eyes meeting hers. “Invaders,” the knight said. He’d barely finished saying the word before the bells started up again, louder this time.
Even though they had been little more than strangers a moment ago, Nyneve and Lancelot took off at the same moment, sprinting down the hillside together. When she slipped on a loose section of dirt, the knight caught her by the elbow, pulling her along beside him.
“Stay close,” Lancelot said as he neatly leapt over the low stone wall at the cemetery’s edge that Nyneve had to scramble across.
Her breath came in hard gasps, her mind racing faster than her legs.
Gathering her skirts up higher, she tipped her head back as far as she could and searched the skies for plumes of smoke, but a swathe of the pleasure park’s old-growth trees blocked her view.
She pushed her body to go faster, trying to keep up with Lancelot’s enormous strides.
They barreled around the bend at the base of the hill, narrowly avoiding a horse-drawn cart.
The stableyard was a cacophony of sound: grooms shouting orders, hoofbeats ringing out as knights galloped toward the fray, a donkey braying madly.
Lancelot surged forward, grabbing a boy Nyneve vaguely recognized by the sleeve. “Who has breached our walls?” he demanded, one hand closing on the boy’s shoulder in a fatherly sort of way.
Before the stableboy could answer, Nyneve watched a bay horse gallop past the yard, its eyes mad with panic.
Its rider still clung to its back, feet lodged in the stirrups, despite having lost his head.
At the horse’s tail were two pursuers: a leather-clad warrior astride a tall, wiry black hound the size of an ox and an inhumanely beautiful girl riding a skeletal gray horse, its tattered mane decorated in faded, fraying ribbons.
In one long-fingered hand, the girl held the knight’s severed head by his hair, his mouth still open in horror.
“The Fey,” Nyneve whispered into the dry, hot wind. Smoke billowed across the sky, obscuring the weak rays of sunlight.
“Sir Lancelot!” someone shouted. A groom ran out from the stable block with Lancelot’s golden charger in tow, fully tacked.
When a large hand landed on her shoulder, Nyneve nearly jumped out of her skin.
“Will you be all right?” Lancelot asked, the knight’s attention settled on her. His eyes drifted to the daggers at her belt. “Something tells me you do not need the assistance of an aging knight, but my vow commands me to ask.”
Nyneve stared up at him, her thoughts as tumultuous as the sea. “I–I’ll be fine,” she stammered. “Go.”
Lancelot nodded, turning on his heel and mounting his charger despite having no mail and, as far as Nyneve could tell, no weapon.
Screams shattered the air as a younger knight a few paces away, just about to climb aboard his own destrier, drew his sword from its scabbard and wordlessly handed it to Lancelot.
The knight reached down and wrapped his hand around the hilt, completely calm despite the madness surrounding them.
Lancelot nodded once at the younger knight and then sent his horse galloping into the tendrils of smoke at the bottom of the stableyard.
Nyneve watched him go, steadying herself.
“My lady,” said the younger knight, meeting her gaze. “Hide in the stablemaster’s quarters. They are coming.”
Nyneve smiled, the wind tugging at her hair as she drew both daggers. “So we shall meet Them,” she said.
The Druid girl squashed the sticky fear unfolding in the pit of stomach, turned in the direction Lancelot had gone, and broke back into a run.
She told herself she was going to the keep, where she might be the safest, where the infirmary would surely be filled to the brim with broken bodies, where every citizen of Camelot was trained to go should something precisely like this happen.
But Nyneve knew she was going toward Mordred. She wondered if all she had ever done was go toward the faerie knight without even realizing it, Fatesongs looping like the tail of a snake.
Tightening her fingers around her daggers, Nyneve tried to empty her mind of such thoughts, creeping along the edge of the stable.
From there, the citadel opened up before her, narrow houses lining the streets that wound up to the castle.
On any other day, the lanes would be filled with playing children and bartering townsfolk and patrolling guards.
Today, the streets held nothing but terror and blood.
Without her baneful magic freed, Nyneve would never have stood a chance.
Not when she stopped to help an elderly woman and a Fey warrior tried to pounce on her from a neighboring roof.
Not when a pack of faerie hounds caught up with her, their jaws wide and saliva-slick.
Certainly not when she rounded a corner only to find High King Ragrshydan astride a winged horse-like creature, his copper armor blackened with the blood of his victims.