The Book of Mordred (24 page)

Arm in arm they headed down toward the gate, with Dolph behind, close enough to keep stepping on Lancelot's heels. The wainwright, the cobbler's apprentice, and the coopers nephew crowded about and interjected their own bits of information as Romola spoke. Boy skipped along in front of them, moving backwards. Bayard, and the rest of the knights who were to present themselves to Arthur, trailed behind.

Nimue counted, came up short, and glanced around.

Wystan was sitting on the parapet, holding the sword Dolph had abandoned.

With a start, she realized he was trying to catch the first of the dawn light, to see his reflection on the burnished steel of the blade.

"Wystan." She touched his shoulder. "Wystan, I'm certain you will be all right. You look fine. If you were going to start aging, I'm sure you would have already—and you haven't."

He laid the sword down. "I haven't." He said it tonelessly, neither question nor affirmation.

She shook her head. She forced a smile, though there was little enough to smile about. "So. Where do you come from? Sir Lancelot, Sir Mordred, and I can escort you back to your village. How would you like that? That would shock the socks off your friends and neighbors."

"Socks?"

"Never mind. It's just an expression a friend of mine used to use."

Wystan said, "Who would know me? This don't be the face I left with."

Nimue bit her lip.

"And I can't be going back with your friends and pretending to be the man whose face this was."

"Oh, Wystan," she said, seeing he was right.

He avoided her eyes, but picked up the sword. He stood straight. With determination he said, "But, then, maybe this be a new chance for me—to start new someplace different. Somewhere. It may be." His voice got less and less sure. Still, he forced a smile. "We better hurry, or they'll be leaving without us," he said. "Those friends of yours seem set on bickering and snarling all the way, and they may well overlook you."

When Nimue and Wystan got to the stables, Dolph and Romola were sitting in the cart with the rest of the St. George group, but they were quarreling bitterly, and Mordred and Lancelot had started a debate on chivalry. Bayard wore a self-satisfied smirk.

"Without strict rules of conduct," Lancelot was saying, "civilization itself would disintegrate. How can you call Arthur's ideas old-fashioned? The old way was to look out only for yourself, and if your neighbor had something you wanted and if he wasn't strong enough to keep it from you—well, rotten luck, neighbor. You want to go back to anarchy?"

"I am not against people being decent to each other," Mordred protested. "Or against table manners or social etiquette, either. But you have made a mockery of—"

"By honoring ladies? By declaring the house of God a place of sanctuary? By establishing that once a man yields, he should not be cut down anyway?"

Mordred jerked his head to look away from Lancelot.

"You have no idea of the brutality of life before King Arthur. Why, the first time I heard of Arthur..." Lancelot had started to smile at the memory, but the smile faded, as did his words, when he saw that Mordred wasn't paying attention. Mordred sat on his borrowed horse looking far away at nothing in particular. "Yes, well..." Lancelot cleared his throat.

In the silence that surrounded them, Romola's voice carried. "What am I supposed to do: Be grateful that you'd still have me? So what? I'm not impressed."

"Outgrown us village folk, have you?" Dolph sneered.

Mordred whirled on him and snapped, "Has anybody ever pointed out what a horse's ass you are?"

Romola grinned, but Mordred had already stopped paying attention and missed it.

"Here, let me help you up," Wystan said to Nimue.

She swung up on the pony that had been readied for her. She started to thank Wystan, then saw that he had frozen. She looked at his stricken face, moved her gaze down to his hands. He had laced his fingers together to give her a lift, but the fingers wouldn't work properly. They couldn't—for they were bent and misshapen and several joints were missing.

Boy shook the reins to the oxen, and the cart started with a jerk.

The men's horses followed. "Listen," Lancelot was saying, "and I will tell you a story about chivalry..."

Bayard rode in the middle, wearing an expression that said
I am eager to listen to every story you are willing to share

Mordred was in one of his silent sulks.

Bayard's men, looking chastised and ready to be forgiven, followed.

From the cart, the cooper's nephew looked back and saw Nimue. "Come on," he called after her. "You don't want to be left behind."

Wystan slapped her horse on the rump.

The last she saw him, he was sitting on the step just inside the gate, elbow on knee, chin on disfigured fist, the first pink of dawn behind him.

"Talking to animals isn't even a big kind of magic," Kiera protested to her mother just as they reached the shady area Agravaine had pointed out as a good place to stretch their legs and rest the horses.

Her mother, as usual, refused to be reasonable. "Honestly," Alayna said in exasperation, "you'll be the death of me yet."

"No," Kiera said. "It won't be anything to do with me."

She recognized her words for a mistake as soon as they were out. A death prophecy wasn't the kind of information most people wanted to hear—least of all her mother. The unsolicited prediction hung between them, just as so many things did lately.

It shouldn't take magical sight, Kiera told herself, for someone who had reached the age of fourteen years old—and been invited, after this one last trip with her mother, to begin training as one of the Queen's ladies-in-waiting—to have the sense not to blurt out such stupid things.

Still, her mother was the one who had started it.

Alayna dismounted without waiting for one of the men to help her: Agravaine, who had come with them as escort, or his younger brother Mordred whom they'd chanced to meet on the road home as he traveled with Nimue.

"Thank you for the ride," Kiera whispered to her pony, who wiggled an ear at her.

Agravaine rushed over, too late to help mother or daughter dismount. His quick green eyes darted from one to the other, and must have caught the tension, for he spoke a bit too brightly: "Nimue says we had better make this a short stopover if we are to arrive at Camelot before the rain."

"Yes," Alayna snapped. "So Kiera's horse was just telling us."

Agravaine raised his eyebrows, but Alayna was already looking beyond him, her attention on his brother, who reached up to help Nimue dismount. The beautiful young enchantress leaned forward, laughing, her golden hair hanging close to Mordred's dark brown. Abruptly, Alayna turned and walked away.

But Mordred must have heard at least part of what had been said, or he could read the situation by the set of Alayna's shoulders, for as soon as he reached Kiera he whispered, "Have you been arguing with your mother again?"

Kiera shrugged. When Mordred didn't move away but waited for an answer, she said, "I just told her that my horse said it felt like ram." The rest of it, she thought, was best not repeated, and nobody's business anyway.

"Oh, Kiera," Nimue said, "you know your mother gets upset when you use magic."

Upset?
Kiera thought. No. Her mother was
terrified
of magic. She was fearful of almost everything.

Kiera knew that, years ago and to the scandal of her great-aunts, her mother had learned to use a sword. She had accompanied Mordred on a quest once, and had fought as a man would, a dim memory from Kiera's earliest childhood.
That
was a mother Kiera could have gotten along with. It was hard to reconcile that image with the plump, pretty woman who spent most of her time treating the imagined ailments of the wealthy old ladies of court. In fact, that was where they were coming back from now: the country estate of a baron whose wife had too much time on her hands and worried excessively about herself.

Kiera wondered, not for the first time, how different things would be now if Nimue had not come to Camelot five years ago.

"It isn't even a big kind of magic, talking to animals," she told them. But—as obvious as that sentiment was—they didn't seem any more willing to accept it than her mother had been. And who was Nimue—an enchantress renowned throughout the realm—to lecture
her
on not using magic? She had thought Nimue would be on her side. "And, anyway, what am I supposed to do when a horse or a dog talks to me—not answer? Pretend I don't hear? My father was a wizard, and it is only natural that I have some of his ability."

The adults exchanged a look she couldn't interpret, then Mordred, without a word, started after Alayna.

"Nicely done," said the usually agreeable Agravaine. "I especially liked that part about natural ability." He strode off to check the horses. Upset with
her,
Kiera realized. As though her mother's bad mood was
her
fault.

Adults always took one another's side.

Kiera went to fold her arms over her chest; but that was awkward ever since this past January when—all of a sudden, it seemed—she had developed a bosom.
You're not a child anymore,
her mother had lectured her.
I was wed when I was not that much older than you.
But in many ways—all the wrong ways—she continued to treat Kiera as a child.

Now, Nimue patted her hand and gave a gentle smile. "It used to be," Nimue broke the silence, "there was all manner of magic in the world. The art was stronger then, and those who practiced it were respected. But it's dimming. All the while dimming. Some people seek to control the weaker magicians, which is one thing for a mother to worry about. And some say the reason there is less magic is because it's a gift from Satan and it's being slowly destroyed by Christianity. Your mother loves you, Kiera. That's why she's afraid."

She doesn't ACT like she loves me,
Kiera thought,
always criticizing, always expecting the worst of me.

Did Nimue have a mother who worried about her? Kiera suspected the question was childish, and though she wanted to know more about the mysterious and usually elusive enchantress, she also wanted to be sophisticated and self-assured, the way Nimue was. So she didn't ask.

But she
did
say, "I've never called on Satan."

Nimue laughed, softly. "Nor have I." But then she looked at Kiera thoughtfully and asked, "What is it? What's wrong?"

"Nothing," Kiera said. Generally, this was the safe answer for her mother.

"
Nothing
wrong," Nimue repeated. "My goodness. Not too many people can say that."

Kiera shrugged. When the silence dragged on longer than she could bear, she said, "It's just..." Nimue looked at her attentively. It might be good to talk to someone for whom magic wasn't a
plight,
like her nearsightedness, or a stomach complaint. "It's just, the last few days ... without looking for it ... I'll be doing something, and all of a sudden I'll see..."

"Yes?" Nimue urged.

"A sort of mist..."

This time Nimue waited, not pressing.

All in a rush—the same way the visions came—Kiera said, "I'm surrounded by gray, and by a silence I can almost feel. I know that I have to get someplace or do something, but I don't know what. And I'm afraid. And I don't know why." She regretted having started any of this—and here she'd been concerned that asking about Nimue's mother would sound childish.

But Nimue didn't rebuke or belittle her. She sighed, and answered seriously. "I've never had the Sight. Or very little anyway. My magic has primarily been small healings." She shook her head. "You really should be trained, your power given a channel, so that you can control your magic rather than the other way around."

This was not like anything her mother would have ever said.

"A channel?" Kiera repeated. A sudden realization blossomed. Though the ring Nimue wore on her thumb was so plain it would be easy to overlook, Kiera asked, "Such as that ring of yours?"

Nimue opened her mouth, then closed it. She jerked her hand behind her back, then tried, twice again, before she got words to come out. "Where did you hear that?"

Shed said something wrong. It took no Sight to see that. "No place," Kiera said. But that obviously wouldn't do. She added, "I can just ... kind of ... feel it."

"You
do
need to be trained."

Kiera couldn't be sure if she meant in magic or in manners. She had overstepped her bounds.
Oh please don't be angry,
she thought. She wanted so much for Nimue to like her.

For a long while Nimue said nothing and Kiera didn't dare speak. They stood side by side, facing down the hill, with Agravaine behind them tending the horses, and Mordred and her mother too far down the slope to see clearly.
Nimue
could probably see them, as Agravaine probably could, too, if he were facing the other way. But Kiera's eyesight was weak.

Except when she saw those things that weren't there.