The End of Magic (2 page)

Guinevere was barely a bride when Arthur’s quest began, and he had never lain with her to make her his wife in more than name.
There was trouble brewing in that corner, for Guinevere was of royal blood, raised as a princess of the Iceni and only lately
converted to the New Religion that Arthur followed. She could not understand Arthur’s motives in searching for the Grail and
leaving Britain behind.

What she
could
understand was that she was left alone in Camelot year after year while the memory of Arthur grew ever more distant in her
mind.

Merlin sighed tiredly, and somehow the sunlight seemed less warm and inviting than it had when he’d climbed all the way to
the top of this tower to enjoy the solitude and the view. He could not blame the young Queen for her increasing attachment
to her Champion, Lancelot of the Lake, but no good could come of it. And with Mab hatching her plots in Tintagel, raising
up Arthur’s bastard son Mordred to be her willing accomplice in damnation, they must all be eternally vigilant.

Merlin did not know if Arthur had confided to his Queen the exact nature of the transgression that caused him to seek the
Grail so passionately, but he suspected she was unaware of what it was. Should he warn Guinevere of Mordred’s existence? Merlin
hesitated. Arthur’s conscience had long since passed out of his keeping. If Arthur had not told his wife, it was not Merlin’s
place to reveal so painful a secret. And perhaps the Queen need never know at all.…

The ravens who lived in the tower took to the air, cawing and complaining. Someone had entered below, and Merlin suspected
who it was, and on what errand she was bound. Drawing his cloak around him and clutching his staff tighter, Merlin descended
the long winding stair that led to the ground floor of the White Tower.

Guinevere, Princess of the Iceni and Queen of Britain, stood on the ground floor, peering up toward the light that spilled
down from the windows above. The years had ripened Arthur’s child-bride into a magnificent woman, strong-willed and regal.
She had never quite lost her distrust of Merlin, a pagan wizard at a Christian court, but she had come to accept his presence,
and sometimes she even took his advice. But Merlin knew that to Guinevere he would always remain half-unreal, a creature out
of fable. A Wizard of the Old Ways in a land that was rapidly forgetting that Magic had ever existed at all.

She did not come here looking for me,
Merlin reflected, and when the Queen recognized him, his guess was confirmed.

“Oh,” Guinevere said. “I was just… good morning, Master Merlin. I did not expect to see you here.”

Her cheeks were flushed and she would not meet his gaze. Merlin thought he could well guess who the Queen had come here alone
so early hoping to meet.

Lancelot.

Lancelot of the Lake had been Merlin’s own choice to guard the Queen while Arthur was gone. Mab’s sister, the Lady of the
Lake, had sent Merlin to Joyous Gard to find a champion to preserve Camelot in Arthur’s absence, and there Merlin had found
the best knight in the world—Lancelot. When Lancelot had returned to Camelot with Merlin, he had easily defeated all of Arthur’s
knights on the field of honor and been named the Queen’s Champion. In the few weeks they had known each other, Lancelot and
Arthur had become fast friends, and Arthur had willingly entrusted his dream of Camelot, a shining city of peace and charity,
to his friend.

Merlin knew that Lancelot had only the highest ideals and the most honorable intentions, but sometimes it seemed to Merlin
that all those principles weren’t quite in Camelot’s best interest. The city should have been finished years ago, but Lancelot
was forever tearing things down, redrafting Arthur’s plans, trying to force Camelot to match a perfection that was simply
inhuman. It never occurred to the knight of Joyous Gard that some dreams were not meant to become real.

“Were you looking for someone, my lady?” Merlin asked Guinevere. “I fear I am the only one here.”
Did you ask Lancelot to meet you here? Was he wise enough to refuse? My children, what am I to do with you?

“No, of course not,” the Queen answered, a little too sharply. Bright color flamed in her cheeks. “I was only… looking around.”

“You should go back to your women,” Merlin told her as gently as he could.

“I shall,” Guinevere replied, with a haughty jerk of her chin. She swirled her heavy skirts about her and walked quickly away,
the silk making a hissing sound against the stone.

Merlin sighed quietly as he watched her go. Her distrust of him made her temperamental; for all that it had been seven years
since her wedding day, the Queen was still very young. But perhaps it was wrong of him to still treat her as a child. For
better or for worse, in Arthur’s absence, Guinevere ruled Britain, and her word was law here. If the choices she made sometimes
seemed foolish to him, then it was no more than her right to choose her own path.

Merlin leaned upon his staff, drawing what solace he could from the smooth surface of the gnarled wood. They would all endure
somehow—he, Guinevere, Lancelot, Britain. And Arthur would return.

Someday.

The Queen strode out of the tower and into the bustling streets of the town. She blinked at the brightness of the sunlight
after the dimness of the tower, but stumbled determinedly back to where she had left her attendants. It had been a foolish
notion really, to go off looking for Lancelot like that. He would not thank her for interrupting his morning’s work for a
bit of inconsequential chatter. Lancelot was a busy man, and despite all his efforts, the building of Camelot went more slowly
every year. Sometimes she thought that Arthur might even be back before it was finished.

As always, thoughts of the King—even after seven years, Guinevere found it hard to think of him as her husband—brought an
unhappy, guilty twinge. How could Arthur have chosen to leave if she hadn’t failed him somehow? Would he have felt such a
need to gain the Grail if she’d been a better person?

What did you want from me, Arthur-the-King? Why wasn’t I good enough—or just enough for you, damn you?

She’d repeated the unanswerable questions to herself so often down the years that separated sixteen from twenty-three that
they’d almost become a litany, but the answer was always the same. Silence, from her heart and in his letters. Though he wrote
of his many adventures and always sent his love, there was never any hint in his letters of a longing to return—to Camelot
or to her. There were times when Guinevere could not imagine why Arthur had married her at all. He seemed to have no earthly
need for a wife or a Queen.

But no matter how little Arthur needed her, there were others who did. Lancelot needed her. She could see it in his eyes.

“Your Highness! There you are!” Dame Linnet cried with relief. Dame Linnet was a plump young woman who favored blue gowns,
and her timidity often frustrated Guinevere nearly to tears. Today, however, Guinevere was almost grateful to see her.

“Yes,” Guinevere answered composedly. “I went to look at the tower, but it was too dark inside to see much.”

“Oh, but that was because the shutters for the upper windows are still closed. When the glass for the windows arrives from
Flanders, it will be bright enough inside to read at midday! Sir Lancelot was just telling us how it would be.”

Dame Linnet gestured back toward the others, who were gathered about a familiar figure.

His bronze hair gleamed in the pale sunlight, and he wore a bright blue cloak that Guinevere had embroidered with her own
hands, for with Arthur absent she had no one else to lavish her needlework upon. Beneath the cloak he wore a simple linen
tunic, but no sword, for Lancelot was a civilized man, from a country so unlike Guinevere’s war-torn Britain as to seem almost
mythical. He smiled when he saw her, and Guinevere smiled back, all the shadows and doubts of a moment before gone like morning
mist. Nothing bad could happen while Lancelot was with her.

“Your Grace,” Lancelot said, bowing to her. “I was just explaining how this section of the wall would look once the buildings
along the street are finished.”

“As beautiful as the castle, I trust,” Guinevere answered in a steady voice. Camelot Castle had finally been finished two
years before, the second structure to be completed in the Golden City after the great Cathedral.

“More so,” Lancelot answered. “Providing the architect does what I tell him. And now, ladies—and Your Highness—if you would
care to accompany me, I will show you the new marketplace.”

He held out his arm to Guinevere, and she placed her hand upon it. She could feel the roughness of the sun-warmed linen beneath
her fingers, and she fancied she felt the warmth of the flesh beneath as well. Her heart beat faster, and for a brief instant
she wished that Arthur had never been born.

Merlin watched them go from the doorway of the tower. He shook his head sadly. He did not need his wizard’s gift of prophecy
to see what was happening between the Queen and Sir Lancelot. And what he could now see, others would soon see. He did not
doubt that—for the moment—the friendship was innocent, born of loneliness on the Queen’s part and sympathy on Sir Lancelot’s.
Both Lancelot and Guinevere were too proud to casually betray their ideals to gratify a momentary whim—and Lancelot, at least,
was so convinced of his moral superiority that he felt himself beyond the earthly temptations of illicit love. Such confidence
could be fatal—no one knew that better than Merlin.

Oh Nimue, Nimue—if you were here, could you stop what I fear is going to happen? Lend me your wisdom to gaze into the workings
of the human heart, for there magic is powerless and even the greatest wizard is blind!

But for Merlin, as for Guinevere, there was no answer, and slowly the wizard turned away and walked slowly through the open
gates of the city.

Oh, Arthur, where are you? You need the Grail, but your people need you more.…

In the wilds of Cornwall a great keep stood upon the coast, its back to the land. Grey sea-mist veiled it day and night, and
the ways to its gates were twisted ones. The gruff fisherfolk who took their living from the grudging ocean swore that Tintagel
was only a myth, and that to see the castle looming out of the fog was a promise of dire misfortune. Who had lived in Tintagel,
and what had happened to them, was something the fishermen did not know. Their King lived in Camelot, and they had no other
lord.

And that was just the way Queen Mab wanted it. There would be time enough to gain the love of the people when Mordred ruled
in Camelot… and Arthur was dead.

The Queen of the Old Ways gazed out the window at the shifting weave of mist. Once she had ruled all this land and the Land
of Magic as well. Now her earthly domain was confined to this one small headland, cloaked and saturated with magic.

She could no longer remember the day upon which her fight for survival had begun, so long had it endured. Nor could she remember
what life had been like before the New Religion had come to Britain, to steal all that was rightfully hers. Once Mab would
have mourned the loss of her past, but generations of fighting had burned that softness from her. She did not know when she
had stopped believing in a victory that would erase all her defeats, but she no longer cared that the Old Ways—the very thing
that gave her life through her worshipers’ belief in her—had been changed irrevocably by the New Religion. Making things the
way they once had been no longer mattered to her, so long as she could have victory—and revenge.

Against Merlin. Against Arthur. Against everyone who had betrayed her, thwarted her plans, destroyed her shrines and her worshipers,
changed
her by the very way they thought of her, through curses where there had once been prayers. They had made her what she was,
and they would pay the terrible price.

She would give them
Mordred,
whose very name meant “the fear of death.”

She had learned from her failures, for this time Mab would not leave the raising of her champion in someone else’s hands.
She would mold her child—her Mordred—from his first breath to the moment he fulfilled the destiny she had decreed for him:
ruler of Britain, destroyer of Arthur, Camelot, and the New Religion.

And Merlin would be there to experience every moment of her triumph. Mab smiled, telling over her dreams of the future the
way a miser might gloat over his hoarded wealth. Killing Merlin was no part of her plan. She wanted him to suffer, to agonize,
to yearn for what he had lost. She did not mean him to escape that.

But Mordred was still a young man, untutored in the Old Ways, and Arthur was still far away from Britain. Even Mab could not
quite see how to take a throne away from someone who didn’t currently have it. Defeating the Queen alone would be no sport.
Let Guinevere destroy herself with Lancelot first; her betrayal would soften up the people until they were
happy
to welcome Mordred as their rightful King.

But for the moment Mab truly did not have any interest in what went on in Britain. She had her dreams of future glory, and
she had Mordred. She walked away from the window and took her place at the long table in the great hall of Tintagel.

Unlike Arthur’s Round Table, this table had a definite head and foot, and Mab was seated near the head. As five of the castle
servitors shuffled into the room, their eyes rolling with terror, Mab’s brow wrinkled as she tried to remember what they’d
originally been before Frik had transformed them with his magic. Mice, she thought, or perhaps rabbits. They certainly looked
like scared rabbits at the moment, but no matter how terrifying his forms of amusement, no one in Tintagel was brave enough
to rebel against Mordred.

As the years had passed, Mab and Frik spent more and more of their time at Tintagel, until the castle was nearly as magical
as the Land Under Hill. Mab lavished all of her care and attention on Mordred. She had erred in leaving Merlin’s raising to
Ambrosia, and the old priestess had corrupted him with soft human emotions. Mab would not make the same mistake twice. She
would burn all the softness from Mordred’s heart, leaving it as hard and crystalline as her own. Every game, every gift that
she gave him was aimed toward this, toward the day when he, her perfect instrument, would take his rightful place as King
and sweep the New Religion and all its works from the face of Britain.