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Mordred turned his attention to the other man. To say that his relationship with the fae knight was complicated, would be to put it mildly. Even after so many centuries, Galahad remained guarded with his emotions. It was odd to hear such an admission. Odd, but not unwelcome. Bowing his head to the Knight in Gold, he took it as graciously as he could. “When Grinn is dead…”
“No, when Grinn is dead, there will be the elementals to contend with.” Galahad smiled thinly. “I fear I am bound to your service until the grave. I am in no need of such false hope.”
Damn Galahad for always being right.
And damn himself for being such a cretin. “I wish to find a way to reunite you with your love. Permanently.” The pervasive grief he had felt over the past few days dug its talons into his heart and squeezed. “You have lost too much time together. I find myself more recently sympathetic.”
Galahad’s smile turned wistful if a little forlorn. “Yes. But I have one thing that you do not.”
“Oh?”
Galahad left the tent on one final word. And it crushed what remained of Mordred’s mood. “Hope.”
“This suuuuuuuuucks!” Gwen stretched out on the grass, glaring at the blue sky up above. It’d been a long time since Doc left, though she had no way of knowing exactly how much time had passed. However long it had taken her to pace around the rock, looking for any kind of magical inscription or clue, then to wander around in a circle some more, then to throw pebbles at the rock, then to lie down in the grass.
Now she was exceedingly bored.
Flopping her arms out at her sides like she was going to make a snow angel, she let out a long, ragged sigh. “Do something!”
Silence.
“Anything!”
Nothing.
She growled and put her hands over her eyes. “Okay, think, Gwen. Think. Think. What did Doc say? That I had to commune with the island?” She tried to replay all their conversations in her head, searching for clues. How did someone commune with an island? Okay, without an epic amount of drugs, anyway.
Tapping her hands into the grass, she thought it through.
Maybe she needed a reason. Wasn’t that how these mythological things worked in the stories? Doing her best to remember all the history classes she’d taken, she tried to think. What if she made a wish?
That raised an important next question. What did she want? What did she honestly want, and why?
She wanted to be able to protect herself.
That meant that she wanted power.
But everybody wanted power. What made her so special? Why would Avalon grant her such a thing, and nobody else?
Shutting her eyes, she tried to focus on that. She wanted power not just to protect herself, though—she wanted power to protect others. To protect Mordred and even Grinn from themselves and their stupid, terrible war. To protect the elementals from going back into the Crystal. Even total shitheads like Lady Thorn.
But it was more than that.
There were thousands upon thousands of people who lived on the island. Villagers—some normal, some magical—some human and some very not. There were woods filled with creatures the likes of which she had only dreamed of. Sure, most of them wanted to eat her, but that wasn’t entirely their fault.
They didn’t deserve to die, caught up in the middle of a three-way epic showdown between a bunch of power-mad assholes.
Avalon needed protecting, Mordred was right about that. But he was going about it the wrong way. When all you have is a hammer, everything looks like a nail. She hated that phrase when her dad used to throw it around, but now it made so much more sense. Mordred only had one means of protecting the island at his disposal—magic-defeating iron—so that was going to be what he used.
There had to be another way.
There had to be. She refused to accept otherwise.
“You kept me here for a reason, Avalon,” she whispered. “I want to help you. I want to help everyone. I want to see this place thrive without the risk of war. Grinn and Mordred will kill each other. And then the elementals will just go back to doing what they do best—being warlord assholes who kill everyone in their way. And if either Grinn or Mordred survive, it’ll be war against the elementals, and then the elementals go back to rampaging around the island. I want to fix it. I don’t know how, but right now it doesn’t matter because I can’t. Help me.”
Silence.
Tears stung her eyes. “I love him. I can’t just leave him to die.”
