Mordred strained his ears next, opening his senses. He had to shut off so much of what he was to survive in Camelot; he could not imagine hearing every mortal clamor and clang. But he found nothing amiss, and certainly nothing that would indicate the awakening of some terrible power.
“It was the first time you scried so far,” Rook commented. “Perhaps we have the wrong location.”
“Wait!” Nyneve called, scrambling off her kelpie. Fighting the wind, she trudged toward a large gorse bush, reaching into its branches. She pulled out a scrap of fabric, holding it up to the dull, cloud-covered sun.
Coarse. Heavy. Brown.
“It is likely a coincidence,” Mordred said, beginning to close his senses down again.
“It is not,” Nyneve shouted over the wind. “It cannot be.” She strode back to them, her gaze never leaving Mordred’s. “I have felt the touch of whatever you harbor in your chest. It is very hungry. If there is something here, it will know.”
In his peripheral vision, he saw Morgana sit up straighter in her saddle, her gaze sharp on Nyneve before it slunk to Mordred.
“That is incredibly dangerous,” he shouted over the wind.
“It is a very good idea,” Rook said, because apparently the kelpie existed to thwart him.
“If I lose control,” Mordred replied, “everyone here will perish. You understand that, yes?”
Nyneve walked over to Rook’s side, putting her hand on the kelpie’s neck and looking up at Mordred. He drew in a deep breath when their eyes met. The Druid girl did not understand that she must be so, so careful what she asked of him. He did not know if he could say no.
“When we escaped the hill,” she said, her expression fierce and determined, “you almost lost control.”
“You took her under the fucking hill?” Morgana snapped. The knight and the Druid girl ignored her.
“Precisely my point,” Mordred protested.
“I helped you pull it back,” she said, fingers curling into Rook’s mane. The kelpie usually danced away from the touch of mortals, but he had no issue with the Druid girl, evidently. Mordred could relate. “I can do it again.” She straightened and held out her hand.
Mordred was very aware of Morgana’s rapt attention as he took Nyneve’s much smaller hand in his.
“I will pull you back, should you need it,” she promised, the wind tearing at her long curls. He stared down at her, almost unable to comprehend her fearlessness. “Do you trust me, Mordred?”
The changeling and the sorceress held each other’s gazes for a long moment. A strange, subtle thing washed over him, like Time had curled in on itself, moving backward and forward all at once. A Fatesong looped in the windswept sky above them, a vast and lonely melody that tasted like blood and ash on his tongue.
“Yes, little thief,” said the changeling. “I trust you far more than I should.” Then he opened the cage in his chest.
Chapter Thirty-Three
Nyneve
Nyneve braced herself against the massive kelpie’s shoulder as Mordred let that hungry darkness wash over the cliffside. Despite the high noon hour, she saw the shadows beneath the rocks and gorse lengthen, as though a thousand black doors had opened in the dry soil. A lonely melody slipped into her mind, the wind distorting the call of a bird. She clenched her teeth and focused.
Whatever lived inside Mordred, it seemed perfectly happy to devour its host. She called to the water at the bottom of the cliffs, trying to form her own current to pull the changeling back, should she need it. Breathing deeply, her body trembling with effort and exhaustion from all the energy she had spent yesterday, Nyneve clung to the knight’s hand. This darkness, she decided with a sudden fierceness, could not have him. Not now. Not ever.
Mordred’s magic slunk over the side of the cliffs, reaching down to the ocean floor. It was almost as if their magics had intertwined, shadow and water flowing together in a swift current. Damp stone and woodsmoke flooded her senses, so similar to when she had turned her face into his tunic and weptlast night. Shakily, Nyneve banished her feelings—emotions as great as the ones she currently harbored were dangerous to involve in a working. Instead, she clung to the changeling’s side like a burr.
The deeper he reached into the land beneath their feet, the more an awareness washed over her, like all of the goddesses had turned their eyes to her, quiet, expectant, waiting. With that searing attention flooding her entire body, Nyneve heard the thrum of something.
A heartbeat. Almost—too fast and strange in timbre, an unusual ticking instead of a thudding, but the heart of some great thing, nonetheless. She tasted the bitterness of old wards, layered over each other throughout what had to be centuries. Just as Nyneve looked closer, she felt Mordred’s magic bare its fangs and immediately began to pull him back. She had been there the whole time, she tried to remind him. She knew the way home. He could follow her back to the light.
For a long, terrible moment, Nyneve was sure he would refuse and sink his teeth into whatever slept beneath the cliffs instead. But then his fingers tightened around hers, and she opened her eyes. Mordred’s free hand was pressed to his chest, his eyelids fluttering open. He stared straight ahead, Rook solid as a statue beneath him.
When he finally spoke, he said a single word, but too quietly, the wind stealing it away. Nyneve exchanged a glance with Morgana and squeezed Mordred’s hand. When he turned to look at her, there was nothing in his expression but horror.
“Kronos,” he rasped. “We have found Kronos’s prison.” Mordred cast his eyes back out toward the sea, his hand sliding out of hers. “He no longer sleeps.”
Fear rattled through Nyneve, rooting her to the spot. Rook let out a long sigh and shook his head, the way any person might. Keeping one hand on the kelpie’s neck for balance, Nyneveturned toward Morgana, seeking any sort of wisdom from the powerful sorceress.
