Guinevere scoffed. “Look at me when you speak to me, please,” the queen said to the guard. “You should have sent for Galen at once.” She glanced at Nyneve, her brows drawing together, and then back at the guardsman. “Since when isthishow we do things in Camelot?”
The queen set her jaw, closing her eyes for a few seconds, as if to clear her mind. Nyneve tried not to stare, her blood pounding in her ears. Her mind felt like a leaf tossed about on the wind, pain clamping its jaws tighter around her ankle, the entire conversation wrested out of her grasp before she could say more than a few words.
“What do you seek today?” the queen asked, pushing one long, fluted sleeve farther up her arm with a flash of annoyance.
Unease twisted in Nyneve’s belly. Was her merepresenceirritating the queen? She would keep this quick, then. Clean, simple, straightforward. In truth, she was too nervous to do much else.
“I seek wardship,” she said, keeping her voice meek, though she forced herself to meet the queen’s gaze despite the frantic fluttering of her heart. “I am a daughter of the House Or’Afon.Your ladyship might recall my noble father was killed in a Saxon raid at our home. My mother sent me out into the night during the attack, hoping I would find safety.”
Nyneve hoped she’d rehearsed the lie enough. She hoped no one would recall the particulars of what had happened five-and-ten years ago—that her father had cast her out of his home two moons before the raid, her mother already taken by the fever. No oneshould. Most of her father’s peers were dead or retired to their country holdings. She was fairly certain the entirety of her old household had perished in the raid, so there should be no aging nursemaid who recognized her face and recalled the past in sharp enough detail to slice Nyneve’s ambitions into ribbons. But she was not sure—not with the Druids’ disinterest in the cities of Roman-blooded men and their suspicion toward written records.
“Go on,” the queen said, almost kindly, though her expression had not softened.
Nyneve didn’t permit herself to feel any relief that Guinevere had not called for the guards and commanded them to drag her away. Not yet, anyway; this queen seemed more likely to let Nyneve tie the knot of her own hanging noose. But there was little other choice, and she’d come this far, so she took another deep, shaky breath and continued.
“I was taken in by a nunnery in the west,” she explained. “Fearing retribution from the Saxon raiders, the sisters hid my background and family seal until I came of age.” She paused, summoning the slimmest, silkiest Thread of her power to put weight into her words. “But now I come to seek my place in the halls of my father.”
She paused again, desperately trying to assess if Guinevere believed anything she was saying. But the queen simply waited, hands clasped, the Pendragon banners hanging from the rafters framing her straight shoulders, an unneeded reminder of hermight. Nyneve hoped she’d made Camelot sound familiar and dear to her—a touchstone, a birthright, not a threat on the horizon.
Because that’s all this court was to her and her people: a threat. Neighboring clans to the south spoke of Arthur’s knights riding through their villages in the name of peacekeeping, which was a bold claim to make when Arthur’s long-held desire to unite the Isles under his throne was well-known. The Pendragon’s men even brought offers of protection and supplies—ifthe clans ceded their land to his rule.
That’s what kings never understood. The Druid-led clans did not own the land they lived on; it was theirs to steward, not hand over like a sack of grain.
But as little as King Arthur understood about Nyneve’s people, the Deceangli Druids probably knew even less about him and his court—which was why the Elders sent Nyneve into the thick of Camelot’s court instead of the mists of Tintagel.
And to punish her, of course.
“Do you have any proof?” Queen Guinevere asked. Her words drew Nyneve back to the cavernous room and its harsh light.
For a long moment, Nyneve’s mind swam with a thousand tumbling thoughts, swift as river currents, before she managed to nod. Then she grappled for the chain around her neck and pulled it free, holding the seal in the palm of her shaking hand. The queen said nothing, leaning closer, peering into Nyneve’s eyes. All the Druid girl could do was hold steady and beseech her goddesses that Guinevere accept her words. Silence strung tight as a bowstring, motes of dust dancing in the sunlight.
“Geraint was a treasured member of this court,” Guinevere finally said, drawing back. She spoke the words so calmly, as though they were little more than an open-ended observation, which neither confirmed nor denied Nyneve’s claim to the Or’Afon line. The queen watched Nyneve closely, her face anemotionless mask without a shred of anything the Druid girl could act upon. Her lungs felt sticky against her ribs, unable to draw air. Heat rose to her face in a sudden rush.
“You know of my father?” Nyneve asked, purposefully vague, trying to cling tight to all her cunning. She had never expected the Cymraes-Moorish queen to be familiar with such old Pendragon history, and was apparently an utter fool for it.
“Yes,” Guinevere confirmed with a prim nod. “May I see the seal?”
Biting down on her tongue, Nyneve offered it to the queen, hoping Guinevere would not notice the clamminess of her palms or the tremble of her fingers. Slowly, the queen reached for the seal and held it up to the light, turning it this way and that. Nyneve used every shred of her willpower to resist the urge to run.
When Guinevere’s sly eyes slid back to meet her gaze, nausea curled in the pit of Nyneve’s stomach. “Anunnery?” the queen asked, making no attempt to hide the open way she examined Nyneve’s clothing and wild hair.
“I had a bad fall in the woods,” she said, furious at herself that she’d created this situation, now forced to spin not one story, but two. “That’s how my ankle came to injury. One of your knights kindly lent me his horse.”
At that, Guinevere startled, something almost like panic coming across her features. Her attention intensified—which Nyneve wouldn’t have thought possible—as she stepped closer. She watched Guinevere with confusion and no small measure of fear, not comprehending until the queen’s gaze brushed her throat, her wrists, her skirts. Understanding landed on her chest like a heavy, cursed stone.
“No, Your Highness,” Nyneve murmured, shaking her head. “Truly, only a fall. I should’ve taken more care on a slippery riverbank. That is all.”
“Do you know the name of the knight?” the queen asked, her chin tilted up, not satisfied with Nyneve’s response. Concern softened her rich voice, throwing Nyneve entirely off balance.
“I believe it was Sir Mordred, Your Highness,” the guard cut in. “She came to the gates on his destrier.”
Two fascinating things happened in quick succession. Nyneve watched Guinevere begin to react to Mordred Pendragon’s name—widened eyes, breath hitching—but the queen caught herself before offering up anything of use. Instead, she responded to the guard’s second sentence, looking back at Nyneve with renewed interest.
“Rook?” she asked, amusement flooding her features, though her eyes were keen and searching. “A girl raised in a nunnery rodeRookfrom the King’s Wood to the city gates?”
Nyneve gritted her teeth before smoothing her skirts with her free hand. “We had horses, Your Highness,” she demurred, her heart quickening its pace again, the steady ground she thought she’d found falling away from her. Once more, her impulsivity had risen from the past to haunt her present—and also her future, she realized, if the queen found this truth too suspicious. Then any chance she had at redemption and the life she yearned for so desperately would be gone.
“There are horses,” Guinevere said slowly, arching a brow, “and then there are the beasts Sir Mordred favors. I doubt a nunnery’s stable held such creatures.”
