Instead of replying with words, the kelpie turned and snapped his teeth at Mordred, taking off at a gallop for the hill. The knight let out a long-suffering sigh and drew his sword. Blood and gore and rain turned his vision to little more than smears of color against a gray backdrop. Still, he was a faerie knight up against mortal men—no matter the enchantments Merlin had laid upon them. His sword still found its mark, his heart drumming in his ears all the while.
As he cut down two Northmen at once, Mordred wondered what it meant that hedidrather enjoy the violence and the terror, the way that such an open attack like this one allowed him to release some of the endless, hungry darkness that was his essence. The unrelenting press of the night stitched inside his chest often felt as though it might consume him if he did not feed it someone else’s blood.
As Rook took him closer to the base of the hill, Mordred yelled out instructions to the other knights, warning them in a coded language of both the raiders’ numbers and directions, and also that there was an enchantment afoot. He would have preferred not to; many mortals, particularly noble-blooded knights, lost their good senses in the presence of magic. But they had to be prepared in case Merlin had more planned.
A Northman launched himself at Mordred from behind, trying to unhorse him. With a snarl, the knight reached back and wrapped his free arm around the man’s neck, choking him. Rook slowed his pace as Mordred dragged the raider from the back of his saddle to the front, tightening the vise of his arm as he sliced at another Northman with his sword arm. Only once he felt the man go limp did Mordred grab him by his braided hair, lift him into the air, and neatly slice his head off. Wheeling Rook, he threw the Northman’s head at a nearby raider, who instinctively caught the projectile, and then screamed when he realized what he was holding.
Tilting his chin back and staring into the skies, Mordred dared to work faerie magic for the second time that day, just a stone’s throw from Camelot’s walls. “Glawaros,” he whispered, closing his eyes for a moment, letting the Cynosbythrae—the Eternal Dusk imprisoned by his skin and bones—seep into his command. The rain bucked against him, another magic-worker’s enchantment trying to slither out of his grip. Jaw clenched, Mordred pressed harder, letting a second glimmering black Thread of the Cynosbythrae weave into his working.
And just like that, the rain abruptly slowed to a mere drizzle, as if cut by an invisible blade. With a sigh of relief, Mordred opened his eyes, ready to scan the area anew and turn the gentle, sloping southern hill into a killing field.
But all he saw was a deep, endless black, pitch-dark and shimmering with twilight-gray around the edges. His heart leaptinto his throat, fingers closing around his sword in a desperate attempt to rein the Cynosbythrae back into submission. But the darkness bloomed, its endless power keening, a horrible, eldritch screech building in his ears.
“Mordred,” Rook said, but the kelpie’s deep, flat voice sounded leagues and leagues away, as though he had left the knight floating in the underwater realm of his people. “Mordred,no.”
The faerie knight felt his body fade away, the cage of bone and blood and viscera that had kept the Cynosbythrae caged these past three-and-twenty years succumbing to its sweet, shadowed song.
“Mordred!” someone—not the kelpie—shouted, their voice imbued with power. Somehow, it banished the endless twilight, like the spark of a flame in a long, cold night. He flexed one hand, feeling the hilt of his sword between his fingers. Then the warmth of the kelpie beneath him, the cool air on his face, the smell of blood and steel in his nose. Mordred’s eyes fluttered open.
An axe swung down, far too close for him to parry, even with all the power of the Fey and the luck of the goddesses. The only thought in his mind was that the raider would never understand it was her blow that opened the world’s oldest wound to the low, hidden place where all shadows came from. Instead of blood, the End of Days would burst forth from beneath Mordred’s skin and all would bow to the first king this world had ever known: the dark.
Rook screamed the strange, lilting screech of his kind, his muscles bunching in an attempt to escape the danger. But Mordred knew it was too late, even as he reflexively pulled his sword up to meet the axe, which was already wet and shimmering with blood.
And then, at the last possible moment, the eclipse that strained at the edges of his being halted. An arrow sprouted through the raider’s left eye, the momentum of her axe unnaturally halted, the weapon drooping like a faded flower. The Northman collapsed to the ground beneath Rook’s hooves. Mordred heaved air into his lungs, wheeling the kelpie away from the worst of the fighting, his gaze searching the ramparts for answers.
There, standing atop the wall, forgoing all the protection of the hulking stone, stood Nyneve Or’Afon. Even from here, he could see she was breathing hard, her hair plastered to her skull with rain, blood smeared across her cheek. Her eyes met his with what he could only call unerring inevitability.
Mordred was not surprised to see that in her shaking hands, the sorceress held a bow.
Chapter Nineteen
Nyneve
Nyneve drew in a strangled inhale, her hands shaking as she clutched the rain-slick bow. Mordred Pendragon stared up at her for a long, breathless moment, the black warhorse dancing beneath him, perfectly and undeniably alive. Some idiotic lutist was still playing during a siege, the looping notes of his instrument wandering onto the parapet, infuriating her further.
Gods’ blood.
She’d just saved the life of the man she’d been desperately trying to kill.
Nyneve lowered her bow, breathing heavily. The wind buffeted her in fierce gusts, and arrows fell around her like rain, but she hardly noticed any of it. She stood numbly, her mind tumbling. Moments ago, she’d snuck onto the ramparts, hoping to better understand the situation at hand. She’d seen the raiders, mad as a hornets’ nest, and was just starting to get her mind around the spelled weather when magic bloomed on the battlefield, so powerful that it made her bones rattle.
It had come from the faerie-bound knight, and it had made Nyneve so afraid that she’d screamed his name, finding himon the field below just in time to see the raider and their axe. Without a second thought, she’d snatched a bow off a dead archer, nocked it, and felled the Northman. As if something deep within Nyneve compelled her to protect him.
A strange, errant thought pierced her mind:
As if she’d been born to save him.
“No,” Nyneve snarled, telling herself it was only the heat of the moment. It wouldn’t help her to have Camelot breached by raiders, and the gods knew she hated to admit it, but Mordred was an incredibly gifted warrior. Camelot needed him—andsheneeded him to make sure Camelot existed so its queen could give her what she wanted.
Nyneve resettled her weight and nocked an arrow, letting it fly to take down a raider who had broken past the main defensive line. As she restrung the bow, Nyneve’s attention slipped to Mordred. Fury flooded her like a tide, her hands shaking with it. Every time she found an opening to slip through, there he was, smirking and beautiful and blocking her way. She bent the bow and felled another raider, imagining it was Sir Mordred Pendragon with her arrow lodged in the weak spot of his hauberk.
The wind rose in another great gust, driving rain directly into Nyneve’s eyes—and those of the other archers, apparently, because the entire line ducked behind the rampart wall for a heartbeat. Beginning to shiver in her summer-weight kirtle, she twisted to look through the narrow archer’s slit, gaze sweeping across the battlefield below.
Something was wrong with the Northmen, she realized. She’d seen their people fight—ferocious warriors, happy to die gruesome deaths if it meant eternal glory in the halls of their gods. But the scene before her was maddening. She watched a woman run herself through on a knight’s blade just for the chance to swing her axe at him. In the distance, more Northmenran at the shield wall Camelot’s knights had formed with no strategy, no thought, just pure viciousness.
She cursed as more broke through, stringing another arrow and pushing against the wind to rise to her feet. Down on the grassy, blood-soaked slope, Mordred and the other knight she often saw with him—Palamedes, maybe—shouted commands to the head archer on the rampart.
“Flank them, for fuck’s sake,” Nyneve gritted out from between her teeth. Camelot had a significant standing army; there was no reason not to send some of them through Merlin’s hidden doors and cut the raiders down the moment they emerged from the fens.
