“No, but you are a queen.” She could hear his smile. His arm around her was comfortingly heavy, her trembling almost past. “You are strong. You are brave. You are quite short.”
She laughed, poking him in the side. “That is not a character trait.”
“No? Hmm.”
She felt him drifting further away, back to sleep.
“You are Guinevere,” he murmured, and then his breathing went soft and even.
She wished with a ferocious longing that any of it were true.
It had been a long summer, and autumn was only beginning to appear with a hint of chill in the evenings and the promise of work to come. Guinevere understood things like harvests now, how much went into them, how vital they were. A good harvest was the difference between a comfortable winter and a deadly one. With a city as large as Camelot, already they were preparing. As queen, she had taken over Mordred’s role in keeping track of supplies and making certain everything was ready. And riding all over the countryside taking stock of the harvest and speaking with farmers gave her an excuse to search for evidence of the Dark Queen’s seeping reach.
Guinevere had wards set in Camelot; she would know if a threat arrived on their shores. But she wanted to know long before then. She would not be caught off guard. No one would trick her, ever again.
“Should we check the perimeter of the forest?” Lancelot asked. They had just finished with one of the farthest tracts of land. Guinevere was hot and itchy in her dress, layers of bold blue and red. She envied Brangien her simpler clothing. But Guinevere was out here as the queen, and she had to look the part. Lancelot, too, looked the part. Her armor was no longer patchwork. She wore uniform leather with metal plates over chain mail and a tunic with Arthur’s sigil on it. Guinevere missed Lancelot’s old armor, though she was glad Lancelot no longer had to wear a mask.
Brangien looked longingly over her shoulder in the direction of Camelot, but offered no complaint. Only Brangien, Lancelot, and Sir Tristan could accompany Guinevere on these trips. They alone knew that she wielded magic. If word reached anyone else, everything would be at risk.
Arthur rode with them when he could, but it was not often. Guinevere preferred it that way. Though normally she longed for more time with him, the Dark Queen was her fault. Her responsibility.
“Yes.” Guinevere guided her horse toward the dark smudge of trees waiting meekly on the edge of the tamed land. Elsewhere the forests loomed and lurked, dominating the countryside. But in Camelot’s boundaries the trees had been felled, and where not felled, tamed. They were gentler forests, there to serve man.
Guinevere’s sleeves rubbed at her wrists, where she bore thin white tracings of scars from trees that were old and hungry and angry.
“Did you sleep well?” Brangien asked, riding at her side. Her tone was so deliberately even and pleasant that Guinevere immediately knew she was fishing for information. Brangien was never pleasant without a reason. Guinevere had not slept in her own bed, and her friend and maid wanted to know about it.
Alas. As always, sleeping in Arthur’s bed had simply been sleeping. Guinevere had awoken to find herself alone. She always woke alone. Sometimes she wondered what would happen if he stayed. If, warm and muddled with sleep, he reached for her in something other than companionship. If they shared a kiss as fierce as the one Mordred had stolen the night Lancelot won her tournament.
“Is that a blush I detect?” Brangien teased.
Guinevere yanked her mind back from where it had wandered. That was the treacherous path that had led her to the fairy queen’s meadow. A path with clever smiles and eyes like the pools of green shadow beneath a tree. Mordred had not been the one to abduct her, but he had used her to hurt Arthur. And he had hurt her, too. Guinevere would not forget it. “I will let you know when there is something to blush about,” she told Brangien.
Brangien frowned at Guinevere’s curt tone, but Guinevere could not explain. “Did you dream with Isolde last night?” she asked instead, remembering her own disturbing dream and Arthur’s suggestion that her knot magic giving away her own dreams had failed.
“Yes.” This time Brangien blushed, a dreamy smile on her face.
That was not good news. It made Guinevere’s odd dream even more puzzling and worrisome. It would need to be addressed, and she hated anticipating how Brangien would take the news. So much of magic was about taking—power, control, even memories—but with Brangien and the dreams Guinevere had been able to give.
Guinevere hurried toward the trees, pulling away from her companions. It was a problem for tonight. She did not have to think about it now, not while she was out here. She wanted to reclaim the sense of peace she found in wild lands. Though Camelot was home now, she had grown up in a forest.
Once again her mind halted. Had she grown up in a forest? She had mere handfuls of memories, and if her last visit to Merlin was any indication, they were not accurate. The cottage she remembered sweeping was a ruin, uninhabited for decades. How could she have lived in a place that was unlivable?
Lancelot had caught up to her. She was subtle about it, but Guinevere’s knight never let her too far out of reach.
“How much do you remember of your childhood?” Guinevere asked.
“My childhood?”
“Your teeth.”
“My teeth?”
There had been a conversation at a market with Brangien and Mordred. They seemed confused that Guinevere did not remember losing her first teeth to make way for her second teeth. She repressed a shudder at having to once again acknowledge the fact that all children with their tiny pearls of teeth had other, bigger teeth, lurking beneath the surface, waiting to burst free. “When did you lose them?”
Lancelot had a hint of laugh in her voice. “I would imagine at the normal times? My first was before my mother—” Lancelot broke off. Her father had been killed serving Uther Pendragon, Arthur’s tyrant father. And while she had never specified how her mother had died, it had driven her to pursue vengeance and then knighthood with singular intensity. “My two front teeth I bashed out falling from a tree. It took quite a while for them to grow in. I had a lisp.”
“Were you teased?”
“Never more than once.” Lancelot smiled at the memory.
Guinevere envied her both the ability to defend herself even as a child and the memories of those events. She was hungry for a past, for some way to fill the emptiness she found when she tried to excavate her own history from memories. In the magical dream where she had connected herself to Merlin to look for him, walking back through her life, she had hit a certain point and found…nothing.
A void. Wiped clean. It did not feel clean, though. It felt like a violation, and filled her with shame. She cleared her throat and continued, wanting Lancelot to talk. To distract her. “Where did you go after you lost your parents? You have never told me much about that.”