I ignored all of the people in the castle that were greeting me, barely paying them any attention as we passed them by.
Finally, I reached the doors of Arthur’s study and he was already opening them before I could knock, probably feeling my discontent through the bond.
“Little queen?” Arthur asked, his voice full of concern.
I threw my arms around his neck, melting with relief when his strong arms wrapped around my back.
A warm hand—Gawain’s—pressed between my shoulder blades, reminding me that, at the very least, I had them to fall back on even when I had failed so miserably at everything else.
Chapter Twenty-Eight
Istared after Guinevere as she practically ran from my rectory and closed the door with a slam behind her.
She had not even given me a chance to respond to her suggestion before she had pulled out of my mind and fled.
Being yanked out of my conjured world too fast always felt jarring, but now it felt even worse as my emotions seemed to rage within my chest.
I had always prided myself for remaining aloof to the world around me.
My beginning was so different from almost every living creature that it had been easy to just be the mysterious wizard that walked out of the mist fully-formed one day in order to help my king whilst everyone gave me a wide berth.
That had been my purpose in life and why the gods had seen fit to create me in the first place.
Truthfully, it had all been simple for me until the day I climbed into that dratted cave and began to see through the eyes of Juneau and Eleanor. The world in the future was so vibrant and different from the time I lived in—and being able to see and very nearlyfeelhow they fell in love with their packs had changed me irrevocably.
I had no place bearing such thoughts—much less bearing them about the woman who was at the very center of the portent I was trying so hard to breathe life into with a middling level of success.
But even still I could not help but do it regardless of how right or wrong it was. Guinevere’s magic called to mine, even when she was not in the same room as me—and in a fairly romantic sense—it felt as if something about it completed me.
She was also a conundrum. I could never quite predict what she would do next or what could come out of her mouth at any given moment and while it had frustrated me at first, I had grown to relish it over the past few weeks.
So, when she suggested we do more than just hold hands it had taken me aback for a moment.
Most saw me as just the wizard at Arthur’s right hand—his advisor and an enigma that could never quite be understood because I was not like them. Hells, I did not even fit into any of the designations. I did not have an increased sense of smell, nor the drive to go into a rut or a heat. I did not even feel the need to bow to an alpha’s words the way a beta would. Many of the alpha kings had tried to do so in vain.
Today, however, when Guinevere looked at me in that underground cave with her face glowing with soft green light from the water, her gaze told me that she saw me as a man. Not only that, she looked at me as if I was a man she was attracted to andwantedsomething more from.
It had made me panic at first if I was being completely honest with myself.
I had never considered myself as a part of the equation when it came to Arthur’s pack and the gods had never shown me such things… though I was fast coming to the conclusion that there were many things that the gods hadnotshown me about what was playing out in front of us.
I had not seen Morgana declaring a betrothal between Mordred and Vivenne, nor had I seen her banishment from the castle by Arthur. It was growing quickly obvious that my gods had kept certain things from me, I just could not understand why.
Did that mean that there was truly a possible place for me amongst Guinevere’s pack?
“Is such a thing even possible?” I asked out loud to the empty room.
But as always, the gods were silent unless they wished for me to see what they wanted me to see.
They had not communicated with me much since I emerged from the cave, only the occasional buzz whenever a piece of the future that they had shown me came to pass.
Such as the Princess of Lothian coming to live inside of the castle as Guinevere’s lady-in-waiting. The gods had shown me a vision of them standing arm-in-arm and giggling as they whispered something to each other… but not how she had come to be here.
Morgana’s movements were making me nervous and the closer we got to the fate that the gods decreed the less they showed me.
I did not know if allowing myself to woo Guinevere was meant to be a part of her future. Everything was too nebulous and vague, two things that did not sit well with me.
Even still, all I could think of now was how her lips might feel against mine and how much our magic would coalesce together with such contact. Just the mere idea of it made my chest warm in a way that I was unfamiliar with.
