“My teeth?”
There had been a conversation at a market with Brangien and Mordred. They seemed confused that Guinevere did not remember losing her first teeth to make way for her second teeth. She repressed a shudder at having to once again acknowledge the fact that all children with their tiny pearls of teeth had other, bigger teeth, lurking beneath the surface, waiting to burst free. “When did you lose them?”
Lancelot had a hint of laugh in her voice. “I would imagine at the normal times? My first was before my mother—” Lancelot broke off. Her father had been killed serving Uther Pendragon, Arthur’s tyrant father. And while she had never specified how her mother had died, it had driven her to pursue vengeance and then knighthood with singular intensity. “My two front teeth I bashed out falling from a tree. It took quite a while for them to grow in. I had a lisp.”
“Were you teased?”
“Never more than once.” Lancelot smiled at the memory.
Guinevere envied her both the ability to defend herself even as a child and the memories of those events. She was hungry for a past, for some way to fill the emptiness she found when she tried to excavate her own history from memories. In the magical dream where she had connected herself to Merlin to look for him, walking back through her life, she had hit a certain point and found…nothing.
A void. Wiped clean. It did not feel clean, though. It felt like a violation, and filled her with shame. She cleared her throat and continued, wanting Lancelot to talk. To distract her. “Where did you go after you lost your parents? You have never told me much about that.”
Lancelot’s smile faded and something closed in her face. Lancelot was never dishonest, but there was a hint of evasiveness in the way she changed the subject. “We should focus. What are we looking for in the trees?”
Guinevere pulled her horse to an abrupt stop, dread and an odd sense of triumph warring in her breast as she looked at what should have been an orderly line of trees and found a riot of enormous, twisted oaks, draped with vines that rustled and reached in the dead, windless air. “That,” she whispered.
* * *
“We should wait for the king.” Lancelot eyed the trees warily, sword drawn and held ready. Guinevere did not know whether Lancelot could feel it the way she could—the way the air felt like a breath being held, the sense that if she whipped around fast enough, she would catch the trees moving—but it was clear Lancelot could feel the threat.
They had left their horses outside the forest with Brangien while Sir Tristan dashed madly for Camelot and Arthur.
“I came back to help Arthur in the fight against the Dark Queen. This is that fight.” Guinevere crouched, resting a hand against the dirt beneath them. Her fingers dug in. The soil was hard and unbroken, and it compacted beneath her fingernails. A worm wriggled by and brushed her skin.
Not a worm.
Guinevere pressed her searching fingers against a root snaking through the soil—years of growth in mere seconds. At this rate, the forest would overtake the farmland, destroy their crops, and ruin their harvest within days. Maybe even less. If she had not been riding here, who could say how long it would have taken word to reach Camelot?
And the trees could destroy more than just fields. She had left the horses outside of the forest for a reason. She could still hear the screams of Mordred’s horse as the roots dragged it beneath the soil of the Dark Queen’s meadow.
The screams of the men, too. Though that had been her own work, which made it far worse to remember.
“She is here.” Guinevere pulled her hand free of the soil and stood, hoping she had not given herself away. She stared into the depths of the trees, pierced by only the sharpest shafts of light, going on for what could be half a league or two dozen. The growth was so thick it was impossible to tell.
“The Dark Queen is here?”
Guinevere shook her head. She could not know for sure. “Her magic is.” She tore her eyes from the impenetrable doom of the forest, resisting the impulse to push in as far and deep as she could. To find that heart of chaos, that heart that her own blood had given shape to.
“Come on.” Guinevere turned toward their horses. Lancelot followed. There was no sense of relief as they emerged from the tree line.
Brangien stood, a few body-lengths away, her eyes wide. When they had entered mere minutes ago, she had been at least twice as far from the edge of the trees.
“Did you move?” Guinevere shouted. Brangien shook her head.
Guinevere wasted no time. She reached into the pouch on her belt and pulled out a coiled line of iron thread. It was heavy and cold in her hand, unpleasant to the touch. She could bind the trees, but they were individual trees. She would have to go down the entire line, and it stretched on and on. The leaves rustled. The branches and trunks groaned.
It had to be iron, though. She would not try to influence the trees directly again. She would bear the scars of their indifference to her demands for the rest of her days.
But there simply was not enough time to bind iron knots to each tree. If she was going to bind something, it would have to be—
“The soil,” she said to herself, triumphant. She could not stop every tree from moving, but she could stop what they were moving through. She dropped to her knees and clawed at the earth, dredging up the dark loam beneath the fallen leaves and small rocks of the topsoil. Brangien, braving the proximity to the trees, joined her as Lancelot stood guard, sword at the ready.
“How deep?” Brangien asked.
“A few more inches. There, that should be good.” Guinevere unspooled the thread, tying it in a complex knot of binding. It was not unlike the knots she had attached to every exterior of the castle. Nothing fueled by magic could pass those barriers. Her idea now was that by plunging the iron knot into the soil, it would infect the rest of the soil, making it inhospitable to magic.
That was the hope. She had never tried it before. Pulling out her iron dagger, an impossibly low note hurting her ears and setting her teeth on edge as always when she handled it, she cut her bottom lip.
Lancelot let out a hiss of anger. “Let me do it!”
“It has to be my blood.” Guinevere pressed the elaborate rings of the iron knot to her lip, whispering her intent, binding it to the iron through the iron in her blood. Then she pushed the knot into the earth and leaned over it, letting the blood from her lip drip down into the hole, watering the seed of her anti-magic and hoping it would spread.
Brangien held out a handkerchief and Guinevere took it, holding it to her lip and standing. She could feel the dirt beneath her fingernails, but she could not feel the magic she had performed. Iron took all and gave nothing back. It was an ending. Poison to the natural magic and chaos of the fairy realm, and poison to the Dark Queen.
The trees shuddered, dropping leaves. There was a creaking and groaning noise, as though a terrible wind raced through the woods, threatening to uproot them. But there was no wind. Their branches strained, clawing the sky, and then stopped.
“Is it over? Did we win?” Brangien eyed the trees dubiously. They were no longer advancing, but they were still there.
Guinevere dabbed at her lip, frowning. “We bought time to consider the problem.”
“Then can we please move farther away?” Brangien shuddered as she turned her back on the trees and stalked toward the horses. Guinevere did not join her.
“What are you thinking?” Lancelot asked.
“I am thinking about how much land we would have lost if we had not caught this. And wondering how much land we did lose. I am not familiar with this area. For all we know, yesterday it was rolling fields as far as the eye could see.”
“I am thinking I should also bring an ax with me on our rides, not just a sword.”
Guinevere laughed, reopening the cut on her lip. She pressed the handkerchief to it again. “I wonder how far the binding s
pread. I connected it to the soil, but what is the reach?” She gazed up and down the line of trees. “We should explore.”
“We are not going back in there.”
“The perimeter. Not the woods themselves.” Though Guinevere had to admit she wanted to do that, too. Iron dagger in hand, stalking the queen that threatened her king. Stalking the queen who had taken Mordred from them, who would take everything if she could.
Guinevere began to inspect the edge of the forest. Several smooth white stones were nestled in her bag—it was not a light bag—and she dropped them every few feet so they could be certain the trees were not advancing. But before they got far, the sound of thundering hooves approached. Guinevere turned, squinting against the sun.
Sir Tristan had found Arthur. He was galloping toward them, flanked by five knights and at least twenty soldiers. Guinevere hastily dropped the stone she was holding and used her handkerchief to wipe the dirt from her hands.
Arthur closed the distance between them in a mad gallop, leaping from his horse almost before it had finished moving. “Are you safe?”
Guinevere nodded. “I stopped the advance. The trees are halted, but I have not decided how to finish it.”
Arthur squeezed the pommel of Excalibur, fingers twitching in protest at not being allowed to draw it. “I can take care of it. But not with you here.”
Guinevere had seen Excalibur drain the life from a tree possessed by magic. In a way that she could not explain, it made her almost as sad as remembering the horse that had been devoured. And Arthur was right: she could not stay once he began to wield the sword. “I can help. We will go in opposite directions.”
“I will not have you wandering in a Dark Queen–infested forest alone. We know she is interested in you.”
“I can defend myself.”
Lancelot shifted uncomfortably. Guinevere shot her a look, but Lancelot did not meet her eyes. Her chin was lifted, her body at rigid attention as her king spoke.
“I know you can.” Arthur put a finger against Guinevere’s cut lip, troubled. “But in this case, you do not have to. You found this threat, and you warned us. I am here now.”
“How are you going to finish it?” It would take weeks to cut back the trees that had moved forward, and she did not like the idea of Arthur riding into the woods, searching for the Dark Queen. Excalibur or not, he would be vulnerable and she would not be at his side. “How will you find her, if she is here?”
“Simple. We will burn the forest.”
“Burn it?” Guinevere spun toward the trees. “But that will ruin the whole forest! These trees did not ask to be possessed by dark magic.”
Arthur gave her a puzzled look. “They are trees. They do not ask for anything.”
“There has to be another solution. Burning everything seems excessive. Can we not just find the Dark Queen, or the source of her infection here, and get rid of that?”
“It would be like cutting off the shoots of a weed. The roots are still there, and the weed will come back in the same spot, or in a new, unexpected one. We have to remove everything. She is in there or she is not, but her magic cannot linger in trees that are burned.”
“I can go in. I can trace the lines of the magic, find—”
From deep within the trees, a lonely howl drifted on the air. Guinevere felt it on her skin and shuddered in spite of herself. She had faced wolves in a wood before. They nearly got her, and they almost killed Sir Tristan, as well. She was afraid, and she hated the fear more than anything else the Dark Queen had done here this day.
Arthur and Lancelot shared a look heavy with unspoken agreement. Guinevere’s fear transformed into nagging worry at what she would do if Arthur commanded her to leave. If Lancelot followed his command and forced her to.
She did not want Arthur to make her leave, and she did not know what Lancelot would do if placed between her queen and her king. And she did not want to find out.
“Very well. I will be nearby, if you need me.” Guinevere trudged toward where Brangien waited a safe distance away with their horses.
She did not want to be safe. She wanted to be useful. And she hated that the best thing she could do to defeat this threat was to get out of Excalibur’s way.
Guinevere watched as the forest burned.
Lancelot was equally agitated and anxious, stalking in a tight prowl back and forth, her eyes on the line of bright flame and dark smoke billowing up into the unassuming afternoon sky.
“You can join them,” Guinevere said. Excalibur would not make Lancelot sick, and Guinevere was perfectly safe in this tamed, lifeless field.
“No. My place is here.” Lancelot stopped, but it seemed to require some effort. Her gaze kept drifting to the blazing destruction the other knights were overseeing. Brangien had returned to Camelot. Guinevere wanted to stay in case she was needed.
A knight broke free from the line of men controlling the flames and rode toward them. Sir Tristan was squinting, a strip of cloth around his mouth and nose as protection against the smoke. He pulled it down when he reached them, bowing his head to Guinevere.
“My queen, King Arthur sent me to tell you that he has this under control and wishes you to go back to Camelot.”
Guinevere twitched against the command. She was the one who had found this. It was her job to fight magical threats. But if Arthur felt like this situation was under control, she had to trust him. At least in Camelot she could check her wards and make certain no additional threat had crept in while they were occupied here. It made sense.
It did not make her resent being sent home any less.
Without a word, Guinevere went to her horse. Lancelot helped her mount, and then they rode back toward the city, equally silent, equally determined not to look over their shoulders at the fight they should be part of. The ride was insultingly dull, the afternoon sullen with heat that plagued them until they reached the lake.
Guinevere wanted another chance to prove herself against the Dark Queen. But last time her presence had not only brought the fairy menace back but also prevented Arthur from wielding Excalibur to end the fight once and for all. She was angry and she was humiliated and she was on yet another ferry across the abominable stretch of water that separated her from the castle.
It might have been preferable to take her chances with Excalibur over this trip across the cold depths of the lake. The ferry dipped and she grabbed Lancelot’s arm, squeezing. “Tell me something,” she whispered, shutting her eyes.
“What should I tell you?”
“Anything.”
“It is more valuable to anticipate a blow than to avoid it. If I know which direction a blow is coming from, I can move with it instead of against it. I use their momentum against them, because they will be focused on following through with their strike while I am already moving into position with my next one. So by taking a blow, I can often end a fight sooner than if I expended as much energy and thought on avoiding being hit.”
Guinevere frowned, leaning her head against Lancelot’s shoulder. Lancelot was so steady. “Why are you thinking about that right now?”
“When I do not want to think about something that is bothering me, I replay sparring matches and fights in my memory, going over the movements, what I could have done better, what my opponent did well.”
“Which fight are you replaying?”
Lancelot paused so long Guinevere thought she would not answer, but when she did, Guinevere regretted having asked. “Mordred. Always Mordred. No matter how I go through it, he wins. He always wins.”
Guinevere wanted to redirect the topic. “So momentum is the key in fighting? I would have thought strength.”
“It does not hurt.” Lancelot smiled gently at Guinevere’s obvious topic change. “Momentum is also critical to climbing. People think climbing is also about strength, and it is, to a certain
extent, but so much of it is confidence and movement. If you freeze, you use up precious energy that might be the difference between reaching the top and falling.”
Guinevere had seen Lancelot scale walls and cliffs she would have thought impossible. “Could you teach me? Not climbing. But fighting.”
Lancelot patted Guinevere’s hand. “Some basics. Self-defense. If you ever need more than that, I have failed at my job. But I have not failed at this one.”
“What one?”
“Distraction.” The ferry bumped against the dock. Lancelot escorted Guinevere off, and Guinevere took a moment to gather herself, to reclaim who she was when she was in Camelot. That cursed lake. It made her life so much more difficult. Being plunged into mortal terror every time she left or returned to the city was not good for maintaining a queenly presence.
Knowing that Merlin had placed the fear there to protect her from the vengeful Lady of the Lake made the fear less shameful, but no less terrifying. Wretched wizard. Wretched lake.
“My queen?” a young, eager voice asked.
Wretched Sir Gawain. Guinevere forced a pleasant expression, repenting of her mean thought. Sir Gawain was one of the youngest knights, her age—sixteen—but eager and accomplished with a sword. Unlike the older knights who kept with current styles, he wore his hair as short as he could to imitate Arthur. Combined with his round face, it made him look even younger than he was. According to Lancelot, all his spare time was spent in the chapel, praying or helping. He had taken to Christianity with the same fervor he had taken to Arthur.
Sir Gawain was tasked with helping Guinevere oversee the granaries within the city, which he also took to with extreme fervor. Guinevere had forgotten they were supposed to check one earlier this afternoon.
“Sir Gawain. My apologies. Our time afield took longer than expected.”
“No apologies required, my queen. I am ready to go now.”
The scent of smoke lingered in Guinevere’s hair. She wanted to shed her cloak and peel off her dress, to rest in her dim bedroom and confer with Brangien about her troubling dream. “Excellent,” she said, following Sir Gawain.
The Camelot Betrayal Page 2