The Guinevere Deception

by Kiersten White

  “And yet! Sir Bors is determined to kill it, if it exists.”

  “Sir Bors is a canny hunter,” Dindrane said. “My brother could never do such a thing.”

  “What proof does Sir Bors have that the creature exists?” Guinevere asked.

  As they resumed walking toward the castle, Brangien resettled the parcels she was carrying. “Rumors. A reliable woodsman with a burned arm, screaming about a demon in the forest. Some evidence of scorching. If it is a dragon, Sir Bors will find it.”

  “I cannot wait to tell my sister-in-law,” Dindrane said, smiling wickedly. “A dragon! And her husband will not be the one to face it.” She hurried away from them.

  It was news indeed. Terrible news. Dragons had been the favored creatures of the Dark Queen. For centuries she had wielded them, sending them to attack farmsteads, to ruin settlements. They had been hunted with ruthless efficiency by the Romans. Even Merlin did not think any still lived. Guinevere had asked during one of their lessons. Merlin had rambled about the old making way for the new, bones buried deep in the earth to grow the seeds of new life.

  But if a dragon was on the prowl, that meant Arthur was vulnerable. Even Camelot was. A dragon in flight could lay siege to the city the way men could not. If the dragon had any alliance to dark magic—or was under the control of someone like Rhoslyn—it had to be stopped.

  “I must go,” Guinevere said, her mind already made up.

  “Go where? The market is over.”

  “Go to the dragon.” If there really was one, she did not trust Sir Bors to take care of it himself, canny hunter or not.

  Brangien stopped walking, stunned. “My lady, that is a job for knights. Not for queens.”

  Guinevere had not told Brangien the truth of her identity. It was one thing for them to share a secret of magic; it was another entirely for Guinevere to reveal her whole self. Guinevere pulled her hood on. “King Arthur is my husband. I will do whatever it takes to protect him. And no one else in this kingdom will be able to know if the dragon is doing the bidding of some dark force. I can. But I will need Sir Tristan to help me.” She turned to the knight.

  His brown face had gone pale. But he nodded, hand on the hilt of his sword and jaw clenched with resolve. “I will need to get my cloak and more weapons.”

  Brangien smoothed her skirts nervously. “I think this is a bad idea.”

  “Meet me where the horses are kept, Sir Tristan.”

  “But you will need a boat!” Brangien exclaimed.

  “I have one.” Guinevere hurried to the castle, leaving them at the gate. She made her way out to the walkway that led to the secret passage’s storage room. She stopped outside the doorway. This one, fortunately, they had not magically protected, since it did not lead directly into the castle. She pulled an extra thread of iron from her pouch, pricked her lip with it, and then fashioned it into a knot that would pull apart at the slightest tug. She inserted it into the keyhole, then pulled, releasing the unlocking magic.

  The door swung open. Relieved and only slightly dizzy, she hurried inside and closed the door behind her. The barrel was a bigger problem, quite literally. It took her nearly ten minutes to shift it enough that she could squeeze through.

  She hurried through the dark, slick tunnel. When she came out the other side, she rushed to the horses’ pen. To her surprise, it was not only Sir Tristan, mounted, waiting for her.

  “What are you doing here?” Guinevere asked Brangien, who was holding the reins of two other horses.

  “No lady’s maid would allow her lady to go on an unaccompanied trip with a knight!”

  “But they would allow their lady to seek a dragon?” Guinevere mounted her horse, laughing.

  “Well, no. But I can only control one of those things.” Brangien stuck out her tongue at Guinevere.

  Sir Tristan led the way, and they pushed the horses as fast as they dared. If Sir Bors killed the dragon before she arrived, she would not be able to determine if it was under the sway of the dark magic. The dragon problem would be solved, but no answers would be obtained. As they rode, Guinevere asked Brangien to show her the knotting method she used. It was a good distraction.

  They were heading in the same general direction as the forest where she had seen Rhoslyn’s magic sparking. What if Rhoslyn had figured out a way to control the dragon? Arthur had made Guinevere promise not to go against the witch, but she had not promised not to go against a dragon. And if she found a link between the two, she would break her promise.

  The lush and well-tended fields gave way to scraggly trees, and then to dense and gnarled old growth clinging to a low mountain. Rhoslyn’s location was farther south, but that did not mean she and the patchwork knight were not involved.

  Sir Tristan rode with one hand on the pommel of his sword and a wary eye on their surroundings. “The dragon is supposed to be in this region. But it could be hours—or even days—before we find anything. Sir Bors is the tracker.”

  They did not have time for that. She had to be back in Camelot before nightfall. “Then we need to find Sir Bors.” Guinevere frowned. An idea took shape. “Brangien, do you have cloth, a needle, and thread?”

  “Yes.” Brangien sounded wary, but handed the supplies over. Guinevere tugged several eyelashes free, then sewed them onto a strip of cloth. How clever of Brangien to anchor the knot magic! It made everything so much easier to manage. It would have been a nightmare trying to knot the eyelashes with only thread.

  She held the cloth up to her right eye, peering through.

  “How can she see anything through that?” Sir Tristan asked.

  “Hush,” Brangien chided.

  Guinevere’s eye pierced the knot, went through cloth, tree, stone. She fought the wash of spinning disorientation as her sight left her and found her target. Sir Bors was paused next to a stream, refilling his leather canteen.

  “He is by water,” she said. “A stream. And—oh, he is standing. Smoke! He sees smoke!”

  “There.” Sir Tristan pointed. “Where the trees are thickest. That is where the stream will be.” It was around a curving hill. When they got closer, Guinevere looked up and she, too, saw the smoke. Though only with her left eye. Her right eye she had to keep closed against the blinding aftereffects of the magic.

  “Wait here,” she said.

  “My queen.” Sir Tristan drew his sword, staring at the smoke. “I can do no such thing.”

  “I am your queen, and I command you both to wait here. I will be perfectly safe.” Guinevere turned, having delivered her lie with enough cold confidence that she hoped they believed it. Then she hurried her horse in the direction of the smoke. A maiden desperately hoping to run into a dragon—that had to be a first.

  She did not have long to search. The sounds of battle between man and beast were terrible. Guinevere jumped from her spooked horse, tied it to a tree, then ran over to a low ridge.

  Down in the stream valley, Sir Bors had the dragon cornered against a boulder and a thick stand of trees. The dragon’s wing had been sliced open, so it could not fly away. It blew fire, but Sir Bors ducked behind a shield lashed to his bad arm. The fire was weak, barely flickering where it hit the shield. The dragon drew another breath. Sir Bors lifted his great sword to strike.

  Guinevere decided to do something tremendously stupid.

  She threw down a scrap of cloth so that it landed on Sir Bors’s head—and immediately dropped him into sleep. He fell hard to the ground, brought down by the sleep knots Brangien had made while showing Guinevere how to tie them.

  The dragon, already braced for a killing blow, froze. It tilted its head.

  Guinevere slid down the embankment and scrambled to get between the dragon and Sir Bors. The dragon swung its huge head, following her. It was the color of mossy rocks, with two great, curling horns and fur like whiskers drooping over its mouth.
Its eyelids, too, drooped low, making it look as sleepy and cross as…Sir Bors. Actually, now that she thought about it, the dragon looked like nothing so much as Sir Bors in beast form. It even had one leg it held against its body, curled and withered from an old, poorly healed wound. Its tail was stunted, its right wing split open, and several spears protruded like spikes from lumpy, scarred tissue along its back.

  Guinevere stumbled, her depth perception off with one eye closed. “Please.” She held out her hands to show she had no weapons. “I have a question. Can you understand me?”

  Dragons were rumored to be terribly clever, capable of understanding human speech. But that was the myth. She did not know the reality. It leaned its head close to her—so close she could see the fine detail of its scales, the faint hint of pearlescence. It took a deep breath, smelling her.

  And then it tilted its head. A huff of air like that from opening a stove blew over her, and then the dragon stuck out its long, elegant purple tongue…and licked her face.

  She had miscalculated terribly. She was going to be eaten.

  But the dragon sat back on its haunches, lowering its head so they remained eye-level. It nudged her once, gently. She reached out to balance and put her hand on top of its head, and then—

  “Oh,” she whispered.

  The freedom of night, of sky. No up or down, no ground, only flight. The wind caressing, buffeting, helping and hindering. Looping lazy circles for the sheer joy of it, surrounded by mother, sister, brother.

  The sharp thrill of pleasure catching sheep between claws, the promising weight of them, the satisfaction of hot blood and torn meat.

  Burrowing beneath the earth, deep, deep, sleeping away the cold months with the heat of mother, brother, sister, curled around each other.

  And then—

  Arrows in the sky. Spears. Sharp points of terrible pain, teeth no animal as small as man should have. Mother. Gone.

  Brother.

  Gone.

  Sister.

  Gone.

  Wandering, lonely. Flight lost to the threat of arrows. Crawling on its belly, looking, searching, finding…nothing. No one. Curling around itself, alone.

  The sky lost. The family lost. The joy and power of existing. Lost.

  Guinevere’s throat burned. Tears streamed down her face. “I am sorry,” she whispered. She looked for darkness, for influence of angry magic, for any connection to Rhoslyn, and found only sorrow and loss and unbearable weariness. This beast was not under any spell.

  It nudged her hand again. This time, in the emptiness of the dragon’s future, she saw it curled around itself, slowly fading. And then she saw…herself. Alone. Slowly fading.

  Why was the dragon showing her that?

  “What do you need?” she asked. She had been ready to fight. Instead, she wanted to weep and comfort this creature. But how could she comfort it against the relentless destruction of time?

  The dragon glanced at Sir Bors, still asleep. Guinevere sensed the fear of pain, of the cruel bite of iron. The dragon crawling, pursued. It was right. Sir Bors would never stop hunting it. And she did not know if she should stop him. As much as it pained her, the dragon was still a threat.

  “What would you do if I could stop him from hunting you?”

  The images changed. The dragon stayed in the wilds, basking in the sun, rolling in the autumn leaves, relishing the snow for one more year. Then it crawled into the earth and went to sleep. And it did not come out again.

  “You want one last year to say goodbye,” Guinevere said.

  The dragon dipped its head once in acknowledgment.

  Dragons had been terrible menaces, but…to be the last of one’s own kind, alone, knowing that your time was ending and there was no way to return to how the world had been. Merlin was right. The old was buried to give life to the new. Even though it was for the best for men, for Camelot, for Arthur, she could still mourn what it cost this ancient creature.

  She could give it the gift of a year for farewells.

  “If you stay far away from men, I can promise this one will not come after you. He will think you dead. But first, I must know. Have you been called by darkness? Is anything stirring?” They had met with darkness twice now. The forest that swallowed the village, and the mist and wolves while fleeing Maleagant. Neither seemed tied to Rhoslyn. Guinevere hoped they were like weeds of leftover magic, clinging to life.

  The dragon’s eyelids slid half-closed. A low hiss sounded in its throat. Demands. Sharp tugs. The trees and the men screaming. The dragon turning its back, leaving the Dark Queen to her fate. The dragon had abandoned the Dark Queen during the great battle. That was a relief.

  But then…Tendrils. Something small, something searching. Darkness looking for something to hold.

  The dragon huffed, making it clear it had no interest in being held. It was enough. Guinevere believed that the dragon was not under dark sway. But something had searched for it, or tried to call it. Something powerful enough to guide darkness, but not command it as the Dark Queen had. Rhoslyn’s rock was heavy in her pouch. The witch needed to be dealt with.

  But not today. Today, she had terrible work to finish. Guinevere knelt next to Bors. There was an old magic that blurred more lines than she cared to. It was one thing to influence objects or events. It was another thing entirely to reach into minds and change things. Merlin had done it to the nuns at the convent so they would not realize Guinevere was a stranger to them. With a sick twist, she suspected he had also used it on Igraine the wretched night that Arthur was conceived.

  She knew how to do it. She was not entirely human, after all. Her hands already brought information in. They could send it out, as well. But she had only ever used them to see. Never to show. And never to force a change.

  It was a violent act. Magic of conquest and force. Was it justifiable when being used to protect a vulnerable creature? Her hands shook as she lifted them to Sir Bors’s temple, and she pushed.

  The trick to changing a memory, Merlin had said, carefully setting seven white stones in a row, is to make the replacement memory so unpleasant, so viscerally awful, that they will never poke too hard at it. Make them flee from the memory. It is the skin on old milk. If they force it, it will break and the truth will spill free. So make the milk rancid. Who would ever touch rancid milk? He had looked up then. You should not have told him. You should never have told him.

  Shaking off the terrible weight of Merlin’s gaze in the memory, still unsure what he had meant by the last part, she got to work. She let her hands sink into Sir Bors’s memories. She did not have to go far, nor did she want to. Once at the dragon, she whispered the story to the knight with her mouth, and put it in place with her hands.

  “The dragon blew fire, but you shielded yourself. Then, as it drew a breath that would end you forever, you plunged your sword deep in its belly. Your moment of triumph turned sour. Its belly split open, spilling a week’s worth of rotting sheep and stinking, half-digested offal all over you. You stumbled away, vomiting on yourself. You vomited so hard, you also soiled yourself. The dragon is dead. That is all you will tell anyone, and all you ever need think of again.”

  She smoothed his forehead, feeling the memory settle. Bors’s mind was a simple, determined thing. He was a creature of pride. He would never want to remember the shame of the memory she had crafted.

  She sat back, exhausted. She could feel something was missing. She was forgetting something. A memory, lost, as she pushed the new one on Sir Bors. What had she given up? She would never know.

  She felt as dirty as the memory she had created for Bors. He was a good man, and she had violated his mind.

  Something dropped in her lap. She stared down at a large, worn tooth. Like the scales, it had a pearl sheen, oddly lovely. A gift.

  The dragon nudged insistently at her. She put her hand on
its head once again. It fixed one sorrowful golden eye on her. One last message pulsed through to her:

  Familiarity. The dragon saw her, and felt they were the same. She shook her head, confused. A lake. The dragon’s reflection in it as it flew overhead, terrible and glorious.

  Huffing a last puff of scorching air, the dragon ambled away, free to see one last year of solitary decline.

  Guinevere did not know if she had truly done it a kindness. She hoped so. At least it would be free, now, to choose its own death. Was everything old and magical doing the same? Finding holes to crawl into, to slowly fade in peace? She prayed her mercy would not come back to haunt her. An old, battered dragon was still a dragon, and the darkness had always loved them.

  But the dragon was not fighting or plotting. It was barely existing. Lonely and weary, she wanted nothing more than to rejoin Brangien and Sir Tristan. Tell them that she had been too late, the dragon already dead.

  No. She wanted nothing more than someone she could talk to about everything she had done today. But Arthur was gone, and she did not know if he would want to hear this. She had not sought out Rhoslyn, but this was just as dangerous.

  She would tell Arthur. He was the only person she could be honest with. She would not give that up. And it was another reason to go after Rhoslyn and the patchwork knight. Something was creeping in the dark and hidden places surrounding Camelot.

  She had one more odious task to complete here, though. Bors could not wake up to clean clothes—they were evidence that contradicted his memory. She began to undress the battered old knight.

  The dragon feels the tug. Feels her sending out her dark tendrils again, calling for aid.

  It sighs, a slight hiss around its missing tooth.

  She tugs harder.

  It has the gift of winter to look forward to, now. Magic can offer it nothing but death, and that is already its constant companion, having taken all its kind and waiting ever-present for the last dragon. The poor lost girl should have stayed. They could have curled together against the night, against the darkness, against time.