“She does enjoy a good wedding,” I said.
Arthur wore Excalibur as part of his uniform during the service, but took it off for the reception, which was something of a relief. All through the wedding, I could hear the sword singing, a high-pitched, dirge-like drone that was distracting.
No civilian photographers were allowed, but even so, the wedding was splashed all over creation. And of course, there were the haters who added up every last dime that the wedding had cost and wrote long screeds about what vampires the royals were, sucking up the financial lifeblood of the country.
In a way, I couldn’t really blame them. England’s economy wasn’t doing that well and it must have seemed a slap in the face for hard-working people to see so much money lavished on a ceremony that could have just as easily been performed by a justice of the peace, or whatever the British equivalent of a justice of the peace was. Never mind that the wedding was paid for by Arthur himself, using money from his personal accounts. Resentment over generational wealth in the hands of the landowners and aristocrats was simmering at a record level all over the world.
In Camelot, that resentment would soon boil over.
Chapter 8
Arthur was not himself after the wedding. It wasn’t just post-nuptial depression or grief over the deaths of his father and sister. He was struck with lethargy that went beyond mere tiredness and into exhaustion. His inability to function at even the most basic level was worrisome to those closest to him.
He’d inherited a kingdom in chaos and his inaction was making it worse. “We can’t keep covering for him,” Gawain told me grimly after seeking my confidence. He and Gareth had resorted to a number of stratagems to keep the public from learning their monarch had gone emotionally AWOL. Gareth hired a team of body doubles to make appearances here and there, but that was only a short-term solution. Even Emrys was worried when the magical medicine he prescribed did nothing to shake Arthur out of his inertia.
“For God’s sake stop hovering,” Arthur said when I tried to discuss the situation with him. “I can’t think with all of you smothering me like this.”
I repeated this outburst to Emrys, who looked alarmed. “This is not natural,” he said, “but I can’t track the magic to its source.”
I immediately thought of Morgaine, of course, but she was miles away attending Fashion Week in Paris.
But then, she pulled an airplane out of the sky from thousands of miles away, I thought. Doing whatever she’s doing to Arthur is a lot easier. Still, I wasn’t truly worried until the night I interrupted Arthur in his study, hunched in front of his laptop, playing a computer game.
He’s playing a computer game?
Arthur twitched in surprise when he saw me, and his first instinct was to click away from the screen where a beautifully rendered medieval landscape was displayed.
A tiny gold chalice rotated in the upper left-hand corner of the screen.
“What’s are you playing?” I asked. “World of Warcraft?” That was literally the only name of a computer game I could remember.
“No,” he said. “This is Grayle Kwest.”
A random dragon flew across the sky. Arthur’s finger twitched, but he managed to keep his attention focused on me.
“Grayle Kwest,” I repeated.
He looked pained. “It relaxes me,” he said, noting my dismay. “You don’t have to look so horrified.”
“I didn’t realize I was making any expression at all,” I said mildly.
“Well, you were,” he said like a sulky teenager.
This is not good, I thought. This is so, so not good.
“What’s the object of the game?” I searched my mind for the right jargon. “What are the victory conditions?”
“It’s a quest,” he said patiently. “The object is to be the first to find the Holy Grail.”
“And then what?”
He gave me a pitying look. “And then you play the game again.” His eyes darted to the screen, then back to me. “Would you like to try? You can set the game for multi-player mode.”
“Maybe another time,” I said. “Will you be coming to bed soon?”
He didn’t answer. He’d already turned back to his game. He never came to bed and in the morning I found him still in his study, heavy-eyed from fatigue and keyed up from massive doses of caffeine. The Red Box—the daily delivery of official documents and briefings he was supposed to review every morning—sat on his desk, ignored and unopened as some sort of battle sequence played out in the game. I watched over his shoulder for a moment, appalled, and then left without him ever acknowledging I’d been there.
I knew I had to do something. Arthur wasn’t the only one at Camelot who was addicted to the game. One by one, other members of Arthur’s advisory council stopped coming to meetings and attending to their duties so they could slay digital dragons and find their golden cup.
“Percival’s playing now,” Gareth reported, “and Bediver and Bors.”
I didn’t know Bediver, but I had met Lord Bors, a man who was fiercely loyal to Arthur. It was bad news that he had fallen prey to whatever this enchantment was, because he was Arthur’s chief diplomat and schedule to go to the Red Lands to negotiate a treaty with the lord of the realm. Emrys and I called a meeting of Arthur’s security team. Only two, Gareth and Gawain, showed up.
“I think it’s time we reached out to Lancelot,” Gawain said. Gareth looked at him.
“You’re probably not the one to do that,” he said, and I knew there was a story there but now was not the time for it. Emrys agreed with Gawain, as well as with Gareth, and the chore of contacting him fell to me. I asked Lady Kay to fill me in before I made the call.
“Oh, there’s no love lost between Lancelot and Gawain,” Lady Kay told me. “Gawain’s the only man who ever beat Lancelot in a fight, and the Frenchman never got over it.” She grinned, a little blood-thirstily, I thought. “But it was a brilliant boxing match.”
I’d heard a lot about Lancelot when Artie and I first started dating. He was Arthur’s best friend and from what I could tell, a soldier without parallel, who was Arthur’s proxy in the little brush-fire conflicts the kingdom was engaged in around the world. Arthur’s admiration of him, in my opinion, bordered on adulation and I often wondered if there was some kind of homoerotic attraction going on under the surface.
“He should have been here for the wedding,” Lady Kay said, which was as close to expressing her disapproval of Lancelot as she got. I had wondered about this absence too. Emrys had been Arthur’s best man, and that had caused some talk, but I had chalked the choice up to diplomacy. By tapping Emrys for the honor, Arthur had avoided provoking any ill feeling among his men.
I was curious to meet Lancelot and desperately hoping for a useful outside perspective on what was happening. Unfortunately, my first impression of Lancelot was not a good one. For one thing, he didn’t return my phone call. Or my email. Or my text. I finally got a response from someone with the email [email protected] who said that his boss was traveling and would get back to me. It took all the self-control I could muster not to rage-text back something I’d regret.
But in the meantime, I kept searching for an antidote to whatever spell had Arthur and his men so captivated. Help came from a most unexpected source.
When I’d first started designing clothes, I’d sold them on Etsy and eBay before I created an online store of my own. After that, I used both sites to pick up items like vintage buttons and unique jewelry findings. I also sourced some of my fabrics there, from tie-dyed velvet to sari silk and old kimonos. One day, just on a whim, I logged onto Etsy and typed in “spell books.” One of the hits that came up was a thin, out of print volume called A Booke of Darke Curses that purported to be a collection of directions on how to curse your enemies. The blurry shot of the table of contents electrified me. “A Spelle for Forgetting Duty,” it said. I knew it was a longshot, but I needed a longshot. I bought it immediately and paid a small fortune to have the book
shipped airmail from a shop called “Wychwood Words” in Ann Arbor. The proprietress, a woman named Viviane, freaked me out by asking me to pass along her good wishes to Emrys. When I mentioned this to him, his eyes flickered blue and black, but he told me he’d never heard of the woman, and that likely she had heard of him and simply wanted to make contact with him, the way people will sometimes try to get a celebrity’s attention on Twitter.
So of course, I asked Lady Kay who Viviane was. “You know Viviane?” she asked.
“No, I just saw her name somewhere.”
“Don’t mention her to Emrys,” she warned.
“Too late.”
“Oh dear.” Lady Kay was quiet a moment. “Would you care for a glass of sherry? I suddenly feel like having a glass of sherry.”
It’s ten o’clock in the morning, I thought. And drinking sherry is like drinking cough syrup.
“If you’re having one, I wouldn’t mind a drop.”
She busied herself pulling out glasses and a dusty bottle, which she put on a table between us. Then she put out a bowl of salted mixed nuts and some water crackers and a slab of cheese with a mother-of-pearl handled cheese slicer.
“Viviane was Emrys’ student,” she began after taking a fortifying sip of sherry. “In the old days, he used to run a magic school. A sort of real-life Hogwarts.”
She picked up a cracker and nibbled it contemplatively. “Viviane was his favorite pupil, his protégé, and finally his lover despite their age difference.”
“He’s a handsome man,” I said. “I can see the attraction.”
“He’s more than five hundred years old,” she said. “It was a considerable difference.”
“Really?”
Lady Kay shrugged. “That’s what Arthur says, and he hardly ever lies.” She took a single almond from the bowl of nuts. “He taught her everything she knows but his mistake was in teaching her everything he knew. And she eventually, she took what he had taught her and used it to trap him in a cave while she tried to take his place as palace mage.”
“That can’t have gone over well with Arthur,” I said.
“Bless your heart, this was long before Arthur was born.”
I processed that, tried to do the math, but I could feel excitement and hope stirring within me.
“Emrys was in the cave for nearly a century before he escaped, although the story changes every time it’s told, and some say his prison wasn’t a cave but the bole of an enchanted tree. It doesn’t matter, he was betrayed by love and it turned him bitter.”
“Poor Emrys,” I said, but then I was struck by another thought. “How did she end up in Ann Arbor, of all places?”
Lady Kay shrugged. “She wasn’t welcome here. The New World beckoned, and we all have to live somewhere.”
“Is she powerful?”
She shrugged again. “I’d say so. Powerful enough that Morgaine tried to kill her once.” She smiled for a moment. “That did not go well for Morgaine.”
“They’re enemies?” Better and better, I thought. Even if the book didn’t contain the spell I needed, I wondered if I could enlist this witch’s aid in breaking Morgaine’s spell. If indeed she was the one responsible. I was almost certain she was, but Emrys couldn’t confirm it.
“Be careful with Viviane,” Lady Kay warned. “She betrayed Emrys and she loved him. She won’t hesitate to throw you under the bus if it suits her needs.”
“You’d think there’d be more—” I searched for the words—“professional courtesy among witches.”
“Magic’s as addictive as any drug,” she said, looking at me significantly. “It can pull you into the darkness if you’re not careful.”
I knew she was right but desperate times require desperate measures.
The book arrived the next morning, covered with stamps and customs declarations. It looked utterly mundane when I opened it, like someone’s composition book filled with scribbles and vague sketches. There was no organization to it other than the typed table of contents, and all in all, it looked like the product of a lunatic with a spelling disorder. All those extra Es added to the ends of words (wordes) in an apparent attempt to make the writing look (looke) authentic.
But Viviane had enclosed a personal note, written on hand-made purple paper. Sometimes the best hiding place is in plain sight; sometimes the best spell is the simplest. Morgaine isn’t as clever as she thinks and that is her weakness. Good luck. V. The signature was a bold flourish of ink that was three times the size of any other letter on the page. Viviane thought a lot of herself.
I took the book into my study and locked the door. I didn’t want my lady-in-waiting or anyone else to stumble across me while I was working. For one thing, all of us who knew that the King of England was whiling away his hours slaying dragons and rescuing maidens in a virtual world were bound together by our fear that word of his “condition” would make it to the outside. If that happened, it could be disastrous. Particularly during the delicate negotiations with the Red Lands. I didn’t need anyone speculating on the reasons I might be poring over a grimoire that had formerly been in the possession of Emrys’ old lover.
The spell itself was in mirror writing, but when I held it up to a mirror, I discovered it was also written in Old French, and apparently in code. “Can you read Old French?” I texted Emrys.
“Yes,” he replied, and not a moment later, he was knocking at my locked door. “Let me in Guinevere,” he said softly. His face was calm when I opened the door, but his eyes were flickering again.
“Let me see the book.”
I handed it to him. He didn’t even need a mirror to read it. After a moment he sighed. “I think this will help us,” he said, although I suspect whoever cast the spell added a few refinements.”
“But we can reverse it?”
“Yes, but I have to warn you, there’s a penalty for using this kind of magic, even if you’re only trying to right a wrong.”
Penalty did not sound good. “It has to be done,” I said. “No matter what the cost.”
He looked at me for a long moment. “In this case, I agree with you. And I’ll try to shield you as much as I can.”
I started to protest, but then I realized I had no idea what kind of danger Emrys was talking about and no real desire to find out, so all I said was, “Thank you.”
Chapter 9
Emrys and I locked ourselves in the tower room he used as his laboratory and together we worked our way through the spell. There were many false starts where we literally saw the magic fall apart as strange smokes and odd smells emerged from the vials and flasks and retorts we were using. Toward dawn of the second day of our labors, I felt a sharp pain in my abdomen. It hurt so bad I dropped the funnel I was holding and had to grab onto the edge of a table to keep from collapsing onto the floor.
“Guinevere?”
“Hurts,” I managed to gasp, but that was an understatement. It felt like a hot curling iron was being jammed into me like a tampon. I could barely catch my breath. Emrys looked from me to the pale blue gas wafting around me. He quickly traced a spell in the air that gathered the gas into a tiny black pill.
“What?” I panted.
“We did it,” he said, and carefully put the pill into a small stainless-steel bowl. Then he turned his attention to me. By then I was pouring sweat, bleeding from every orifice, and my heart was beating so fast that I was afraid it was going to explode. Emrys put his hand on my shoulder and a blessed wave of coolness moved through my body, flooding my core with icy relief.
I breathed in great gulps of air as the pain subsided.
“Better now?”
“Yes,” I said. I looked at the pill in the bowl. “Is that the antidote?”
“I believe so,” he said. “But I fear despite my best efforts, you have paid a terrible price for this remedy.”
The coldness I felt then had nothing to do with Emrys’ magic.
“What happened?”
“This spell…it is powered by
pain. Not just physical pain but mental anguish as well.”
Just give it to me straight, I thought.
“You’ll never bear children,” he said. And then he shook his head, angry with himself. “I never saw this coming.”
Never have children, I thought. I felt a pang of terrible loss for a moment and remembered a conversation I’d once had with one of my private clients. She was a wildly successful business woman who had chosen never to marry and hadn’t regretted her choice for a single second. She was also childless by choice. “But then I hit menopause,” she told me. “And my emotions were all over the place anyway. And it suddenly hit me…I can never reverse my decision about having a child. And I panicked a bit. It was one thing for me to choose not to procreate, but having it be a physical impossibility was another thing.” As an adoptee, I had been a bit annoyed by that confession, especially since there were way too many people who still shamed women for choosing not to have kids, but I suddenly knew how she had felt.
“I’m so sorry,” Emrys said.
I wondered what the royal protocol was on adoption. If an adopted child would be considered a legitimate successor. The country was already in a crisis. The last thing anyone needed was Morgaine in charge.
“It is what it is,” I said, a phrase that had always annoyed me, much like the ubiquitous “whatever.” But it seemed appropriate to the situation.
It was easy enough to feed Artie the pill. I dropped it into a chocolate milkshake I served him in the study. His eating habits had devolved along with everything else, and he was surviving on a diet of food so junky it was distressing the palace cook. “He hasn’t eaten a vegetable in weeks,” she said to me, a worried look on her face, “except for potatoes.”
Playing With Fire Page 129
