The Guinevere Deception Read online

  He nudged her knee with his. “You said you had a few thoughts to discuss. That was two. What else?”

  She had said a few thoughts. But the last one she had not meant to include in the list. She wanted to know how he had recognized her. How he had found her face even when she was hiding it. It felt precious. A gift of grace in the midst of turmoil. And she did not want to spoil it by pulling it apart like one of her failed knots. She snatched at another issue to bring up.

  “Oh, yes. I will need to visit every door in and out of the castle. You have given me the solution I lacked for how to secure them. I need threads of iron, melted and stretched so thin I can twist them.” Those knots would not need replacing. They would ask more of her to put in place, but then she could forget about them. The cost would be paid up front.

  “Of course. I will have them made as soon as possible. Do you require anything else?”

  “A way to store supplies without arousing Brangien’s suspicion.”

  “That is easily done. I will get a trunk for the secret passageway between our rooms.”

  She yawned, unable to hide it. Her eyelids were heavy. A touch as light as a moth’s wings alighted on one of her coiled, aching muscles. No. Not a real muscle. Something else inside her. She sat up, alarmed. The knots were all intact. She would know if they had broken. Had she really felt something? Or was she so tired the barrier between sleeping and waking was crumbling?

  “Is everything all right?” Arthur asked, responding to her expression. She felt through herself. The space on her scalp where it always felt like three hairs were being yanked out. The tickle of missing breath in her lungs. The dryness on her tongue. The sore ache that never quite faded. All the knots were still tied to her. If something had brushed against them, it had accomplished nothing.

  “Yes. I think so.” But she redid all the knots under his patient gaze. She would seal them with iron soon. Bidding Arthur goodnight, she stumbled, exhausted, back into her bedroom and gratefully crawled under the blankets.

  She did not see the moth waiting, soft and patient, where it had been carried into her rooms on Brangien’s stolen cloak.

  The dark queen has seen this Guinevere, the queen-not-queen, already, carried to her on a hundred wine-tinged dreams. Arthur can seal his people away from her, but dreams and nightmares are still her realm, and she is free to come and go as she pleases.

  The queen-not-queen is small, more like a sparrow than a falcon. Her hair is as black as tar and, depending on the dreamer, is worn in a plain braid or a tremendous crown of plaits.

  In some of the dreams she is regal. In others, a mere girl. In a few, she is small and ugly, with sneering lips and vicious eyes. In most dreams, she barely exists, overshadowed by the usurper king, the boy with his sword, the figure even the dark queen cannot escape though she no longer sees with eyes herself.

  But she does not care how those hundreds of borrowed eyes see the queen-not-queen, because none of their eyes matter. None of their eyes see truth. Even their dreams cannot pull apart what they see to understand what is.

  That is why she finds the queen-not-queen’s dreams. A moth dusting the girl’s sleeping eyes, her lips, her ears.

  She slips from the dust into the dream.

  There is a steady plink-plink-plink of water. The dark queen knows darkness, but in the black, the claustrophobic fear of the dreamer snags her, tries to overtake her. She is the darkness, though. She has nothing to fear there. She cannot be trapped.

  There is a girl. Naked. Pale and trembling, arms wrapped around her legs, face buried in her knees. She has made herself as small as she can, and still she is not small enough.

  The dark queen pushes through the dream toward the girl. The dream pushes back. Eventually she is as close as she cares to be. What she had taken for pale skin is more complicated. There are knots everywhere, woven into the very veins, webbed over the skin like scars, binding and holding. Strands of blue-black hair flow down the girl’s back, and the queen can almost see what the knots are doing there. Can almost tell what—

  The girl looks up. Her eyes are bottomless. Empty. The dark queen recoils. The cave is not the trap. The girl is the trap. Because in those eyes, she sees—

  “It will unmake us,” the girl whispers. “And I will let it happen.”

  * * *

  The moth dies.

  * * *

  The dark queen claws her way out of the darkness screaming after her, the darkness wanting to swallow what is left of her. She feels something she has not felt since the usurper king drew his cursed sword.

  The dark queen is afraid.

  What did Arthur bring into the castle?

  “Market day!” Brangien chirped, throwing the bed curtains wide. Guinevere had not recalled drawing them. Perhaps they were the reason her dreams were all of darkness and being trapped. “The king requests your presence at his side.”

  As much as she was determined to spend every moment preparing and hunting for the impending threat, she had to admit a day at a market sounded fun. With people there for a reason other than her wedding, it would be less overwhelming than their time at the lakeshore. And she would have to get used to crowds. People were mysteries to her, which would not do for a queen.

  She had gone so long without knowing them. It had only been Merlin before the convent. This reminded her of Arthur’s question. Merlin had been with Arthur until a year ago. Guinevere had been with—

  “My lady?”

  “Yes?” Guinevere snapped to attention.

  “I said, what colors would you like to wear today?”

  Guinevere smiled. “Something joyful. Unless you think I should be somber?”

  “The people love their king. They want to see him happy. Showing them a joyful queen at his side will endear you to them.” Brangien hummed softly to herself. Her voice was clear and sweet and sad. Guinevere liked it immensely.

  Brangien laced and tied Guinevere into a long flowing underdress of green, then draped a delicate yellow robe over it. A silver belt cinched them together.

  Frowning, Brangien held up several hoods. The hood would engulf Guinevere’s head like a cave, with two long strips of cloth coming down nearly to the floor on either side in the front, keeping the hood anchored.

  They all looked the same to Guinevere. Like ropes to bind her.

  Brangien shook her head. “Not quite right. As a married woman, you can choose whether or not to cover your head. And there are no rules for your hair. The style is plaited, of course. Elaborate braids crowning your head are in fashion. But your hair is so striking. What if we braided it back from your face but then left it long and undone, trailing down your back like the waterfalls of Camelot?”

  Guinevere did not like imagining her hair as waterfalls. But she trusted Brangien to present her well. “That sounds perfect.”

  Brangien got to work. By the time she was done, Guinevere’s hair glistened and rippled. There was a burnished metal mirror in her room. It gave more of an impression of her looks than truth, but the impression was pleasant.

  After a careful examination, Brangien nodded. “There is no reason to try and make you look like a stuffy old wife. You are young and lovely. Oh, Sir Percival’s sister will simply loathe you.” Brangien smiled wickedly. “She used to snatch me up every time she found me alone, treated me like I was a common servant. I do not seek pleasure in others’ unhappiness, but I might accidentally find some today.”

  Guinevere laughed, taking Brangien’s elbow. “I fully support that accident.” Brangien was already dressed, so they were ready to leave. It was odd, being the latter to wake up. In the forest, she had woken with the dawn. So many long conversations with Merlin. Lessons. Sweeping the cottage. Running from rain and sheltering in a cave.

  She could not quite remember the details of the cave. Or she did not want to. It was as t
hough the girl she had left in the forest had ceased to exist. Just like dead Guinevere. They had both of them been replaced. Perhaps the source of her memory gaps was that simple. She had to fill her mind with so many new things, the old got pushed out. And every magic had its cost. She knotted away tiny parts of herself constantly. What had Merlin pushed out when he pushed in the knowledge of knot magic?

  Trying to shake off her troubled thoughts, Guinevere let Brangien escort her down several flights of stairs to the main hall of the castle. Because the castle was shallow and had been painstakingly carved from the mountain, it had been built upward instead of outward. Everything was stone. The steps, the walls. And most of it was seamless. It was not plastered together around openings. Instead, the openings were dug from the stone.

  “Who made the castle?” Guinevere asked.

  “I do not know, my lady.”

  “Does anyone know?”

  Brangien shrugged in apology. “It is older than anyone here. Uther Pendragon discovered it. But I doubt even he knew who carved it free from the mountain.”

  They entered the great hall. Arthur was there already, standing in conversation with Sir Bors, Mordred, Sir Percival, and a few knights Guinevere did not yet know by name. A slight pang hit her: they spent more time with him than she ever would. She was his wife, after all.

  She was not his wife.

  How quickly she forgot! Playacting had muddled everything. There was a dangerous magic in pretending. Pretend long enough, and who could say what was real?

  But when Arthur looked across the room and his entire being lit up with happiness at seeing her, she forgot again. She beamed at him as he rushed to her and gave her an exaggerated, silly bow. In the space of crossing the floor, he had transformed from conquering king commanding men twice his age to…Arthur.

  “I thought we could visit the smithy tents today.” He took her hand and put it on his arm. Brangien walked several steps behind them. The knights fell in as well, orbiting Arthur. If the way they had orbited her on their journey here had been dutiful, the way they orbited Arthur was determined. Purposeful. He was not a task to them. He was everything. “I wanted to have something made for you. You can give the instructions yourself.” He winked at her. Not jewelry for his queen. Iron thread for his secret sorceress.

  It suited her better. And it would help remind her that she was not a queen. She was a protector. Protectors, like the knights around Arthur, did not take days off to celebrate trips to the market.

  Still, she smiled and waved prettily as they walked down the streets. She had just as much protecting but far more pretending to do than any knight.

  Though some horses were stabled inside Camelot’s city, they were very rarely ridden there. The streets were too steep. Brangien had explained the previous day that the horses kept here were ferried across the lake to be exercised. Most people in Camelot had no horses, or the horses they had were stabled on the plains beyond the lake.

  Guinevere could see a great flat ferry ahead of them was already packed with horses. The horses were perfectly calm, used to their transportation. Guinevere was not calm at all. She had not considered how they would get to the market.

  Her body froze. Arthur felt it. He held up a hand for his men to stop; then he leaned close, putting his mouth next to her ear.

  “Trust that I will let no harm come to you.”

  She did. She truly did. But who was Arthur to water? Arthur was a king. The wielder of Excalibur. That mattered nothing to the lake. It was dark and deep, cold and eternal. Someday it might dry up, but the water would flow elsewhere. It could not be unmade.

  And they were fragile, breakable, one choking breath away from death.

  She stumbled numbly forward, Arthur leading her. When they got to the edge of Camelot, the lake gnawing at the shore, she could go no farther. Arthur scooped her up into his arms, laughing brightly to cover the necessity of his actions. He was cloaking it in jest.

  “My queen is so light, I could swim her across the lake myself!”

  His men laughed as well. A hand was on her back. Brangien. Guinevere buried her face in Arthur’s chest. He talked and joked with his men as though carrying his queen onto a ferry was a perfectly normal action for a king to take. And because Arthur acted as though it were normal, it became normal.

  Guinevere stayed curled against him; she was trembling, hiding herself from the water. She felt it in the sway of the raft, heard it in the hungry slapping of the water against the wood. Arthur directed the ferryman to cut to the side of the lake, shortening their journey and meeting up with the horses instead of steering directly to the market. “I would like to ride in,” he explained.

  He did not put her down until they were on dry land again. Brangien stepped in front of her, blocking everyone’s view and pretending to fix one of Guinevere’s braids. “Take your time,” she whispered. “Wait until you can breathe again. Wait until you can smile.” She held Guinevere’s eyes. And soon, Guinevere could breathe. Soon, she could smile.

  “Thank you,” she whispered. Brangien squeezed her hand, then stayed with Guinevere while the horses were made ready. Brangien’s touch felt like dusk or dawn—something was nearly in view, but Guinevere could not tell whether Brangien would be illuminated or hidden completely given enough time.

  “I think,” Guinevere said, making her voice as light and breezy as the summer day around them, “I have found my new preferred form of transportation. I will never walk again. Nor shall I ride horses. I want to be carried everywhere by a king.”

  The men laughed.

  “The queen has expensive tastes,” Mordred said. “Imagine how many kings we will have to find to take turns so my poor uncle king can rest on occasion.”

  “I am up to the challenge.” Arthur picked Guinevere up by the waist and spun her around. She laughed at the surprise, aware of how they were being watched. If Arthur pretended to adore her enough to want to hold her all the way across the lake, she would make certain everyone knew the feeling was reciprocated.

  He set her on a horse. She settled herself, but had a moment of disappointment when he mounted his own horse instead of riding behind her as he had on their wedding night.

  Brangien directed her horse to Guinevere’s side. Arthur was on her other. Around them, Arthur’s most trusted knights escorted them along the wide, curving shore of the lake. Guinevere would have preferred more distance from the water, but she hoped that for the return trip Arthur could think of an excuse to break away and take the tunnel instead of another wretched ferry.

  Her thoughts were overtaken by the market ahead of them. Already it was bigger than any village they had passed on their journey here. It was acres. Far more people were there than Camelot could ever hold.

  “They come from all around for the markets,” Arthur said. “On market mornings, I send men to the roads and make certain passage is safe. Everyone who wants to buy, sell, or trade is welcome.”

  “For a fee,” Mordred added.

  Arthur smiled. “For a fee. I have to pay the men who guard it, the ones who make the roads safe. But a safe market is a prosperous market.”

  “Are all markets like this?” Guinevere asked Brangien as Arthur and Mordred discussed something to do with a border.

  “Have you never been to market before?”

  Guinevere flinched. Her voice had been filled with wonder. She had spoken like a wild thing from the forest, not like a Guinevere. She covered with a lie that would give her excuses for future mistakes as well. “I was never allowed. My father did not think it appropriate. I rarely left our home at all, and then I was in the convent.”

  “Well, you have started with the best. There are no markets in the world like Camelot’s market. Our king has seen to that. He speaks of the safe roads as though it is a simple task. I assure you it is not. He has fought these last three years to crea
te this kind of far-reaching safety.”

  It was no hard thing to pretend to be delighted with and proud of Arthur. Who could not be proud of such a man? Of such a king? Her fears of losing herself in the pretense were unfounded. She was allowed to think the best of him.

  They rode up to the edge of the market. Guinevere searched the borders, but saw nothing menacing. Brightly colored strips of cloth were raised on poles, like flags. Some had images painted on them, advertising where certain wares could be found. Music and laughter and the general chatter of people in a celebratory mood surrounded them.

  Arthur helped her dismount. “Go and explore. I will meet you at noon to visit the smithies.”

  “But what about you?” She scanned the crowds nervously. “How can I protect you if we are not together?”

  Again, he looked surprised. “Oh. Is there…a knot? Something to connect us? I must be with my men. And I am afraid your presence would be too remarkable.”

  Guinevere plucked out three of her hairs. Arthur leaned close as though whispering something to her while she knotted them around his wrist. His breath was warm and pleasant against her ear, the prickling sensation on her scalp connecting her to the hairs almost unnoticeable in comparison.

  “Done,” she said, though she had lingered a bit longer on the knots than necessary.

  Arthur squeezed her arm, then turned back to his men. A few more, wearing the dust of many miles, had joined them. Their faces did not hold the happy ease of a market day. They held the weight and strain of news.

  Guinevere wanted to hear what it was. But Arthur had said this was not a place for a queen. If any of it was a threat from magic, Arthur would tell her. If it was matters of men, Guinevere could not help. She had connected them for the time being. If something magical menaced Arthur today, she would feel it.