But then the herald was announcing the next match, which happened to be his mounted sword fight against Lancelot. A stupid tradition, making the King’s Champion and Queen’s Champion fight each other. Mordred was supposed to lose, some not-so-backward way of saying the king always had more power. As if that fact were not already apparent to everyone.
He nodded to Lance, who was mounted on his pale golden charger on the other side of the field. Then Mordred reached for his sword, greeted by the sight of Nyneve’s green hair ribbon still tied around the hilt. He gritted his teeth, ignoring the way his heart beat faster, an open-mouthed hunger unfolding in his chest.
The Druid girl was dangerous, yes. But for some godsforsaken reason, she was dangerous to him, specifically. Like she had found the crack in his armor long before arrivingat Camelot’s gates and intended to pierce him with dagger after dagger until he fell to his knees at her feet.
Mordred sighed, dropping his reins for a moment to adjust his helm. Rook stood still beneath him. The warhorse had always been rock-solid when it counted. Arthur leaned over the railing despite the mist, making some speech to the crowds huddled on the damp wooden stands. Mordred drowned it out, gathering Rook’s reins back up and flipping the blade in his grip.
Then Arthur held up the red silk pennant, and Mordred pulled himself together, sitting up straight in his saddle. Rook responded immediately, setting back on his haunches to prepare for a charge. Though this match was little more than theatre, intended to show off the power of the throne’s champions, he was well aware that Lance would absolutely kill him given half the chance and the opening to make it look like an accident.
Mordred might have been destined for the grave like a mere mortal, but he would not be dispatched to his funeral pyre by the likes of Sir Lancelot du Lac.
Arthur dropped the silk, and Mordred closed his legs around Rook, sending the warhorse forward in a furious charge. He met Lancelot with a clash of swords and a roar from the crowd. And then he fought. It was easy to slip deep inside himself with a weapon in his hand and blood in his mouth. That was his natural state: violence and death. No room for much else.
Mordred pressed the inside of his calf to Rook’s flank, and the charger swung to the side, circling in on Lance. The older knight leveled his sword straight at Mordred’s breastplate and sent his horse flying toward them. Mordred sighed. Terribly boring fighter. Rather hard to make everything as dramatic as Arthur wanted with an opponent as bland as Lancelot.
He just waited, holding Rook in place, intending to send the horse elegantly dancing to the side at the last moment. But then a flash of red caught his attention, even thoughnothingshouldcatch his attention besides his enemy and the hum of their blood. His gaze snapped to the slip of auburn to find Nyneve directly in his sightline, leaning on the railing of the stands, her eyes locked on him.
Her mouth moved, though he could not make out the words. Then she winked at him. Apprehension gripped the back of his neck with a cold hand, but Lancelot was nearly upon him. He could not deal with the Druid girl and the King’s Champion at the same time. So, he shifted his weight, cueing Rook. The warhorse obliged, offering a series of fast, elegant, lateral strides before bursting into a hard gallop toward Lancelot.
The knight barreled down on them, adjusting for Rook’s movement, his sword gleaming in the weak light of the sun. Mordred’s saddle suddenly tilted hard to the side, like a strap had been snapped by some hidden knife. He fought for his balance, trying to kick his feet out of the stirrups, but his boot caught, and Mordred plummeted toward the earth—and the two warhorses trained to bludgeon anyone foolish enough to find themselves beneath their hooves.
Chapter Fifteen
Nyneve
With only a small twinge of regret, Nyneve clung to the railing and watched Sir Mordred Pendragon fall from his horse, the weight of his armor dragging him down into the mud.
He shouldn’t have killed her messenger, shouldn’t have made a deal with her, shouldn’t have been such a distraction to her goals. She couldn’t afford any kind of distraction, but particularly not one with moon-pale skin and fathomless ocean eyes and the most terribly beautiful voice she’d ever heard. If he wouldn’t accept the peaceful death of drowning in her waves, she would batter and bruise him until he gave in.
Nyneve dug her fingernails into the damp railing in anticipation, blinking the mist out of her eyes. Mordred hit the ground hard, the crowd offering a collective sound of sympathy. She frowned when he rolled clear of his horse’s hooves, looking to Sir Lancelot as the knight thundered closer. The saddle leathers were tangled around Mordred’s legs, but he managed to pull himself free just in time. When he rose to his feet, an apocalyptic vision on a field of gray, the crowd roared his name.
Nyneve narrowed her eyes, glancing over at the king’s awning where Merlin stood. She wasn’t particularly keen to do magic in the vicinity of the sorcerer. Her manipulation of the saddle leather’s stitching through fiber magic might go unnoticed—women’s magic, surely—beneath the attention of Merlin. But if the sorcerer had felt any of her working, a second spell would only confirm her presence. So Nyneve turned back to the tourney field and hoped the famed Sir Lancelot would finish the job for her. At the very least, everything would be so much easier if Mordred were seriously injured and out of her way for a while.
Lancelot circled the unhorsed knight with what looked like utter glee, his charger’s hooves slinging clods of damp earth. Mordred stood motionless, a statue of glimmering mail—until he didn’t. Moving impossibly fast, he flipped his grip on his sword so the blade pointed down, then lunged at Lancelot.
“He’s absolutely mad,” Nyneve whispered to herself with what she hoped wasn’t admiration. Instead of trying to remount Rook or find a place to fight from the ground with a decent advantage, Mordred had chosen to try to unhorse his opponent. Lancelot hadn’t been expecting it either, it seemed—in reflex, he clamped his legs to his horse’s sides in an attempt to stay seated. But that only cued his well-trained charger to break into a gallop.
Mordred grabbed Lancelot by the neck of his hauberk and hauled him off his mount with terrifying strength. The warhorse galloped away in a surprising display of panic, thundering through the arena’s gates despite the pages and squires attempting to slow the animal. Cheers exploded from the crowd, people jumping to their feet and clambering down to the railing for a closer look.
With one hand, Mordred slammed Lancelot into the damp, pockmarked earth, the other pulling his helm off—for bettervisibility in hand-to-hand fighting, Nyneve supposed. But then his eyes met hers, a challenge simmering there.
Nyneve gritted her teeth and held his gaze, her hands curling into fists even as heat fluttered between her thighs. She tried to ignore how Mordred had reduced the realm’s greatest knight to a tangle of mud-splattered mail and leather at his feet. Backlit by the watery sun, his surcoat blackened with rain, Mordred looked like an avatar of patient, inevitable violence. It nearly undid her.
Hunching her shoulders around herself, trying to be as small as possible, Nyneve experimentally whispered to the rain that soaked the ground beneath Mordred’s feet. It answered her call immediately, grabbing at the knight’s boot, pulling him off balance. She smiled, pleased—until a wave of stale, humid air hit her. All at once, it felt like a thousand insects were crawling across her skin, seeking entrance through each and every orifice, tiny barbed legs scuttling beneath her eyelids, straining against her mouth.
With great effort, Nyneve held back an instinctual scream and released her hold on the rain entirely, pulling all her Threads back and locking them down tightly. Immediately, the sensation of being watched—touched, investigated,seenin the worst way—disappeared. She slammed her eyes shut and pressed her hand to her mouth, trying not to gag. In the back of her mind, she could only pray it looked like she was upset at the violent match down on the turf.
Merlin. What she’d just felt hadn’t been Mordred, that much she knew. She’d felt the brush of his faerie-lent magic, and it was nothing so vile. Nyneve bit down on her tongue. Gods’ blood, that had been impetuous—now the sorcerer might be aware someone with Druid magic walked these halls.
She turned back to the fight, hoping it would at least be worth it. But Lancelot was still down in the mud, struggling. Mordred stood above him, batting away the older knight’s sword arm withone swipe of his armored hand, wolf-like in the shadow of the rain, his dark hair plastered to his skull.
Then the gray-eyed knight turned and whistled. Rook came galloping from the sidelines a heartbeat later. Nyneve fumed as Mordred took a running step forward, using the movement to spring onto Rook’s bare back as the stallion raced by. The crowd went absolutely wild, a group of scullery girls at Nyneve’s side screaming so loudly she thought her eardrums might ring for weeks.
Now Mordred was circling a downed opponent, the pale flash of his grin apparent even in the dim afternoon rain. Lancelot righted himself, looking for his horse, but the golden charger was long gone. With an enraged yelp, the knight went for his belt, pulling a knife free and throwing it at Mordred. Nyneve arched her brow at the storied knight’s excellent aim, the knife whistling toward Mordred’s exposed neck.
Evidently, Mordred was well-accustomed to people throwing weapons at him, because he simply reached one gloved hand forward and plucked Lancelot’s knife from the air like a flower from its stem. Despite herself, Nyneve’s mouth dropped open; she’d felt no Threads of magic in the unlikely feat. Mordred sent Rook cantering forward, the warhorse’s plaited mane streaming like war banners.
The charger slammed to a halt right in front of Lancelot at the perfect distance, the point of Mordred’s sword just coming to the older knight’s neck. Even from the stands, Nyneve could see the fury in Lancelot’s eyes as he pressed his lips together and held his hands up to yield. Her anger mirrored the knight’s own: howdarethis interloper claim such a victory against her efforts.
