Lancelot’s smile faded and something closed in her face. Lancelot was never dishonest, but there was a hint of evasiveness in the way she changed the subject. “We should focus. What are we looking for in the trees?”
Guinevere pulled her horse to an abrupt stop, dread and an odd sense of triumph warring in her breast as she looked at what should have been an orderly line of trees and found a riot of enormous, twisted oaks, draped with vines that rustled and reached in the dead, windless air. “That,” she whispered.
* * *
“We should wait for the king.” Lancelot eyed the trees warily, sword drawn and held ready. Guinevere did not know whether Lancelot could feel it the way she could—the way the air felt like a breath being held, the sense that if she whipped around fast enough, she would catch the trees moving—but it was clear Lancelot could feel the threat.
They had left their horses outside the forest with Brangien while Sir Tristan dashed madly for Camelot and Arthur.
“I came back to help Arthur in the fight against the Dark Queen. This is that fight.” Guinevere crouched, resting a hand against the dirt beneath them. Her fingers dug in. The soil was hard and unbroken, and it compacted beneath her fingernails. A worm wriggled by and brushed her skin.
Not a worm.
Guinevere pressed her searching fingers against a root snaking through the soil—years of growth in mere seconds. At this rate, the forest would overtake the farmland, destroy their crops, and ruin their harvest within days. Maybe even less. If she had not been riding here, who could say how long it would have taken word to reach Camelot?
And the trees could destroy more than just fields. She had left the horses outside of the forest for a reason. She could still hear the screams of Mordred’s horse as the roots dragged it beneath the soil of the Dark Queen’s meadow.
The screams of the men, too. Though that had been her own work, which made it far worse to remember.
“She is here.” Guinevere pulled her hand free of the soil and stood, hoping she had not given herself away. She stared into the depths of the trees, pierced by only the sharpest shafts of light, going on for what could be half a league or two dozen. The growth was so thick it was impossible to tell.
“The Dark Queen is here?”
Guinevere shook her head. She could not know for sure. “Her magic is.” She tore her eyes from the impenetrable doom of the forest, resisting the impulse to push in as far and deep as she could. To find that heart of chaos, that heart that her own blood had given shape to.
“Come on.” Guinevere turned toward their horses. Lancelot followed. There was no sense of relief as they emerged from the tree line.
Brangien stood, a few body-lengths away, her eyes wide. When they had entered mere minutes ago, she had been at least twice as far from the edge of the trees.
“Did you move?” Guinevere shouted. Brangien shook her head.
Guinevere wasted no time. She reached into the pouch on her belt and pulled out a coiled line of iron thread. It was heavy and cold in her hand, unpleasant to the touch. She could bind the trees, but they were individual trees. She would have to go down the entire line, and it stretched on and on. The leaves rustled. The branches and trunks groaned.
It had to be iron, though. She would not try to influence the trees directly again. She would bear the scars of their indifference to her demands for the rest of her days.
But there simply was not enough time to bind iron knots to each tree. If she was going to bind something, it would have to be—
“The soil,” she said to herself, triumphant. She could not stop every tree from moving, but she could stop what they were moving through. She dropped to her knees and clawed at the earth, dredging up the dark loam beneath the fallen leaves and small rocks of the topsoil. Brangien, braving the proximity to the trees, joined her as Lancelot stood guard, sword at the ready.
“How deep?” Brangien asked.
“A few more inches. There, that should be good.” Guinevere unspooled the thread, tying it in a complex knot of binding. It was not unlike the knots she had attached to every exterior of the castle. Nothing fueled by magic could pass those barriers. Her idea now was that by plunging the iron knot into the soil, it would infect the rest of the soil, making it inhospitable to magic.
That was the hope. She had never tried it before. Pulling out her iron dagger, an impossibly low note hurting her ears and setting her teeth on edge as always when she handled it, she cut her bottom lip.
Lancelot let out a hiss of anger. “Let me do it!”
“It has to be my blood.” Guinevere pressed the elaborate rings of the iron knot to her lip, whispering her intent, binding it to the iron through the iron in her blood. Then she pushed the knot into the earth and leaned over it, letting the blood from her lip drip down into the hole, watering the seed of her anti-magic and hoping it would spread.
Brangien held out a handkerchief and Guinevere took it, holding it to her lip and standing. She could feel the dirt beneath her fingernails, but she could not feel the magic she had performed. Iron took all and gave nothing back. It was an ending. Poison to the natural magic and chaos of the fairy realm, and poison to the Dark Queen.
The trees shuddered, dropping leaves. There was a creaking and groaning noise, as though a terrible wind raced through the woods, threatening to uproot them. But there was no wind. Their branches strained, clawing the sky, and then stopped.
“Is it over? Did we win?” Brangien eyed the trees dubiously. They were no longer advancing, but they were still there.
Guinevere dabbed at her lip, frowning. “We bought time to consider the problem.”
“Then can we please move farther away?” Brangien shuddered as she turned her back on the trees and stalked toward the horses. Guinevere did not join her.
“What are you thinking?” Lancelot asked.
“I am thinking about how much land we would have lost if we had not caught this. And wondering how much land we did lose. I am not familiar with this area. For all we know, yesterday it was rolling fields as far as the eye could see.”
“I am thinking I should also bring an ax with me on our rides, not just a sword.”
Guinevere laughed, reopening the cut on her lip. She pressed the handkerchief to it again. “I wonder how far the binding spread. I connected it to the soil, but what is the reach?” She gazed up and down the line of trees. “We should explore.”
“We are not going back in there.”
“The perimeter. Not the woods themselves.” Though Guinevere had to admit she wanted to do that, too. Iron dagger in hand, stalking the queen that threatened her king. Stalking the queen who had taken Mordred from them, who would take everything if she could.