Chapter 21
I slept an entire day and night, longer and deeper than I had in a decade.
When I awoke the following morning, my first thought was of Lancelot.
I had ventured under the shining knight’s facade, seen the hidden places where he kept his flaws and quieter charms, the damage he carried beneath his haughty perfection.
In the midst of it all, I had found a heart larger and more complicated than I could have imagined.
My next recollection was of our journey, how we had recognized one another in myriad ways, discovered similarities that neither of us could have guessed.
Lancelot’s blood ran with healing as mine did.
He had chosen to return to Belle Garde instead of running back to his King and life of duty.
He had seen my true face and not looked away.
What it meant was not for me to decide alone, but the connection we had shared under the moonlight felt natural, powerful, a current of potential that maybe we owed to ourselves to explore. Lancelot wanted to work miracles, and I could show him how.
All I knew for certain was, I had to see him.
I rode up to the lodge in the soft morning light, eschewing the minstrel’s gallery to go directly into his room.
Lancelot was awake and pacing, dressed in a clean shirt and breeches, his bed undisturbed.
He had his boots on, as if he thought to go somewhere, but the buckles flapped loose, his every step a metallic crack.
“Good morning,” I said, closing the door behind me. “I commend you for keeping your word and returning.”
He regarded me in the searching way I had become accustomed to, taking in my well-rested aspect, the sleek midnight gown I wore, my hair, which I had brushed so it shone more than usual. In contrast, his eyes were dark with lack of sleep, cold as a winter dawn.
“What in God’s name are you doing?” he said.
I had not been expecting friendliness, but the severity of his tone and forbidding demeanour halted me outright. I adjusted to an attitude slightly more circumspect.
“I’ve come to hear of my nephew’s rescue,” I said.
“I’m sure you know everything you need to,” he retorted. “From your damsel.”
So this was how he intended things to be—evasion and hostility. I let the allusion blow past me. “Only you were at the Dolorous Tower’s liberation. What happened?”
“There is nothing to tell.”
“Not even that Arthur was there?” I said. “Or that you could hardly face him and his praise? It was only a few weeks ago you were telling me you were the door that stood before your beloved King. Now you cannot bear to look him in the eye.”
Lancelot flushed a sudden and guilty red. “Assumption is not knowledge. You don’t know anything about my life in the Royal Court. You don’t know anything about me.”
His voice was still hard, but a weariness had crept in. I edged closer, until I could see the jump of pulse between his collarbones.
“Don’t you find it exhausting for us to lie to one another this way?” I asked. “My grudge isn’t with you, and I don’t believe your real troubles lie with me. I see you more clearly than you like to admit.”
He let out a heavy breath but did not move away. Unexpectedly, he was listening.
“We share more than our differences,” I continued. “In fact, what we have learned of one another these past few days holds great potential. An opportunity for us both.”
Lancelot’s gaze sharpened. “What do you mean?”
“You ran out of Camelot to break free,” I said. “You returned here from the Dolorous Tower, to Morgan le Fay herself, without even attempting to escape. You came back for a reason, perhaps more than one.”
“I came back because my honour demanded it,” he said unconvincingly.
“That is not what you told Sir Gawain.”
For a moment, he looked stunned, conflict flashing across his face between what he knew but could not admit to himself—that he and I had gone to the Dolorous Tower and back together, and had found ourselves mutually drawn.
“You dare put words in my mouth,” he said. “When all I did was fulfil my oath to return to your captivity, and I am once again at your mercy. Nothing more.”
His voice was studiously bland but uneven beneath, both goading me to argue and willing the conversation to be over. To push him now felt dangerous, a dance on the edge of a cliff, but how much I wanted to try. How badly I wanted to light this fire and feel us burn.
“What is it, Sir Lancelot?” I murmured. “Are you afraid of wanting something you believe you cannot have?”
His mood, already stormy, turned dark. He stepped closer, his heat cloaking my skin, and I looked up at him, taking it as the challenge he intended.
“Tell the truth,” I said.
For a moment, he seemed about to retreat, but it lasted only the span of a breath. “Very well,” he said. “If you want the truth, then I have some honesty for you.”
His words came through a taut jaw, as if he was forcing them out. “When Sir Galescalain and I dined with you, I’m sure you remember he prevented me from speaking of a third knight in our company, who did not enter this valley. Do you know who it was?”
I frowned. “Why would I?”
“You claim uncanny instincts. Use your great insight to see what is obvious.”
It didn’t take long for his implication to dawn. “Not—”
Lancelot nodded, his mouth a cruel curl. “Sir Yvain. He was travelling with us, in pursuit of Sir Gawain.”
I stared at him. “My son was at Belle Garde?”
“Almost. When he returned to Camelot, he heard of our previous encounter and was intrigued. He asked of you, and for his sake, I said you were charming enough—a flesh-and-blood woman despite your demon reputation. My words got him all the way here. Nevertheless, when he stood on the edge of your Val Sans Retour, he decided he could not bear it. He preferred to ride on alone, towards danger, rather than set one foot closer to his mother.”
I swallowed, all wit struck from my tongue. “Was he at the Dolorous Tower?”
“I won’t discuss that without his agreement,” came the sanctimonious reply. “From what I hear, you have not earned the right.”
That he discerned my deepest wounds with such accuracy was as surprising as it was agonizing. “So you use Yvain as a weapon against me,” I managed. “How honourable.”
“You asked for the truth and I gave it to you. Moreover, I will speak to what Sir Yvain cannot. Your son deserves better.” He regarded me with an angel’s disdain. “You know it’s true, Morgan le Fay, deep down.”
I knew it was a tactic, that he wanted my hurt and fury to distract from the true nature of what smouldered between us.
To keep his world in perfect balance, I could not be the charming damsel, a wounded mother, or a woman of fascination drawing him towards new freedom.
I had to be the corrupt sorceress, the traitor, his enemy.
To absolve himself, Lancelot needed to hate me, and wanted to make me hate him too.
And in that moment, I did. He had won.
“Enough of this,” I snarled.
With a sweep of my arm, I cast a spell of containment and flung it upon him like a poacher’s net. He resisted falling but thrashed madly against the magic’s strength, bellowing in anger. Unwilling to hear it, I wrapped an invisible gag around his mouth.
“How dare you goad me with my losses,” I said to his struggling form. “As if I don’t know what they are, or feel them as glass in my skin, every moment of every day.”
I put my fingers to his neck and found the silver chain beneath his shirt, dragging out the emerald ring. Lancelot gave a cry of protest deep in his throat.
“Perhaps you should learn what it is like to lose what is precious to you,” I said. “How it truly feels to be Morgan le Fay.”
With a hard tug, I snapped the chain and snatched the ring into my hand. He made a furious lunge within the magical bonds and managed to break towards me, but I avoided him easily. A click of my fingers brought him to his knees.
“Oh, hush,” I said above his muffled roaring. “How you love to make a fuss.”
I stepped out of arm’s reach and unbound Lancelot with a careless flourish.
A brief demonstration of my power was all he needed, though it had tired me to contain such a force as he.
Bondage was a showy spell, far costlier than using the elements, and I should not have used it. Still, I had enjoyed tying him up.
My captive knight was less pleased. He scrambled to his feet and pointed a threatening finger. “We made a deal. I gave you my other ring so I could keep the emerald. You have no right to take it.”
“I have every right to do whatever I wish,” I shot back. “I make the rules here, not you. I decide when they change.”
“This is the Devil’s work, even for you,” he said. “Give me my ring.”
He glared at me with such ferocity that a lesser being might have combusted into ash. To me, it was a bowl of oil thrown upon a raging pyre.
“Damn your ring!” I cried. “It is lost to you.”
“You don’t understand,” he insisted. “It is all I have left.”
“And now you have nothing,” I replied. “Painful, isn’t it? Get accustomed to the feeling, as I have.”
The harshness in my voice repelled him better than any magic, my playful insults and threats something he had not taken seriously. For the first time, Lancelot du Lac believed in the true strength of my fury.
“Tell me what you want for the ring,” he said desperately. “I’ll do anything.”
“I want nothing from you,” I said. “Keep your charms, your persuasions, your handsome, beguiling pain.” I held up the emerald ring between my forefinger and thumb. “How is this for a difficult truth—the name Guinevere is carved inside the band.”
He stood rigid, trying to form a strategy, but I felt his mood as one I knew intimately: the rage coursing through his miraculous blood meant he couldn’t see straight, let alone form rational thought.
“I see now it never mattered what I knew,” I went on. “That the Queen fell for the knight in her service, and ran away to live with him for a year. It was irrelevant, what I saw behind the pavilion—what I heard. The lengths you would go to. Anything for you.”
I paused to take in his shock, and it was as searing and satisfying as a hot bath on a cold day.
“As long as you kept quiet, I could do nothing. Until I beheld this ring, the answer to everything. Confess or do not, it makes no difference. The two of you are adulterous—treasonous—and I have my proof.”
“It only proves the emerald was given to me,” Lancelot argued. “Believe what you wish, keep me here forever, I don’t care—but if you have any decency left, you will honour our deal and give my ring back.”
“God’s blood! ‘My ring, my ring,’ on and on! I am so bored of this.” I held the emerald out to him, tantalizingly within reach. “Forget your oaths, the deals we made. If you want your precious ring, then come and take it.”
With breathtaking speed, Lancelot lunged, displaying a sweeping grace where his honour denied him brute force.
He took hold of my left wrist, just below where I held the ring and I allowed it, letting his obsession become his downfall.
Right hand at my belt, I whipped out my falcon-handled knife and pressed it to his throat.
In an instant, he wrapped his free hand around my knife-wielding wrist, but even with his strength, I could easily slice two major vessels in his neck before he could move.
We were fused in a vicious stalemate, breaths hard and aligned, as if we shared one pair of lungs.
Our faces were so close I could have reached up and bitten his bottom lip.
I could cure you of her, I thought. Given one long night, I could make you forget her name and sing my own.
It was a dark notion, selfish, as much a cry from my body’s own hunger as my wish to push Lancelot to his limits.
His eyes widened as if he had heard it, the memory of our journey rearing up: Lancelot’s confession of a desire to work miracles, beyond who the world thought he was; the glamour falling from my face and his acceptance.
Our quiet, determined ride back in the moonlit dark, away from the life he knew, and towards a different future.
“It doesn’t have to be this way,” I told him. “What you believe of yourself isn’t true. There is so much more for you to know, to achieve, if you set yourself free.”
He fixed me with his piercing blue look, unfaltering even with a knife at his throat. For several pounding heartbeats we seemed inevitable. Then, all at once, Lancelot dropped his grip from my wrists and held his hands apart in surrender.
“I am not a faithless knight,” he said.
He did not pull away from my knife, so I let the blade take its pressure off, leaving a pinprick of red on his skin. His healing blood called out to mine, the miracle he would never know he possessed.
“This could all be different,” I replied. “If you just let yourself be stolen away.”
Lancelot shook his head. “I am not a faithless knight,” he said again. A useless oath that no one needed to hear but him.
“Then that is your choice.” I lowered my knife, sheathed it and stepped away from his hard-breathing frame. “The consequences will be yours to bear.”
He didn’t flinch, but said, “What does this mean for me?”
“Are you asking if I intend on killing you?”
“I don’t fear death,” he replied. “I just want to know my fate.”
So do I, I thought. But I will create my own.
“I’m not going to kill you,” I said smoothly. Summoning the door open, I let my feet carry me towards it, away from our shared, feverish heat. Lancelot sprung forwards as if to prevent me, but stopped dead when I turned to look at him.
“I don’t need you at all,” I continued. “I have more than enough to destroy Camelot by myself. Guinevere, Arthur, your adoring brothers-in-arms, your fairy mother who helped ruin my life—they can all feel what it is like to suffer for love.”
I slipped the emerald ring on my finger, admiring it at a distance. “It suits me, don’t you think?”
Lancelot stared at me in horror, frozen, incandescent with beauty, as I swept out of the room and shut him back in.
It wasn’t until I was securing the iron bar that I felt the slam of his shoulder against the door—a futile attempt to escape, or perhaps feel something other than defeat.
I pressed my spine to the oak planks as the collisions kept coming, savouring his rage through the wood, reverberating deep in my body.
Taking off Guinevere’s emerald, I rested the shining band on my thumbnail and flicked it up in the air, catching it neatly in my palm, again and again, green and gold whirring before my eyes, drawing my next move into focus.
The ring was enough to strike lightning through Camelot, and maybe start a fire after that.