“Only Arthur and I have the keys,” she was saying. “When he came from school with that tramp, acting like she was already queen, I tried to leave. He begged me to stay. Built this room as a place for us to meet without Guinevere knowing.”
A secret door in the wall pushed open, two figures entering from Lady Gremlaine’s room. Tedros broke into a cold sweat. Agatha had already described this scene to him, but now it was real, the prince witnessing the younger Grisella Gremlaine in lavender robes, her tan face unlined, brown hair loose to her shoulders. At her side was a hooded figure in a black cloak, gripping a knotted piece of rope in her hand. A rope that looked like it was made out of human flesh.
The spansel, Tedros thought.
Beneath the hood, he could make out Evelyn Sader’s forest-green eyes, glinting like a snake’s.
Nausea coated the prince’s throat.
“I put hemp oil in his drink like you told me to,” Lady Gremlaine said to Evelyn. “Fell straight to sleep.”
“We must move quickly, then,” said Evelyn, holding out the rope. “Place this spansel around his neck.”
Lady Gremlaine swallowed. “And then I’ll have his child?”
“That is the power of the spansel,” Evelyn replied. “Use it and you will be pregnant with King Arthur’s heir long before Guinevere marries him.”
Tedros felt light-headed, hardly able to listen.
The Evils of the present were seeded in the past. This past. Right here, in this room.
He looked up to see Lady Gremlaine standing over his father as he slept, her shoulders stiff, her lips quivering.
With a choked gasp, she spun to Evelyn and grabbed the rope into her hands. Her shadow stretched over the sleeping king, her fingers firm on the spansel. She stared down at Arthur, cheeks pink, breaths rushed, her thirst for him fighting the sin of what she was about to do. Fingers shaking, she reached the spansel for his neck.
Tedros averted his eyes, even if he knew how this played out. The idea that this was happening at all . . . that Lady Gremlaine and Evelyn Sader were in cahoots . . . that Grisella Gremlaine, his father’s once-steward and lifelong friend, had drugged him asleep and wanted to have his child—
“I can’t,” she whispered.
Tedros looked back at her.
“I can’t do it,” Lady Gremlaine sobbed. “I can’t betray him like this. I love him too much.”
She dropped the spansel and fled the room.
Tedros exhaled . . . until Evelyn Sader picked the spansel up.
His blood rushed so hard he could feel it in his teeth.
“I won’t watch this,” he said to Agatha, spinning for the door from which they came. “We have to leave—”
“This is where the Snake’s secrets led us, Tedros,” said his princess, not moving. She held him in place the way he’d held her when the Snake charged them across the desert. Each one strong for the other when they needed it.
Tedros let her hold him, his legs steadying. Slowly, he lifted his eyes to Evelyn, pulling back her hood, the spansel pinched between red-painted nails, as she skulked towards Tedros’ father. She had Rhian’s tan and Japeth’s cold leer, so clearly their mother, Tedros could see now. She smiled down at the sleeping king. Then Evelyn hooked the spansel around Arthur’s neck . . .
“This is where the scene ends,” Agatha told Tedros. “It disconnects here—”
Only it didn’t this time.
The scene continued, Evelyn releasing her hands from the spansel, leaving it noosed on the sleeping king’s throat.
Arthur’s eyes opened.
They fixed upon Evelyn Sader, his big blue pools brimming with lust.
Agatha pulled away from Tedros, her face pale.
“What’s happening?” said the prince, watching his father and Evelyn draw close.
“I—I—I don’t know,” Agatha sputtered. “I didn’t see this!”
Tedros wanted to rip the spansel off his father’s neck, to fight the horrors of the enchanted rope, but he was as powerless to stop its magic as his father had been—
From behind Tedros came a whirl of motion, flying past the prince, swinging something down—
Straight into Evelyn’s head.
She fell without a sound, onto the startled king, before she slumped to the floor, unconscious.
Arthur looked up at Lady Gremlaine, hunched over Evelyn’s crumpled body, a brass flowerpot in her hands.
Her eyes spilled tears, her face ghost-white. “I didn’t know . . . I didn’t know what she was doing . . . I had to stop her . . .”
Arthur looked startled for a moment, like a child shaken from sleep. Then his gaze set upon Lady Gremlaine, kindling with the same lust he’d just had for Evelyn—
Lady Gremlaine yanked the spansel off his neck.
Instantly, Arthur snapped out of his trance.
The young king gaped at his weeping steward . . . then at Evelyn on the floor.
Arthur lurched off the bed, backing towards the door. “What’s happening!” he panted. “Guards! Guards!”
“Arthur, I—I—I can explain,” Lady Gremlaine stammered. “It was m-m-me . . . I asked her for the spell . . . I—I—I’ll explain everything . . .”
The color went out of Arthur’s cheeks, his eyes darting between his steward and the flesh rope and the stirring body on the carpet. “Grisella . . . ,” he breathed. “What have you done?”
The room vanished, returning Tedros to the coolness of a dark passage, inside the body of a snake. His heart was leaping out of his ribs, his body vibrating with fear . . . horror . . . relief.
He glimpsed his princess’s eyes shining through the dark with the same emotions.
“Agatha . . . Arthur’s not his father.”
“Or Evelyn his mother,” she said.
Neither prince nor princess finished the thought they were both sharing, but it hung over them like a dagger.
So who are his parents?
“Tedros, look!” said Agatha.
Ahead, an emerald flare of light blinded them. Then two. A new pair of eyes. Only these were moving, racing towards them like green fireballs, a black body attached. A snake within a snake, hissing and flashing massive fangs. Tedros grabbed Agatha to run, but it was coming too fast and too big to dodge. Tedros dove, sheltering his princess with his body. The snake swallowed them whole—
Then it was muggy and hot, like a jungle in summer.
They were in Sherwood Forest.
Marian’s Arrow lay ahead, couched against lush, dewy trees, growing so wild that all the branches had wrangled around each other, giving only peeks of a red sunset.
“Another secret,” said Agatha. “Something the Snake doesn’t want us to see.”
“In Sherwood Forest?” said Tedros, dusting himself off. “What does Sherwood Forest have to do with the Snake?”
Whistles and hoots echoed behind them, along with men’s chants—
“To the three rings of marriage!
The Engagement Ring,
The Wedding Ring,
and the Suffering!”
Tedros and Agatha turned to see a parade of Merry Men, carrying a fresh-faced Arthur on their shoulders towards the Arrow, the young king wearing a donkey-skin cape and a paper crown with the word “BACHELOR” scrawled in red, while he gnawed on a charred turkey leg and responded with a chant of his own.