“I know,” she said.
“I need what you gave me,” I said. “When I came to you before, with Arthur and Uther.”
The thing that was not being said sat between us, clearly visible to both of us, but neither of us looked directly at it. Her expression did not change. But something behind her eyes did; it was a very small movement, like a fish turning beneath still water.
“I remember what I gave you,” she said.
“I am asking for it again.”
She was quiet as the not-wind moved through the trees. I waited.
She had made me wait before, the first time I’d sought her counsel and then her assistance. I had sat in a different version of this space: it had been smaller then, more ruin and less cottage, and she had let the silence go on until I understood that she was not simply thinking. She was making me understand what I was asking. That was part of the transaction with Blodeuwyn: you sat in the full knowledge of what you had come for until you could not pretend otherwise.
I sat in that knowledge now.
What I had come for before had been a boy: Uther’s son, storm-eyed and furious, young and already burning with the kind of purpose that either creates kings or ruins them. I had believed in him completely then. That was the part I had never said to anyone: not the calculations, not the strategy, not the prophecy, but the simple fact that I had looked at Arthur Pendragon and believed in him the way you believe in the sun rising. I had been certain he was the shape the world needed.
And so I had come to Blodeuwyn with what she required, and she had given me what she could give, and the dragon had gone into him. And for years, the world had become a different place.
“Bring them both,” she said finally.
The cord moved through her fingers again.
I waited because I was confused. I thought she meant something else, wondered if she meant something else. But when I looked for an alternative meaning, I found none.
“Arthur?” I asked. “And Guinevere?”
She nodded. “Together. In this space. Both of them.” She didn’t look at me. “That is what it will take.”
This was something I had hoped would not be the case, but I saw no other way around it, and clearly, neither did Blodeuwyn. But deep down, I had known. I’d realized. I’d known since the vision broke me at the window, and I had walked three days into this forest knowing, and I had asked anyway because there is a particular kind of human need to have things confirmed by a voice outside your own head.
I asked anyway.
“What will become of Arthur?”
Blodeuwyn turned the cord in her hands, and then she looked out at the trees. She took her time with her response the way she took her time with everything.
“The same thing,” she said, “that happened to his father.”
I said the word because I needed to say it. “Death.”
“Yes.”
The trees moved. Something, a bird maybe, called once from a long way off and then was quiet. And even though I had expected this response, my stomach dropped anyway.
I had built him. That was the part that pressed on me now, sitting on this stone in this ancient, wrong-feeling space with the cord moving through her fingers and the word still settlinginto the air between us. I had taken a boy who had thunder in him, and I had gone to Blodeuwyn, and I’d paid what she asked, and the dragon had gone into him from his father, and Arthur had risen from it into something the world had not seen in generations: a king who could actually hold the land together. A king with fire enough to make other men afraid.
And I’d watched what the fire did to him across the years, and I’d told myself it was the cost of the thing, the necessary shadow beneath the necessary light, and I had believed that because I needed to believe it.
Now I was going to bring him to this place, and my daughter, whom I had also shaped, also aimed, also sent into a situation that would break her open whether she survived it or not.
I thought about what Guinevere would be when this was done. More specifically, I thought about what the dragon would do to someone already made of water and old magic. I thought about whether she would understand, eventually. Then I wondered whether understanding was something I had any right to ask of her.
I had asked it of Arthur, but I did not believe he’d fully understood. He had become something else instead.
I agreed, but I said nothing. I simply stood, and the agreement stood with me, which was how these things were done between people who had crossed these particular thresholds before.
Blodeuwyn did not move. She looked at the cord.
