We follow them at a distance. Kieran moves like silk and night down the hall, eyes never leaving Anabelle. The politician’s arm stays braced around the princess’s shoulder, guiding her through the building.
I keep waiting for the strike. For Julian’s blue eyes to go feral with a surge of rune magic. For him to grip the princess’s arm, use her as bait to lure us out of hiding.
But it never comes.
One phone call from Julian summons a small army of shiny black Jaguars. Red-eyed Protection Command officers swarm the lobby. Prodding charged stun guns into every available corner, hoping to root out hidden foes. Some of them even have the weapon wrapped around their knuckles like brass rings. A new design. Meant for a quick punch and jab. A serious fight.
Jensen is here. Eric too. Julian Forsythe ushers Anabelle into their arms like a parcel. Kieran watches the exchange with sharkskin eyes, letting nothing go. All of his powers are gathered, ready to break apart the lobby’s marble floor.
“We need to stay hidden.” I place my hand over his mark. He doesn’t even notice. All of his focus is poured on to the herd of men, Anabelle ringed inside them like a baby calf.
“Take the princess back to Kensington Palace,” I hear the politician saying. “Have men search my office. See if they left anything else behind. And make sure the press is given access. I want to be certain they cover this incident properly.”
Eric nods—head bobbing like a circus seal offered a bucket of fresh fish. Jensen looks less enthused, but this doesn’t stop him from sending several stun gun-wielding men upstairs.
Since when did Protection Command take orders from a member of Parliament?
But he isn’t just a mere Parliament member, is he? My eyes flicker to Julian Forsythe’s wrist. The tattoo is still there, barely visible against the stark white of his shirt cuffs. I haven’t felt any magic rolling from the mark yet, but Julian doesn’t need spells to control these men. Kieran’s right. The mortals drink his words like mead.
He’s their Beowulf. Their savior. Their monster slayer.
And he’s ready to lead them straight into battle.
My heart is not ready for Kensington. A palace of firsts. The bedroom with its frescoed ceiling of angels, where I first laid eyes on Richard, when the magic of our soul-tie first anchored itself in my chest. The garden of gravel and marigolds where my veiling spell first slipped and I couldn’t make myself bring it back. The moment Richard first became mine.
The marigolds are gone now, withered by frost and rooted out by dutiful gardeners. But the angels are still here, painted in a slant of forever-gold light. Their smiles unchanged. I stare up at them, curled tight in the elegant chair I once sat in every night and watched over Richard as he slept.
We’re locked in Richard’s old room, which Anabelle promptly took over when her brother made the move to Buckingham (“more walk-in wardrobe space” was her reason at the time). Kieran and I are still coated thick in his follee-shiu. We speak in whispers regardless, all too aware of the human security standing guard on the other side of the bedroom door.
“What now?” I keep staring at the angels, imploring the heavens. “I thought getting caught by Protection Command was what we were trying to avoid.”
“We’re exactly where we want to be,” Anabelle assures me. She’s pacing: back and forth, back and forth. Over the Persian rug I used to study during the hours Richard slept. “Now that we know Julian is . . . someone else . . . the only way we’re going to find Richard and expose Julian is if we take him by surprise. He believed my story. He doesn’t see me as a threat.”
“That’s because you aren’t.” My spine goes rigid in the chair as I sit up to look at her. “That was an awfully big gamble you took in the office! If he’d discovered you were lying, he could have killed you!”
“If I hadn’t thrown him off the trail, we would all be just as dead,” Anabelle answers, “or locked up in a dungeon somewhere. Or wherever it is ex-Camelot sorcerers stuff their prisoners.”
“Julian’s just as good as made you a prisoner. Have you seen the guards outside your door?” I nod to the white-paneled wood. “I don’t think they’re going to be letting you out of Kensington by yourself any time soon.”
“Then it’s a good thing I plan on staying.” The princess is going in circles. Stamping over and over on the same visages of woven horseback warriors in her anxious track. “Julian may be a sorcerer, but he’s a politician too. There aren’t many politicians who would turn down a personal invitation to dine at a royal residence. Especially if it’s a banquet held in their honor for rescuing the princess from the hands of some villainous Fae. It’s good press for him.”
“You want to invite Julian Forsythe to a dinner party? This evening?” I can barely believe what I’m saying. “Are you mad? What are you planning on doing? Feeding him some bad eggs? This is a sorcerer, Belle! Not some schoolgirl frenemy.”
Anabelle pauses and taps her fingers together. “Eggs isn’t a terrible idea. Though I was thinking more along the lines of spiking his drink.”
“You don’t want to use magic at all. You mean to trick him.” Kieran shifts. He’s crouched in the window ledge like a cat, an equal distance between the princess, myself and the night outside.
I’m trying my best not to notice him—here in this room where Richard and I shared so many intimate moments. But Kieran’s veiling spell is a stiff cocktail—oozing into my every pore, blurring even those memories.
“You want to drug him?” I ask. “To what end? As soon as he wakes up we’ll be outmatched again.”
“We won’t be there when he wakes up. You said Titania won’t aid us without proof. What better proof than the sorcerer himself? I’ll give him a heavy dose; you and Kieran can take him to Titania before he even knows what hit him. Once the Faery queen realizes we’re right, she’ll question him. Find Richard.”
It’s not a terrible plan, but it’s not foolproof either. I run it through my head like a marathon show, with dozens of alternate scenarios. Most of them don’t end well.
“How are you going to explain his disappearance? To the staff? His wife?”
“You can teach me memory alteration,” she says, as if stealing someone’s memories and replacing them is the simplest thing in the world. For her, it probably will be. “I’ll make them think he was called away to an emergency meeting. That the abduction happened outside the palace grounds.”
“And what about the press? They’ll make it look like a silencing attempt. Paint Forsythe as a martyr.”
“He won’t go missing for long. As soon as you rescue Richard we can set the record straight. Expose Julian for what he truly is. We’ll use the power of the press to turn things around.”
“What if the drug doesn’t work? It’s likely he’s warded against such things. Poison was as common as daylight in Arthur’s day.” I think of the birdsfoot trefoil on the table at the banquet. How Julian stared at it with such intent. How had I missed so many signs?
“This is the way it must be done, Emrys,” Anabelle says firmly. “If we can’t face Julian head-on, then we come at him from the side. Take him blind. It’s this or groveling at Titania’s feet. And I don’t think we can wait for her much longer.”
I stare across the room at Richard’s sister. She’s standing so straight, so sure. Just like that iron statue of the warrior queen Boudica on the Thames’s shore.
Gone is the party planner who smashed a vase in her panic attack over the coronation ball. Gone is the girl who strangled my arm like a lifeline in the black Jaguar.
She’s her own version of warrior royalty. The stress of Richard’s disappearance has only compressed her into a tighter, tougher version of herself. While I’ve been falling apart, she’s been pulling together. It’s as if all the seams ripped out of me have been rewoven into her.
I have no doubt she can do this.
The bottle-green velvet of the chair and the lulling sounds of Anabelle’s last-minute party planning are the perfect recipe for sleep. It doesn’t take me long to reach Richard. I feel his presence along the edges of the dream. Guiding me through layers of sleep, like a boat to safe harbor.
The world is chaos around us. Still. Always. But my eyes find his and refuse to let go.
Richard’s boots and cape twist deep into the mud. His hair is matted, eyes edged with weary red. His jaw bristles with shaveless days. I’ve never seen him so raw, so worn. Yet just knowing he’s here and real fills me to the point of bursting.
I reach him, slide straight into his outstretched arms. He pulls me tight into himself. Arms strong and steady: my anchor in these treacherous waters. I bury my face into his chest, fill myself with his nearness. His touch which sparkles and swells like a spell in my chest. And for a moment, even in the folds and depths of a dream, I feel whole.
But I can’t feel this way forever. I can’t always be sleeping.
I look up, straight into his fire-gold eyes. “Richard, this dream, it’s real. We’re actually here.”
“I know.” His whisper is hoarse, as if his throat is lined with dust and he’s just now brushing it off. “I’ve been waiting for you all night. Hoping.”
My heart is a thousand shards inside my chest: grinding, wanting, and so close to having. I want to kiss him again, but our time is short. Mordred is coming for us. Just as he has in every other dream. His footsteps are thunder through the earth. He leaps and lunges across the battlefield like a tiger. Honing in on the king, his prey.
“Where are you?” I gasp out the words. “In the real world?”
His arms stay tight around me. Unyielding. “I don’t know. The last thing I remember was the carriage, and then I woke up here. They’ve brought me food, but I never see any of them. It’s all dark.”
I hear the creaks and groans of Mordred’s armor. So close. Soon the dream will end and I’ll have nothing. Nothing but more pieces of Richard lodged everywhere, stinging, reminding me of how I still haven’t found him.
Time. I need more time.
The fierce of Richard’s kiss still burns on my lips, within my chest. I hold on to this as I step out and around Richard, plant my feet in the mud. Wait for Mordred’s always-fatal blow.
He lunges toward us, the same way he does in every dream. But this time something catches my attention. It’s not the sword which makes me pause, but his armor. The steel is black as Kelpie skin, glaring against Camelot’s distant firelight. Fine writing wraps around the knight’s limbs and face, so small and neat it could just be random scratchings in the metal.
But these scratchings are far from random. They’re small, precise, and complex. Rune magic at its finest.
The jagged letters are everywhere, swarming across Mordred’s armor, protecting him with all manner of spells. Armor over armor. Shield over shield.
It’s little wonder Arthur couldn’t defeat Mordred in the state he was in. So ravaged and hamstrung by grief.
Runes. Everywhere runes. Just like the signature of Blæc’s death. Only this time the symbols are a sick silver white—bursting my vision like ill-strung stars. Constellations writing down doom and maligned fortunes. Spelling out the ever-exact ending of this dream.
Blades and burning. Always.
I can still see the letters, swarming and confused behind my lids—like lamp-lit moths. But I’m awake. I know this because the armchair brushes soft velvet against my cheek. Because the voices murmuring like soft streams beside me belong to Anabelle and Kieran. Because my arm aches with fresh blood the way it does after every dream. Because the glow and song of Richard just under my breastbone has vanished.
Mordred.
That’s who’s been watching from behind those eyes of blue. The brutish invader from the north who found the weakness in Arthur’s armor. Who plunged his sword straight down and watched the Pendragon’s blood mix deep with mud.
All these years I thought he was dead—reduced to ash and vulture feast by Mab’s enraged magic. (Once I gave Mab the news, she returned to fallen Camelot faster than I could fly, even then. By the time I reached the battlefield again, the Pendragon and the sorcerer were gone.) But the Faery queen never unmade Mordred, like I’d thought. She had different plans for him: long years of agony in the earth’s deepest shadows. She must have looped his life like Guinevere’s. Cursed him to lifetimes of darkness. A fate worse than death.
He told me himself, that night at Windsor: Faery queens are the cruelest creatures alive.
And now Julian-Mordred has returned. To undo another king. To take back the kingdom Mab wrenched so brutally from his grasp. To get revenge on the Fae and the crown in one fell swoop.
A crack in my eyelid shows me Anabelle cross-legged on Richard’s old bed. Her party planning tools fan out in front of her: a series of notes, a laptop, a half-empty cup of tea. The whole setup—the shimmering light of electronics on her face, the focused scrunch of her nose, how she types a few words and then chews her lip—reminds me of the way her brother used to work.
Kieran has moved from the window to the edge of the bed. The computer’s presence doesn’t seem to bother him the way it would sicken a Frithemaeg. Instead its glow shifts and melds with his scar. This too lights up the princess’s face. Her laptop keys tap, tap, tap away: making lists and menus and specifications for flower arrangements. The Ad-hene watches the flight of her fingers with open awe.
Anabelle pauses, looks up at him. “What do you feed your prisoners? I want to make sure it’s not on the menu I’m putting together. Don’t want to let him catch on that I suspect anything.”
“We never fed our prisoners,” Kieran tells her. “Most immortals never acquire a taste for food.”
“But—what about Guinevere? And fake-Julian? You never gave them anything to eat? That whole time they were there?” Anabelle’s eyes get wider with every question—glimmering horror and Word documents. “They must have been so hungry. . . .”
Kieran tilts his head, all of his curls spilling to one side. “What does hunger feel like?”
“It’s like wanting something, except worse.” Anabelle studies those curls—spiraling in and out of the electric light. Her hand is tight by her leg, as if she’s pushing back the urge to reach out and touch them. “If you ignore it, it starts to hurt. And if you keep ignoring it, it becomes all you can think about. Until you get what you need. Or you die.”
“Like love,” Kieran suggests.
The princess’s breath goes sharp. I wonder if Kieran notices: how she’s watching him, how his words must be spearing her heart like a hunted whale.
“I—I wouldn’t know.” This time her denial is quiet, a whispered thing. She shifts gears, driving their conversation into a whole new direction with a louder voice. “I can’t imagine being hungry and vitamin D–deprived for so long. . . . No wonder fake-Julian is so angry. That literally sounds like hell.”
The Ad-hene says nothing. His face goes back to its hard, stony stare. The one which was once so constant—the one that’s been crumbling under jars of beetroot and sunlight as gold as the princess’s hair.
“Sorry,” Anabelle says quickly. “I know it’s your home. I don’t mean to criticize it so much.”
“It’s where I came from, yes. But it hasn’t felt like home in a long, long time.” Kieran’s words are slow and careful. Handpicked. “It’s not a nice place. Not anymore. Especially compared to all of this.” He nods up to the sky-born angels, their white feathers splaying over us like a canopy.
Anabelle’s mouth pulls to one side, wry. She snaps her laptop shut. “I know it might be hard to believe, but there were times when these palaces felt like a prison.”
Kieran keeps watching the angels. Taking in every intimate detail of the artist’s brushstrokes.
“I mean—it’s not at all like the maze you live in. But there were so many times growing up when all I wanted was a normal life. I spent hours looking out windows watching children play in St. James’s Park. Scraping their knees. Getting dirty. I wanted more than anything to be out there with them. Chasing ducks and fighting with stick swords and not caring about manners or harp lessons or whether or not my stockings had runs in them.”
Even from here, with one ear smudged against velvet, I hear the thickness in her voice. Kieran hears it too. His stare has fallen from the angels, drifted to Anabelle. The princess looks down into the teacup, as if she’s really telling all of this to the leftover sips of Earl Grey.
“People see this life and they want it. They think it’s something out of a fairy tale: castles, pretty dresses, magazine covers, and all the rest. But they don’t realize how much it weighs. My life—it’s never really been mine. I’ve always had people telling me how to act. Where to study. Who to be friends with. I have to be flawless all of the time or else I get pounced on by the press and my mother.
“Richard always hated the pressure. He ran away from it. But I’ve tried to please everyone. To be Britain’s perfect princess. And it’s just bloody exhausting.” Her last few words are edged with anger. She places the teacup back on its tray with such vigor that it rains amber drops across her wrist.
Kieran shifts; the bed creaks under his weight.
“These past few days . . . they’ve been awful, but they’ve also been illuminating. For the first time in my life I’ve felt free,” she drifts off.
“I know what you mean.” His hand rubs up the ridged muscles of his bare arm. Over his mark. “Not all prisons have bars or walls. To be someone you’re not is a prison in itself.”
He says this and those eyes cut over to my chair. I wonder if he knows I’m awake, if he hears the extra-heavy patter of my heart. How it flutters and stings under his words.
“But I can’t just stop being a princess.”
“I suppose not.” Kieran frowns. His fingers are still on his mark, tracing it round and round. Following the silver lines without even looking at them. His eyes are still latched on to my chair.
It’s no use pretending anymore. I’m awake and he knows it.
“What if who I want to be and who I’m meant to be aren’t the same?” Anabelle goes on. “What if they never fit together?”
“That’s the question, isn’t it?” Kieran asks my chair, my barely closed lids.
I sit up, as if I’m just twisting awake: all limb and yawn. “What are we talking about?”
Anabelle flinches, puts on a face. The softness from just moments before hides behind curtains of tense brow and a cocktail-hour voice.
“Dramatic, philosophical things.” Her voice goes deep. Like a play narrator. “Fate versus free will. What if the person you were born to be isn’t who you want to be?”
I give her the only answer I can think of. “Then I suppose you must decide which life you want more. Make your choice.”
Kieran slides off the bed, leaves the princess alone in the downy waves of comforter. He moves back to his window perch, where the first hints of dawn smudge against the glass.
“Easy words,” he says softly. The icy light blooms and spreads across his face, making him look like some sort of winter god. “Not all of us are strong enough to fight fate. To wage war against the nature of things.”
Fate. The nature of things. Is that what I’m battling against? Is that what’s dragging Richard away? Wrenching us apart?
No.
“It’s Mordred,” I say suddenly, replaying the final moments of my dream over and over again. Silver-scratched runes branding my eyes as the black knight plunged his sword into Richard’s chest. Plunged me into waking.
How many more times will I have to watch him die?
“What?” Anabelle chirps from the bed.
“Mordred,” I force the name out again. “He’s the one pretending to be Julian Forsythe. The same sorcerer who killed King Arthur.”
Kieran looks over at me, painted in frosty surprise and morning sun. “How do you know?”
I’m about to tell him. About to let the truth slip out, when I catch myself. The dreams, they’re the last corner of my life that belong to just me and Richard. The last hint of mortality I can cling to when I’m around the Ad-hene, listening to the siren call of other choices.
“I—I just remembered,” I say. “He used rune magic. The symbols were etched into his armor the day he invaded Camelot.”
Anabelle looks too pale, almost sick as she asks, “Do you think he’s going to kill Richard?”
The question—same but different—circles in Kieran’s eyes like a wolf around prey. Is it worth his death?
“I don’t know.” I look down at my ringless finger, lined up with all the others in a tight fist. Ready for a fight.
But if it truly is fate I’m up against . . .
Am I willing to accept the cost?