Epilogue
Mordred
Mordred blinked into the sun. The trees circling the meadow were damp with the early morning rain. Piskys fluttered at the edges of his vision. Past the tree line, a nymph braided her hair beside a running stream, the surface of the water sparkling like gemstones.
Morgana was dead. Galen was dead. And yet here he was in a beautiful fucking meadow, his eyes burning in the sunlight, Nyneve and Guinevere mute at his side. The quilt they had spread out on the wet grass was getting damp, but no one seemed inclined to move.
In the distance, the sun shone down on Camelot, smoke and wreckage marring its southern side. The keep stood proudly, mostly intact, the Pendragon flags snapping in the wind. The drought had broken. They had not found Ragrshydan, but every single knight had survived the hunt.
Upon their return, Arthur had been shocked and then furious about Morgana’s murder.
Bedwyr was confined, set to be sentenced in the evening.
Merlin disavowed the knight’s claims about his involvement, and even after everything, Arthur seemed inclined to believe him, or at least playact as if he believed him.
Everything was dangerous and terrible, and Mordred did not see a way out.
“Are we going to read them?” Guinevere asked, pulling Mordred from his thoughts.
Wrapped in waxed cotton at the edge of the quilt were five letters: four addressed, respectively, to Guinevere, Mordred, Nyneve, and Arthur, the fifth unmarked and unsealed.
When Mordred had pushed the door to his chambers open a few hours prior after the longest night of his life, he had not actually been surprised to find three traveling trunks lined up neatly along the far wall, just as Galen had told Nyneve.
Oh, Galen.
“I think this one is first,” Nyneve murmured, shoving away tears with the back of her hand and reaching forward to grab the unaddressed letter. “It was resting on top of all the books in the first trunk.”
Mordred pressed his tongue to the roof of his mouth, fighting off tears. All three of the trunks had been painted with a beautiful seascape. He had immediately recognized it as Tintagel, Morgana’s ancestral home and the very place she had raised him.
He had been such a discontented child, as most changelings were, furious to be locked in a magical tower with one of the best mortal sorceresses to ever live. He had hated the tidal pools and their walks along the bluff. He hated the falcons she kept and the curving walls of her grand library.
The summer breeze ruffled Mordred’s hair as he slumped forward and cradled his head in his hands, thinking about Tintagel’s cliffs.
He would give anything to take one more walk with Morgana.
She could tell him the names of all the creatures in the tide pools for the hundredth time.
Perhaps he would finally commit them to memory.
Guinevere, crying in that silent, regal way that all good queens do, handed Mordred the unsealed letter.
The three of them exchanged a look. The meadow went utterly silent, save for a shrike’s warning call to one of the kestrels circling overhead.
With shaking hands, Mordred picked it up and straightened, folding his legs.
He looked down at the parchment, snow-bright in the sunshine.
Then, clearing his throat, he read aloud from his aunt’s spidery, elegant handwriting.
My dearest ones,
Like my mother, I can see the Threads, but I am no Oracle. Neither of us had a godsdamn thing to do with that slippery cunt known as Fate. I can only see Threads from my own life, though I am privy to the way those events may ripple out across the centuries.
That is to say, what happened last night had to come to pass.
I could not tell any of you because I have told people what I have seen before.
I have made choices based on the futures I glimpsed upon my Threads.
And every time, it has slipped out of my hands.
I learned from my mother that to see a Thread come to fruition is to act as though nothing has changed because of what I have witnessed.
And I need you to hear me: this Thread I have foreseen, that somehow stretches all the way from the burning of a sorceress to the far reaches of the next millennium, is the only one where this world might stand a chance.
It is the only Thread where a girl kills a god.
It is the only Thread where Merlin, the sorcerer who conspired to help Uther Pendragon rape my mother and bear the poisoned fruit that is Arthur Pendragon, gets precisely what he is owed.
I pray to the Morrigan that I have not said too much even in these few sentences.
I have spent years of my life trying to devise a way to tell you three how much hangs in the balance of me burning at that stake.
Guinevere, you would have died right there in my bed if you had grabbed your dagger as you intended.
Nyneve, you would have burned instead of me if you’d used your magic to try to save me.
Mordred, you cannot murder everyone in this citadel.
His voice wavered as he came upon the next line.
(Please, my darling changeling boy, hold the darkness back one more year, would you? For me?)
Mordred put the letter down on the quilt, his hands shaking. Morgana’s writing blurred as his eyes filled with tears. Resting her cheek against his shoulder, Nyneve gently picked up the sheet of parchment and continued in his stead.
I believe the three of you know that I am far from selfless. If there was any other way for everything to pass in the way that it should, I would have taken that path. But here you are, aren’t you, reading this letter?
Do not weep for me. Suffering is a pastime of the living, and now I walk freely among the dead.
All my love,
M.
Guinevere went still, looking over at him with a fathomless sort of loss that he never wanted to experience. “That’s it?” she managed.
“No,” Nyneve said, pulling a handkerchief from her pocket to wipe away her tears. “There’s a letter for each of us, I believe.”
“Oh,” Guinevere said, lurching forward toward the bundle of waxed cotton.
At the last moment, she paused, her hand hovering over the letters.
Then she drew back, folding her knees to her chest. “No,” the queen admitted in a broken whisper.
“I do not think I am ready for there to be nothing left of her.”
A sob wracked Nyneve’s body as she shook her head, tears streaming down her face. “Nor I,” his sorceress murmured, though her fingertips brushed the letter with her name.
“No,” Mordred breathed. “Not today.”
Just hours ago, he had returned from Arthur’s pursuit of Ragrshydan and the Host to find the charred corpse of one of the few mortals to ever love him lashed to a stake, the body of his friend crumpled at the pyre’s feet.
If Nyneve had not been waiting for him, holding her terrible vigil at Galen’s side, he was quite certain he would have destroyed the entire citadel then and there.
He remained unconvinced that it would not have been the correct choice, though the soft animal weight of her head on his shoulder lulled him into believing otherwise.
The sound of a horse’s neigh drew Mordred’s attention to the left of the meadow, where the path came snaking up from the citadel’s main road. His hand landed on his sword, and he drew himself up to stand before he caught sight of Gawain’s chestnut mare and Palamedes’ gray stallion.
“You should not be seen with us!” Guinevere called out.
“Aye, aye,” Gawain said, waving the queen’s words away like a fly. His mare ambled toward them before coming to a halt for the knight to dismount. “This’ll be the only time I disobey Your Royal Highness, I swear it.” He sank into a low bow with a flourish.
Palamedes shook his head at Gawain as he swung his leg over Qila’s side, pulling off the stallion’s bridle to let him graze.
His gaze met Mordred’s, and he smiled sadly.
“What are we going to do?” the tall, powerfully built knight asked in his most princely voice, expressive eyes searching the three of them.
“We should probably run,” Gawain said with a grunt as he sat down next to Guinevere, squinting as he looked out into the distance.
“You are welcome in my mother’s court, I am sure,” Palamedes offered, lowering himself to sit on the edge of the quilt. If he saw the letters, he ignored them.
“I am not abandoning my throne,” came Guinevere’s icy voice as the queen sat up and faced them.
Her eyes were puffy and red-rimmed, her hair in the simplest plait Mordred had ever seen.
And yet the tilt of her chin was undeniable.
He had never seen someone so clearly born to lead.
“I am still queen. That affords me some degree of power. And I will do whatever I can to turn these dark tides.”
“You have my sword,” Gawain promised, smiling at her. “Been in this citadel since I was a wee thing. I’m not about to go anywhere.”
“I am not from these lands, but I made a vow to Camelot’s court,” Palamedes said, tying a few strands of long grass together. “I shall not abandon this place when its need is most dire.”
Mordred watched them, biting down on his tongue.
He would not take their agency from them, no, but if they stayed, it was incredibly likely he would watch them all die.
He had hoped his predetermined death at least meant he would not have to live through the loss of those he loved.
But Merlin was going to take that small shred of peace from him, too, it seemed.
“What are the five of us actually capable of doing against such reckless hate?” Mordred asked, perhaps too bitterly.
Guinevere got to her feet, every inch a queen despite her rumpled clothing and loose braid. Her gaze swept across all of them, a challenge simmering in her eyes. “Stay here with me,” she said, backlit by the too-bright sun. “Stay here with me and prepare to meet it.”
A Fatesong slipped into the clearing, long and low and filled with so much ache.
The meadow was heavy with dew and destiny.
Beside him, Nyneve sat straight and still, the light turning her hair to flame.
Palamedes had his chin tipped back to look at the queen, his hands folded elegantly.
Gawain grinned madly, his eyes glittering.
A flock of starlings landed on the tree branches overhead, their songs sweeter and lighter than Fate’s, who strummed Mordred’s Threads with Her needle-sharp nails.
A pit opened in the bottom of his stomach. The knights and the queen and the sorceress all looked like figures from a forgotten myth, an ancient ballad only one minstrel still knew, a grand tale that had already come to pass.
“If all of us stay,” Gawain said meaningfully, arching a brow at Mordred, “we might damn well be able to save everyone.”
“I will stay,” Mordred said, his words heavy. The starlings flew away, and a cloud drifted over the sun. “But no, Gawain, I am sorry. We will not save everyone.”
The mortals he was stupid enough to love turned toward him, some of the light going out of their eyes.
He hated himself for being the shadow to their brightness.
“If we stay,” the faerie knight said, “we will be forced to make terrible choices that will haunt us forever, should we manage to survive. We will lose everything that makes us who we are, and then we will lose even more.”
He drew in a deep breath as Nyneve reached up to brush an errant wave of dark hair out of his eyes. “Yes,” she murmured. “I fear you are correct. But for now, we are together, lingering in the sun. And if tomorrow it is all over, at least we had this for a moment.”
Mordred gazed into her eyes, trying to memorize what it felt like for Nyneve Or’Afon to look at him like she was willing to fight the entire world as long as he was at her side.
The five of them were quiet for some time, the meadow overtaken by the chirping birds and giggling nymphs down at the streambed.
Nyneve rested her head on one of his shoulders, Guinevere on the other.
Gawain sprawled out, Palamedes’ head in his lap.
Mordred did not know much time had passed when Gawain yawned and sat up to stretch.
The knight’s body went still, sending alarm pulsing through Mordred’s veins.
Gently disentangling himself from Nyneve and Guinevere, he got to his feet. In the distance, plumes of dust rose from the old Roman road. Fifteen or more monks were riding out, pushing their mounts hard despite being just beyond Camelot’s gates.
Mordred was a doomed thing. He knew an ending when he saw it.
“Do you think,” Gawain asked quietly, “they’re coming for us?”