by Ryan Graudin
Elaine is with him this time, her frail frame swallowed in a coat of blinding white fur. Her skin is almost as pale, set off only by the sleek dark of her hair and eyes. The only spot of color on her is the bright scarlet swathe of her lipstick.
The doorman offers to take her coat, but Elaine shakes her head, shrugging the fur even farther over her bony shoulders.
“My wife has a chill,” Julian says, guiding his wife into the Orangery with a wide sweep of his arm. “She’ll keep it on, as long as Her Highness approves.”
I frown, thinking of the tightness of his knuckles in that photo, the bruises I imagined. I wonder how deep they go under those layers of fur. Elaine’s dewy eyes are wide, almost skittish as they take in the room. Something like fear passes behind them, quivering under her thin red smile as she greets the princess.
It will all be over soon, I want to tell her. You’ll never have to see this monster again.
“This is your dinner,” Anabelle says in her sweetest voice. “Can I get you anything to drink? A Pimm’s Cup perhaps? I heard it was your favorite during your Oxford days.”
“Did you?” Julian’s eyebrows fly up. “That was ages ago. . . . The stories of your past have a way of catching up with you, don’t they?”
“He doesn’t drink anymore.” The prim and prick of Elaine’s voice suddenly reminds me of why I disliked her so much on the yacht. “He needs a clear head for his job.”
“Prudent.” Anabelle’s face stays ice. “I suppose if there’s anything these past few months have taught us it’s that our government’s leaders must be ready for anything.”
Elaine Forsythe nods. “It’s a dangerous world. I’m just glad men like Julian are taking a stand.”
“Someone must,” Richard’s mother joins the conversation. “Lord Winfred is just as blinded by these creatures as Richard and Anabelle once were. Thank goodness your motion of no confidence passed, Mr. Forsythe. With you as prime minister we can finally do something.”
“I’m not prime minister yet, Your Majesty,” Julian reminds her.
“But you will be. After the election tomorrow,” Queen Cecilia says without a doubt. “And once you are we’ll take more extreme actions to protect our city and find my son.”
Anabelle clears her throat. “The first course should be arriving shortly. I think you should enjoy it, Mr. Forsythe. Oysters fresh from Whitstable, where you grew up.”
“Ah! How thoughtful.” Julian Forsythe’s smile is stunted as he leads Elaine to the table. Her coat blends in with the white of the back wall, the crisp blank of the tablecloth. If it weren’t for the color in her hair and lips, she’d disappear altogether.
Dinner begins. Attendants bring out silver platters, trailing mouthwatering scents as they make their way around the table. I stand in my corner, still as death, watching Julian Forsythe. That wilted grin stays on his face while he wields his utensils as delicately as a calligrapher’s pen. A silver goblet of water gleams by his right hand—shimmering full of the drugs we need him to take. Every muscle in my body keeps winding tight as I wait for him to take a sip.
He doesn’t drink.
Anabelle watches the glass too. By the second course her smile is shorter, fading.
When the third course arrives Anabelle’s smile vanishes altogether. From where I stand I see her hands wringing under the table. Knuckles knotting into knuckles.
I move to Kieran’s corner, dodging trays of stuffed wild mushrooms and glazed Cornish game hens. The Ad-hene’s expression is brooding, his signature stone stare taking everything in: the queue of diners, the muted flower arrangements, the china plates full of extravagant food.
I’m so close to him our arms are nearly touching. The prickle hasn’t returned. Not since I shouted it away in those tunnels. Banished it like a demon.
“What do we do now?” I ask.
“Wait until the moment is right,” he says this without looking away. I follow his stare.
Anabelle sits close. Even from such a short distance away I have trouble picking out any flaws. Her perfect summer-gold hair, her skin soft under the light of the table’s candelabras. The dress she’s wearing tonight is silvery; it glows under the candlelight like the Ad-hene’s scars.
I look back at Kieran, see the princess’s form in miniature, shining through the iron of his eyes.
“Do you think she really loved me?” His question is quiet, but it hangs heavy. I try to make sense of it. Why he’s asking. Why it matters. Why he speaks in past tense, as if the end has already been written.
I look at the princess again. From this angle I cannot see her twisting hands. Just as I can’t see any sign of the agony which swept over her this afternoon. The heel-crushed heart which colored her words, fed her magic.
“I know you really hurt her,” I answer, thinking of the paint flake storm.
“I’m sorry.” Kieran’s voice is as cracked as Kensington’s ceilings. He’s still looking at Anabelle as if she’s the only soul in the room. “Know that I’m sorry.”
The chandeliers’ light cuts out. The Orangery becomes an archipelago of candlelit faces. Garden torches glare against the window panes, so the whole wall looks as if it’s on fire. Gasps rise from the table, swelling louder with every second the dark stays.
“It’s them! They’ve come back for you, Your Highness!” Julian Forsythe rises from his chair, a jerking motion which sends his goblet tumbling. A harsh light blooms from his hand. The sight of it fills me with sick.
“We have to do something!” I reach out for Kieran’s arm. But where I expect his solid, steady build, I find only empty space.
Kieran is gone. And so is his veiling spell.
Queen Titania—in all her stubborn pride—was right.
I never should have trusted the Ad-hene.
This revelation burns through me along with stares and darkness. Every burnished face at the table is tilted in my direction—their expressions slowly melting into horror. Elaine Forsythe lets out a terrible whimper.
Her husband moves in a flash. Julian Forsythe’s hand rises, a fist. I see his tattoo clearly: a ring of runes inked around the veins of his wrist. Lit blue by the glow between his knuckles. Not a spell like I thought, but a stun gun.
He’s coming for me, with the same tiger lunge Mordred performed in dream after dream.
The force which rushes through me as soon as Julian’s fist meets my skin feels almost like magic. It’s the stab of a hundred wasp stings all across my body, freezing my muscles, binding me with electricity. All of me collapses on the marble floor, deadweight.
The stun gun charge is gone, but I still cannot move. All I can do is stare, helpless, watching everything unfold like a dream before me. Julian Forsythe stepping away. Queen Cecilia’s beetroot-flushed cheeks: all shock. Anabelle’s expression as frozen as my muscles. And then Eric’s face: furious and twisted like some cornered wildcat as he bends over me. Hauls me to my feet.
On the other side of the room Julian barks orders. “Check for others. She’s not working alone.”
I want to speak, I want to scream out the truth to all of those wax-figure diners. How the real threat is standing in front of them, cloaked in all the handsome manners of an Oxford graduate. But my words are trapped inside, caught in the jellyfish stun of Julian’s knuckles.
My eyes catch Anabelle’s, but the ice of her magic I felt this afternoon has only grown. The princess is sheathed in it now. Controlled, yet impenetrable.
She watches Eric drag me away without a word.
The garden path is all flicker and fire, shadows dancing over hedges and gravel. Everything feels unsteady in the blackout’s fresh dark, as if the whole world has tilted on its side. My muscles begin to throb as Eric pulls me down the Orangery’s front steps. I stay deadweight anyway, hoping he won’t notice and stun me again. I let my feet drag: two long, sliding protests in the path’s gravel. My mind churns frantically through plans of escape.
Jensen and other Protection Command o
fficers join Eric’s side, talking into radios and shining electric lights into the dark between the hedges. A wind rushes through the garden: winter’s breath tearing at the evergreens. So strong, so cold, that it snuffs many of the pathway’s torches. Eric stops at the sudden dark. I wait for him to drop me and rearm his stun gun, but he keeps still.
After several seconds I realize the other officers are just as motionless. The wind is gone and the remaining torches don’t flicker. Eric gapes over me like an opera singer mid-note, his eyes glazed. The world is caught in a single moment—bound by some strangely wrought spell.
This magic hasn’t just frozen people. There are no sounds. No motion. Nothing. Time has been suspended. There’s only this moment, reaming through itself over and over with no signs of stopping.
The Orangery doors swing open. Julian Forsythe appears in its gap, his wife on his arm. They walk together—their steps deafening through the gravel. Elaine’s stilettos stamp through the mark my heels left. I hang from Eric’s frozen arms like a criminal caught in the stocks, awaiting my final sentence.
Julian stops only a few steps away. His arm stays tight around his wife’s coat, digging into that white fur.
“I know who you are, Mordred.” I shout his name like a challenge. “So let’s drop the subtleties and—”
“Mordred?” Elaine Forsythe’s eyes startle, go wide. She looks her husband up and down. “Now that’s a name I haven’t heard in a long, long time.”
A smile curls up onto those crimson lips, coy as a cat’s tail. She goes on, “Do you know I’d nearly forgotten about him? It’s hard to remember faces when you spend so many years in the dark.”
Her smile keeps rising and I feel my stomach falling. Swirling into itself like water down a drain.
I was wrong.
Elaine’s arm slides out of Julian’s grip. Her fingers start drawing back her coat, exposing the snowy skin of her breastbone. Mink fur falls away, slides down her arms. Her dress is all black, melting like silk into the night, covering her arms in long lace sleeves.
No. I squint closer through frozen firelight. Not lace. Not even sleeves. The entirety of her arms is covered in ink: thousands upon thousands of tiny rune tattoos, so close and cramped together that her skin is more dark than white. Novels of spells and power etched into her very flesh.
The markings of a sorceress.
She turns and I see how the dress dips down her back in a luxurious V. The runes are there too, so small and complicated even the pure skin between them looks like a foreign language.
“Be a dear and hold my coat for me?” She looks at Julian Forsythe, her voice all bright. “And would you go inside the Orangery and make sure everything is in order? The faagailagh and I need to have a little chat.”
Julian doesn’t hesitate. He takes the armfuls of fur and walks back the way he came, into the Orangery. He leaves the door open and I see Anabelle seated at the table, her gaze suspended on the garden path, seeing nothing as this sorceress from another age faces me in the dark.
“The runes on his wrist . . . ,” I think aloud. “You put those there. You’re using spells to control him.”
“Catching on, are we?” She twists her white swan neck until the joints pop—a sound like die being cast. Her face turns in the preserved light and I see lines spidering onto the skin around her eyes. Growing in front of me.
I hang limp in Eric’s arms, mind spinning. “Who are you?”
The sorceress doesn’t answer; she’s noticed the web of wrinkles too. Her hand dips into the folds of her dress, produces a sharp, ebony quill. She places the fanged tip at the end of her wrist—where the skin is still sheet white—and starts to carve. Blood and pigment swirl down her palm, together black as she incants old, old words. With every syllable, every deeper dig of the quill the age which appeared so quickly on her skin vanishes.
“Feeling your years?” I ask when she puts back the loaded quill.
“Routine maintenance. Not all immortality can be sustained as effortlessly as the Fae’s. Runecraft, unfortunately, cannot be looped. Spells fade and must be rewritten. It’s kept me busy all these years.” She looks down at the hundreds of tiny symbols on her arms. “It seems I’m finally running out of room. I’ll have to find myself a new skin. A shame. This body has seen so much.”
But who is this body? What did I miss?
I try my question again, in a different form. “Runecraft was never common in Camelot. Where did you learn it?”
The sorceress doesn’t ignore me this time. The dew vanishes from her dark eyes—become a stare which twists into me like a maelstrom. “You should know, Lady Emrys. You were one of those who sent me across the sea.”
Her words hiss and spit. A memory settles in, drifts into the cracks of my mind like stray ashfall. It was one of my first shifts as a Frithemaeg Guard. The day I followed King Arthur and a train of his knights down to the sea—where the boat waited. His sister rode close to me: a sallow-faced girl with limbs like twigs. Never saying a word while Arthur greeted her betrothed with a handshake and a formal treatise. It was the sister’s shoulders which gave her away. They were rigid as grave markers as she watched the sails of the longboat hoist high, prepare to steal her to the shores of Normandy. To the castle of a lord more than twice her age.
I remember, even then, feeling sorry for her. This slip of a girl, being sacrificed to keep the peace. Married off to a foreign warlord. Never to be seen again. I’d always thought ill of Arthur for it.
“You’re Arthur’s sister. Morgaine le Fay.” The whisper hardly leaves me before I remember Guinevere’s words, the ones which made the princess shudder and shrink behind my back: Sister of a king. Across the sea and back again. Even sisters fail us in the end.
Guinevere hadn’t been talking about Anabelle at all. She was fighting the silencing spell, trying to tell us about Morgaine.
The sorceress’s lips curl back at the sound of the Pendragon’s name. Red as fresh hurt. “Half sister technically. But no one ever seems to remember that. I was the oldest of King Uther’s children. My blood was the purest, the most royal. Arthur was the bastard son of a scullery maid, and still he was favored for the throne.
“We grew up together in my father’s palace. We shared everything and we were close in age, yet we were as different as the sun and moon. Everyone saw it. Even Merlin, our magic tutor. He taught us together at first. Small things like hemming gowns without a stitch and mixing healing poultices. Then he taught us how to channel our emotions and work larger spells. I was the stronger one, I always was. But as our lessons progressed Merlin started favoring Arthur. The sorcerer told me I was not ready—even though I was better at magic than my half brother. I was too angry, he said. I had too much darkness in me.” Morgaine’s eyes harden like the torches’ enchanted light. “But my half brother—a weakling boy who slept by ten lanterns because he was scared of the dark—Merlin found a way to thread magic into his very blood. Arthur became powerful enough to move mountains and I was stuck with tricks any hedge-witch could muster for a few copper pieces.
“Merlin refused to continue my magical education, so I taught myself. My father died and Arthur, the bastard prince, was crowned king. He sat on the throne which was rightfully mine and I hated him for it. My hate grew stronger and my magic did too. Strong enough to fight my half brother and become queen. But Merlin discovered my research before I could take the throne and warned my brother of what was to come. Arthur would not believe it at first, but when he came to my chambers to confront me, I fought him. I’d always thought my brother a weakling, but whatever powers Merlin gave him were stronger. Arthur snapped my staff, burned my grimoires, and banished me from the kingdom in secret. He was too kindhearted even to subject me to public shame. He pretended to marry me off, for my dignity. I was shipped to a land of tattooed savages, exiled from the kingdom I should have ruled.
“But that hardly stopped me.” Morgaine looks down the length of her bare arms—storied and spelled. �
��In the land of savages I became a savage. I learned their magic, carved their runes into my skin. Each symbol means something different: life, power, strength, control. There are hundreds, thousands of spells which can be written out, in skin or on walls, unleashed at just the moment I choose.
“When I had learned all I could, I returned to Camelot. But Arthur’s blood magic was too strong for me to face outright, even with my runecraft. So I watched from the shadows. I watched as Arthur fell in love with a Fae. I watched knights and peasants alike praise his name. I watched him sit on my throne, wear my crown. I watched all this and I waited for the perfect moment to take back the kingdom.”
“And then you destroyed everything,” I say, trying to keep up with all the puzzle pieces which are now click, click, clicking into place. Too many to count. “It wasn’t Mordred at all. You were controlling him with the runes, the same way you’ve been controlling Julian.”
“Is that who they credit for Pendragon’s doom?” One of the sorceress’s raven eyebrows lifts high. “Mordred was a pawn. I needed his armies to assure my victory.”
“And Guinevere?”
“Ah yes. The other faagailagh. Key to my brother’s golden heart.” Disgust curdles her words. “Merlin taught us that emotions were the key to our magic’s strength. Arthur always did draw from love. A vulnerable, feeble emotion—one which breaks. It didn’t take long for me to realize that Arthur’s magic and heart were tied up in Guinevere. She was the crack in his armor. His weakness. And she herself was weak, undone by a handsome knight and one of my love spells. As soon as Arthur learned that his dear bride had ridden off with Lancelot, his magic faltered, and I struck.
“I stood on the hill and watched it all turn to ruin. But it wasn’t enough. I wanted Arthur to see my face before he died. I wanted him to know I was taking back my kingdom.”
“So you killed him? After Mordred stabbed him?” After I’d left, flown back to Mab’s court in a flurry of anger and fear.
“I wanted to watch him suffer, but I waited too long. The Faery queen came like Judgment Day.” A sigh leaves her. Almost dream-like. “All white and fury. So much power. I’d studied Arthur’s magic. I knew his weakness. But I had not prepared for a Faery of Queen Mab’s caliber. My runecraft was no match. The Faery queen threw me into the Labyrinth’s darkness, thought she had taken care of the problem. Much the same way my half brother did. Again I found myself robbed of a crown, stripped of freedom.
