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Guinevere felt nothing. Had she been afraid of something so fragile? So temporary? She imagined the vines entering his mouth, stopping his tongue. They did. They covered everything but his face. It tipped up toward the moon, his cold, dead eyes finally settling on an emotion:
Agony.
Maleagant was dead.
“Guinevere,” Lancelot said. The fear in her voice pierced Guinevere. She shuddered, suddenly aware of the beetles that crawled all over her. Aware of what she had done, and how little she had felt about it.
She brushed the beetles away frantically. The trees shuddered, creaking and groaning as they stretched. “Enough,” Guinevere said. “We are finished.”
But the trees were not. And neither was the darkness. A hand burst free from the ground, grabbing Guinevere’s ankle. Lancelot cut the hand off. It scurried along the ground like a spider, away into the forest.
“What have we done?” Guinevere covered her mouth as she watched another hand form where the first had been cut off. Something was down there. And it was breaking free.
Mordred knelt next to the hand. “Guinevere, I am so pleased to introduce you to the Dark Queen. My grandmother.”
The hand extended, growing to an arm. A hint of a shoulder. The first curve of what would be a head.
“No,” Guinevere said, backing away in horror.
Mordred released the hand. He stood. “Arthur destroyed her body, but not before she sent her soul down into the ground. She needed help in order to take a new form. I could not manage it; neither could my mother. This is miraculous. Thank you.”
“You tricked me!”
He recoiled as though offended. “I tricked you? I am the only person who has not lied to you. I am the only person who came for you.”
Lancelot gripped her sword hilt, stepping in front of Guinevere. “No,” she said. “You are not.”
“How?” Guinevere could not believe it, could not understand. “You are not fairy. You touch iron.”
Mordred twirled
his sword elegantly through the air, the metal singing. “My mother is Morgan le Fay, Arthur’s sister. But my father was the Green Knight. I am from both worlds. Iron bites, but it does not kill. And I am accustomed to pain.” He lifted an eyebrow in wry judgment. “That was a nasty trick you did on the doors at the castle. Like ants swarming over my body every time I went in or out.”
Guinevere forced her eyes away from the monstrosity in the ground to meet Mordred’s gaze. “You cannot let her rise. You know what it would mean.”
“A return to nature. A return to the wild magic at the heart of this country. Do you know who carved Camelot out of the mountain? It was not men. Men came in and claimed it, because that is what men do.” He held his sword and stared at how it caught the moonlight. “I do not want men to die. But they need to be reminded of their place in the world. Someone has to stop them claiming everything worth having. Stop them claiming everyone worth having.” He held out a hand toward Guinevere. “You do not belong in Camelot. You belong here, with the dark and wondrous magic that runs beneath and through everything. You know it is true. Tell me you have not tasted it. Tell me you have not felt it when we touch.”
Guinevere could not tell him that. Not honestly. And the loss of magic did hurt her. She felt it everywhere: in the weight of Camelot’s stone, the expectations of its people, the relentless erosion of time. She had let it form her into someone she did not know. She had let men claim her.
“What is your true name?” Mordred asked. “You are not a princess from the south.”
She opened her mouth, and—
She did not have it. It had been lost to her. All she was now was Guinevere. She could feel the future coming, creeping ever closer, where even the little magic she knotted into the world around herself would cease working. Wonder would sleep so deeply that it could not be called. Just like Merlin, sealed away in a cave. He had let it happen. He had left Camelot. Given it to Arthur. Given the world to men.
Guinevere understood Mordred’s anger. She felt it herself. Everything wondrous was being unmade, and it was terrible beyond comprehension. But wonder, too, was terrible. The meadow around her was proof enough of that. Was not Maleagant’s death terrible and wonderful in equal measure? The tree’s sentience beautiful and abominable? Trees, magic, wildness were the uncaring opposite of justice. Men demanded justice, revenge. They banished magic to make way for rules and laws. In nature, only power mattered. And she had power.
It had crawled all over her as she watched a man die.
She could not give herself to this darkness. Not after everything she had felt and seen and done as Guinevere. Because of Camelot, she knew what it was to have a family among friends. To love Arthur. To believe in him. She had from the moment they met. There was loss in what Arthur was doing, yes. She finally understood what the dragon had shown her. The kinship it had seen in her. The choice ahead of her.
Merlin had already made the choice to remove himself from the clash of old and new. To let his own magic be sealed away.
To die, even.
Guinevere was not ready to die. And she was not ready to let darkness return without a fight, either.
“We have to stop her from rising,” she said, turning to Lancelot. “I might be able to. But only if you keep Mordred busy.”
