Nyneve blinked, and then the Morrigan was gone, though three crow feathers floated in the air, coming to rest on the dusty ground at her feet.
“What the fuck did any of that mean?” someone roared. It took Nyneve a moment to realize the voice had come from her own throat.
Morgana leaned against the hawthorn tree, looking utterly spent. “In times of much turmoil,” she explained, not looking at either one of them, “the gods and greater powers are often prevented from intervening directly. I do not know if it is some law of their making, or simply a cruel game they play. Instead, they bestow gifts and guidance upon their creations. Fey and mortals alike.”
Morgana’s words hit Nyneve with the weight of a millstone. She had learned about the Chosen as a child among the Druids, but it always seemed more like a fairy tale than anything else. In a sudden rush, she recalled playing with the other children in the forest, all of them proclaiming which deity’s Chosen they might be one day. She could not remember what her answer had been, but it should not have mattered what a child uttered some ten-odd years ago beneath an oak tree.
“I do not want this,” Nyneve said hoarsely, bitterness souring her tongue. She had come to Camelot in the hopes of proving herself to the Elders—proving that she deserved to have her baneful magic unbound and to return to her home, hermeadows, her people. She squeezed her eyes shut against the wind and saw the body of Uccu’s son, battered and bloodied, looking as though he had been torn apart by an animal. By a monster.
Nyneve did not want any of this, no—but perhaps she deserved it.
“Of course,” the Druid girl muttered bitterly, looking down at the wide part of the stream where she usually bathed. It had resisted much of the drought thus far, but now, in the light of her raised lantern, it was little more than a mud pit. She shouldn’t have expected anything else, not after the day she’d just had. Clenching her jaw, Nyneve turned and trudged up the bank, following the deer trail to the meadow behind the physician’s cottage.
Halfway across the clearing, awareness prickled her skin, and she paused, the lantern swinging. All the usual nighttime sounds of the forest abruptly halted. Then there was a rustle of feathered wings, and for the second time in one day, a great divine thing appeared before Nyneve.
In the icy light suddenly bathing the clearing, she found herself face-to-face with a tall, willowy creature. Pale wings arched out of the deity’s back.
She drew in a deep breath and reached for her dagger, the scent of brine and tarnished silver hitting her nose. “I’ve really had enough of your kind,” she spat. She was sweaty and dusty, and every time she closed her eyes, she saw Elaine’s body. “If you are not here to actually help me, please, piss off.”
“I am here to assist, child,” the being said in a voice like starfall and turning wheels. Teeth flashed in the dark likemother-of-pearl, entirely too sharp. “I do not yet have a proper name in these lands, but you may know Me simply as Fate.”
Nyneve almost laughed in the deity’s face because there was nothing more absurd than the avatar of Fate appearing in a dusty meadow to a Druid girl who just wanted a damn bath. But the pulse and pull of the creature was undeniable—much like the Morrigan, except there was something about Fate that made Nyneve’s blood run cold.
Fate strode closer, but She did not walk so much as glide, Her garments fluttering in a wind that Nyneve did not feel. “You walk a delicate path, little mortal,” Fate said, tilting Her head to one side. There were too many teeth in Her mouth. Nyneve supposed the being needed many sharp edges on which to cut everyone’s Threads. “It is rare for a primordial thing like Me to interfere. But I feel you should know that the Nameless One, the changeling you call Mordred, is doomed.”
Nyneve’s throat went dry. “Doomed?” she echoed, raising her lantern higher to peer into Fate’s eyes. She immediately regretted it. She saw her birth and her death, but not just one—allof them, the beginning and end of each individual Thread. Every single one taken between Fate’s teeth and severed. Exhaustion struck her hard, her stomach roiling.
“Doomed,” the deity echoed. “There is a war coming. You can feel it, can’t you, child?”
Nyneve set her jaw and said nothing. Of course she could feel it.
“It is his blood on the killing field that begins the next Age,” Fate said. “The price of the Nameless One is death. Unlike his creatrixes, unlike all the rest of his kind. The Bear will strike him down with the Blade, and the new world will be born.”
Nausea gathered in the back of Nyneve’s mouth. “You hold everyone’s Threads,” she snarled, one hand sliding to her daggereven though it would never do anything against a goddess, “so change them. Change his.”
“Oh, little fool,” Fate murmured, looming over Nyneve. The Druid girl’s ears rang, and she suddenly felt as though she might not be real. “If only it were so simple. If only a dull, tiny thing like you could open your eyes and see.”
“Then why are You telling me, if I can’t do anything and You refuse to help?” Nyneve demanded in a tone that was not fit for addressing a goddess. She set her lantern down, unable to resist the impulse to have both hands free in case she needed to fight.
Fate smiled, bearing all Her many teeth. The arched, strangely shaped wings on Her back flexed, sending a rippling breeze through the clearing. Then the goddess set one long-fingered hand on Nyneve’s shoulder, nails digging into her skin so hard she winced.
“Because you could have a great and vast future,” Fate murmured. “You have heard My Songs. They promise greatness. Leave this city behind. Forget the doomed changeling.”
The Druid girl considered it. A promise from Fate Herself that the future would be so vast and great that Nyneve could not even begin to imagine what it might hold. The bargain was simple. The price was not heavy: leave Mordred and Camelot behind. She had contemplated doing much the same for significantly less than Fate’s favor.
Nyneve straightened her spine and willed herself to look into the goddess’s eyes again. She saw so many of her deaths. Strange clothing and stranger worlds, all the different Threads she might have lived unspooling before her. And in each and every one, she could not help but notice something peculiar: a tall, lithe man who was not a man at all. His moonlight skin and dark waves of silken black hair, his eyes like an ocean in a storm, his voice like dusk over the lake and heather on the hills. Every single Thread, no matter how outlandish the worlds Nyneve peeredinto became, he was there. That familiar ache sang in her chest louder than any of the goddess’s melodies.
“What do you say, My child?” Fate asked in the voice of the strange, lilting lute notes Nyneve had heard her entire life, never understanding until this moment what they meant. Fatesongs, all this time.
The Druid girl picked up her lantern. “No.”
Nyneve slammed her fists into the door so hard that a knight she did not know leaned out of his room and furrowed his brow at her. She ignored him. When the door still did not open, she began to furiously pound on it.
“For Modron’s sake,” she heard Mordred snap from inside a moment before the door was yanked open. “What could— Oh. It is you.”
“It’s me,” Nyneve said. She hadn’t actually planned this. “Might I come in?”
It was only then that she realized Mordred had neglected to pull on his tunic. The torchlight carved out the hard planes of his muscles, running its golden fingers across his chest and stomach. Her mouth went dry.
