by Lucy Weston
Power fills me. Glorious, blood-heating power unlike any I have ever known save at the peak of physical pleasure when the world falls away and the spirit soars free. Far from feeling the exertion of my efforts, I am renewed and reborn in a way I could not have imagined possible. Eagerly, I look for more prey.
They come floating out of the sky, hesitating as though they are able to sense the deaths of their kind yet not quite believing what is happening. The light swells within me. Without hesitation, I strike again … and again, twice more in quick succession. I am in the lists, on the battlefield, whirling, turning in all directions to confront my enemies, who fall before me, chaff on the wind.
Dimly, I am aware of my counselors, huddled in the shadows under the broad-branched trees where they are illuminated again and again by the bursts of dazzling light that come from me. Their white, strained faces contorted with shock put me in mind of the Greek theater masks portraying tragedy and comedy, the twin aspects of life between which we reel. Dee, Cecil, Walsingham … they are my chorus urging me on yet at the same time warning of disaster when pride outstrips reason.
With each death, my strength grows. I feed on those I kill, gaining in power by the moment. Growing, too, in hunger. My appetite is ravenous; I am insatiable. I will kill and kill and kill without ceasing until—
“Stop!”
For an instant, I falter. The vampire I am about to kill shoots into the sky, escaping me. Suddenly, all is stillness.
Mordred walks out of the night onto the killing ground where I stand, the greater blackness of his cloak flaring around him. He is pale as moonlight and as bright. His presence rolls over me, a wave from the deepest sea of eternity.
“What in the name of all creation are you doing?” he demands.
Face-to-face with him, the yearning I have come to know all too well rises in me, an elation that fills my spirit and body alike, banishing all sorrow, all doubt, all mortal weakness. So powerful is it that I can almost believe that Mordred must be right, we are fated to be together. Before such a treacherous notion can take greater hold of me, I must act.
With no thought but to strike him down, I try to raise my arm, only to find that the weight of it is suddenly too much for me. I let it sag instead.
“I am defending my people!”
He comes closer still. I see again how beautiful he is. Longing for him threatens to consume me. I resist with all my strength.
“No, you are not!” he exclaims. “If you want to defend them, you will seek peace with me. Instead, you declare war. Are you mad?”
Truth be told, I wonder at times at my own sanity, dark times when the scaffold looms ever present in my thoughts and I cannot rest for the terror it provokes in me. But I am not in the grip of any such dread now. I am reborn as Morgaine’s heir; I have her power. I need fear nothing, not even Mordred.
“There can be no peace between us!” The very thought terrifies me, reminding me as it does of my weakness concerning him. “Your kind wantonly butchers mine and you imagine—what? That I will surrender to you?”
A flicker of regret crosses his face, enough to tell me all.
“You did think that!” I crow, unable to contain my glee that he could be so deluded. “You thought to beat me. Let me tell you, that will never happen! From the time of my birth, enemies have sought to destroy me. One by one, they have failed, and so, by God, will you!”
He looks away, long enough for me to wonder what he sees in his mind’s eye, what landscape so engages him.
At last he turns back to me. “I thought to give you a lesson. A handful dead, sacrificed so that many more can live and this realm be safe for all time. But you refuse to learn. You go forward blindly, heedless of what damage you do.”
He raises his hands and I brace, thinking he means to attack me. But a moment later, he lets them drop as though in resignation.
“Heed me, Elizabeth. Morgaine had to kill hundreds of my kind … hundreds … before she had enough power to come against me, and even then she failed. I survived, she did not. Have you thought of that? Even more, have you given an instant’s thought to what happened to this realm afterward? Or do you imagine that men sit about their fires of a winter night and reminisce about the golden age that followed Arthur?”
“Darkness fell over this kingdom because you killed Arthur, not because of what Morgaine did to stop you.”
“Arthur was a man, nothing more. Had I not killed him, he might have lived a few more years, but then he would have died, as every mortal man must do. He would have been cut down by an enemy or an injury or by any of the ailments that strike without warning.”
Mordred’s audacity threatens to rob me of breath. It is all I can do to respond. “You cannot excuse what you did on the grounds that he would have died anyway! He was your father! It is for God to say when that happens, not you.”
“Then God has been oddly silent on the matter! Darkness was poised to sweep over England long before I ever made the bargain that I did. And it is poised to do so again. Had Morgaine made the right choice and allied with me, all the centuries of suffering that followed could have been avoided. Will you equal her for wanton foolishness?”
What twisted reason is this? Does he truly think to convince me that he did all for England’s sake?
“It is not I who is mad, but you! Your kind feed on mine!”
“So do yours!”
At my look of shocked disbelief, he flings out an arm. “Look around you, Elizabeth,” he commands. “You and your nobility take the lion’s share of everything this realm possesses and leave mere bones for the rest. A single failure of crops and there is starvation. A chill winter and the frozen dead stack up like cordwood, while summer fevers sweep away legions too weak to fight them off while you sit in comfort in your palaces.”
“That is how God has ordered the world,” I insist. “It is not for us to question.” I know what I say to be true, yet the words ring hollow all the same.
“How very convenient. But you take far more than my kind ever have. We need only feed in moderation, rarely causing death. Being fed upon is how more of us are made, or did you not know that?”
I did not, nor do I wish to. There is nothing about him that concerns me. Nothing. He is the very Devil with his silver tongue. Feed on my own people. What a perverse notion. I serve my people. My life is theirs. There is nothing I would not do for them—
“There would have been no deaths last night,” he says, “but for my holding my own kind back too long, denying them all but the smallest opportunity to feed in hope of reaching an accord with you.”
“Such restraint.” I think to mock him but my effort is a poor, limp thing. What he says strikes me to the core. Worse yet, I am all too aware that I can scarcely control my growing hunger for him. He seeks to undermine my will at every turn, and I, God help me, fear all too greatly that he can succeed.
“And as we are on the subject of moderation,” he continues, “you may wish to reconsider before you feed again with such abandon on my kind. Morgaine learned to her regret that such gorging comes at a price.”
“I did not—” Horror sweeps over me, driven by the hideous realization that what he says possesses at least a grain of truth. I have fed and ravenously, growing in power each time I killed. But those I slew were vampires, deserving of death. Indeed, all I truly did was release them from their hellish existence. To suggest any parallel between me and Mordred is—
He steps closer, so close that I feel his breath against my skin. To my heightened senses, he smells of the night wind that blows from distant places under a blaze of starlight. My mind whirls as I struggle not to reach out to him.
He bends closer to me, so close that some fragment of his power seems to leap across the short distance separating us to brush against my neck. Weakness steals over me. The thought of his power … his sensuality … his possession…
“I could kill you now,” he says with perfect calm, and yet I see again the flicker of regret in his gaze. “
More than a few will say I am mad not to do so.”
Abruptly I return to myself. My life is not my own, it belongs to my people and it is of them that I must think. “Then why don’t you? What stays your hand?”
He shrugs, and for just an instant I imagine that I see him as the man he was so long ago. A true prince for all that his father could not recognize it.
“Hope,” he says, and is gone on the wind and the night.
“If there is a God, hear me now!”
Not that I thought He would or even that He truly exists, for I had seen scant evidence of Him in all my years on the benighted earth. Even so, from the dark pit of my rage and despair, I called to Him.
“Elizabeth was anointed in Your name! She is Your responsibility. Shine the light of wisdom into her befuddled brain before another millennium of darkness smothers this realm.”
No answer came, nor had I expected any. The wind cut slits in the river mist. I slipped through them and flung myself skyward. My only thought was to put the world and all its ills behind me. For a time I drifted toward the sickle moon, hanging in the west. Mars and Jupiter shone brightly in near conjunction at the apex of the heavens. Ordinarily, I would have enjoyed the sight but my mind was in such turmoil that I took scant notice.
Something had to be done, but what? Certainly, I could kill Elizabeth before she became an even greater danger to me and my kind. But without her at my side I would be left to watch England fall to its mortal enemies—the Pope, the Spanish, and the like. Of course, I could wage my own war against them, but when it ended, I would likely find myself ruling over a kingdom of the dead carpeted in bones from Cornwall to Northumberland.
I had told Elizabeth that I still had hope, and I suppose that was true to at least some degree. But hope boils no peas, as the saying goes. I needed a plan.
Given that I have centuries of experience acquiring and holding power, I would say in all modesty that I have a mind given to scheming. Yet just then it was blank. No inspiration of any sort came to me. I was too stunned by Elizabeth’s rejection, and by the realization of how powerful she was becoming, to think clearly.
In search of clarity, I alit near the top of the spire that rose above old St. Paul’s. From that highest of all vantage points in the city, I looked out over slumbering London. To my left lay the Tower, quiet now that Elizabeth was no longer in residence. Briefly, I thought of Anne in her grave and of Morgaine, both still forces to be reckoned with. But Elizabeth commanded my attention. My gaze traced the path of the moon-silvered river to where it curled past the Palace of Whitehall.
Had she returned there yet? Sated temporarily on the essence of my kind, did she gloat over her victory? Or did she have the stomach to consider that in gorging so wantonly, she had put at risk the very life of her realm? Did she perhaps taste the bile of regret?
Hardly aware that I did so, I lifted off from the spire in the direction of the palace. As once I had called Elizabeth to me, now I felt called to her.
Before dawn, 18 January 1559
Returning upriver, I retreat into my thoughts. The events at St. Savior’s have a dreamlike quality, although perhaps they would better be likened to a nightmare. I tell myself again that I have done nothing wrong. To the contrary, it is only good and right to protect my realm from such beings. And yet—
I cannot confront my doubts any more than I can meet the eyes of my companions. Cecil, Dee, Walsingham—not a one of them looks at me directly, but I catch their anxious glances and see their tight-lipped concern.
Anger stirs in me. Walsingham aside, the other two conspired to make me what I am. Let them dare regret it now and I will have their heads on pikes adorning London Bridge.
No, I will not. My temper, ever prone to flare hotly, cools as rapidly. I have need of their wise counsel, but more than ever I also need their humanity lest I be in danger of losing my own.
More even than all that, I have the most urgent need of Robin, the touch of his hand, the sound of his voice, the simple reassurance of his presence.
Straight upon regaining the palace, I make for his chambers. Coming through the door from the private passage, I startle the servant who is keeping watch on a pallet beside the bed. At once, the man stumbles to his feet, bows hastily, and retreats into the outer room.
Robin and I are alone. My beloved lies pale and unmoving behind the velvet bed curtains. Only the steady rise and fall of his chest assures me that he breathes.
A deep sigh escapes me as I approach him. A bruise darkens his left cheek, and beneath his eyes are shadows. He murmurs something—can it be my name?—too faintly for me to be sure. I wait, breath held, for him to speak again. When he does not, I give in to irresistible temptation and, having kicked off my pattens, slip under the covers with him.
His flesh is warm even through my clothes, which still bear the night’s chill. I lay my head on his shoulder and press my lips to his throat, feeling the pulse of his life. Hunger stirs in me, and as before thoughts of Mordred come hard upon it. I sigh deeply, glad of the exhaustion that draws me away into sleep. When I open my eyes again, I can see through the parted bed curtains the room reflected in the black squares of the window-panes. For just a moment, I catch a glimpse of movement beyond, but the impression is fleeting and I am too distracted to take note of it.
If hope has caused Mordred to spare my life, assuming that he could have taken it, what does he hope for? Mere power and the triumph of his kind, as I have assumed? Or something more?
He warns of the darkness that will sweep over England again as though he himself is not its harbinger. He claims to want to prevent it but how is that possible, for surely evil cannot negate evil?
That seems a worthy problem as much for an alchemist as for a queen. Perhaps I should ask Dee. He can explain to me how evil is transmuted into good, if any such thing is possible.
If Mordred could have killed me, surely he would have done so after I slew so many of his own. What king would suffer such a threat to endure?
One with higher aspirations than his own survival?
What is wrong with me! I am here with Robin, comforted by his nearness and content to remain where I am until the break of day expels me. What claim has Mordred on my mind?
And why can I not chase him from it?
Lying beside my beloved, giving thanks to God for the continuance of his dear life, I refuse to think any further of my undead foe. There will be time enough and more for that later. After all, what was it that Mordred said? That he had held his own kind back from feeding while he tried to reach an agreement with me? If he wants my surrender that desperately, I can be assured that he will do nothing to jeopardize it, at least not yet.
I slide my fingers down Robin’s chest, feeling the thick bandage just below his heart. Dear Lord, how close I came to losing him, this cherished friend of my childhood grown to be the man I love. He deserves far better than for me to go mooning after a demon! Yet Mordred …
No! I will not think of him. In a rage at my wayward self, I sit up in the bed and press my fists against my brow, fighting to drive him out. Yet for all my effort, the sense of him grows within me. I can almost … smell him?
Smell the night and the wind as though the air all around me is charged with his power.
As though he is near.
I leap from the bed, cross the room at a run, and throw wide the windows.
A whirl of snow dislodged from the roof immediately above falls over my outstretched arms. I see only that … and a ripple of blackness moving away across the sky.
18 January 1559
I remain with Robin as long as I dare, lying sleepless beside him as late night yields to the creeping stealth of day. Only then do I slip off down the passage to my own chambers. Once there, I suffer myself to be bathed and dressed by my ladies. Kat eyes me with concern; I know she wants private speech with me but I contrive to avoid it. She disapproves of Robin and will tell me so … again. I have no patience for that at the moment.
Cecil, who finds some pretext to have a private word with me each morning, is not in evidence. His absence further jangles my already strained nerves.
The usual breakfast of cold meats, breads, and ale is laid out in my withdrawing room. I glance at it in passing but can find no appetite. I am not looking forward to the coming hours, crowded as they are with yet more celebrations of my coronation. Scarcely are morning prayers concluded despite the constant whispers and murmurs of my attending courtiers crammed into my ill-named “private” chapel than I progress to my audience chamber, where I am subjected to a performance of sonnets written in my honor, all flattering to be sure, if somewhat insipid. Yet I do my best to appear pleased. My intent is to encourage the arts in my realm both for my own glory and for the glory of Britannia, which are, after all, one and the same.
Directly afterward, I am feted in front of a tableau depicting me as Athena, the goddess of wisdom, defending England from the twin forces of ignorance and sloth. Were that all I have to worry about I would have slept better the previous night. As it is, I am grateful for the stiffness of the whalebone corset beneath my buckram-lined bodice. Both help to keep my spine ramrod straight until the performance finally ends.
I am rising to leave when I spy Robin standing toward the back of the audience chamber. My first thought is relief at seeing him up and about. Hard on it comes surprise when he does not hurry forward to greet me. It is not like him to hang back.
Nor is it like him to stand with his arms crossed over his chest, glaring at me.
With a quick swish of my skirts, I turn and leave the chamber. My ladies trail after me but not too closely. They have the sense to steer clear of my temper, as apparently Robin does not. And to think that I practically wept over that man scant hours ago.
My mood, already soured, does not improve when Cecil sidles up. Without meeting my eyes he murmurs, “A word, Majesty?”
I am resigned to speaking with him when suddenly a wave of nausea sweeps over me. I press a hand to my lips. The feeling ebbs quickly enough, but in its place comes a gnawing hollowness that makes me gasp. I have never felt any such sensation before—a combination of the most acute hunger and desperate urgency that drives me to do something, anything, to sate it.
