Merlin scratched his beard, eyeing the wine warily, and demurred. “Exciting day. Yes. Yes, indeed.” He sat on a wooden trunk at the foot of Lady Lunette’s bed and bowed his head, deep in thought.
Lady Lunette’s smile waned. “How may we help you?”
Merlin finally looked up and stared out the window at the setting sun. “For some reason, a day like this reminds me of a story. Perhaps you’ve heard it. Among the gentry they call it ‘The Story of the Midwife.’ ”
Lady Lunette considered her pastry dough. “I don’t believe I have.”
Merlin’s voice was soft. “They say it was an unusually cold night for May and that a frost had settled over the crops. Yet the people stood beneath the stars holding candles because a king was being born that night. And this was very important, because the old king had died only months before, leaving the queen a regent—not a true blood heir to the throne. But were she to deliver a son, then he would rule as the true king.”
Lady Lunette carefully placed the raw fig pastry onto a tray of similar unbaked pastries. Her face was stone.
Merlin warmed to his subject and folded his hands, leaning back to savor the tale. “But as the night wore on, it became clear that the child had not turned and struggled inside the Queen Regent. And though she prayed to Saint Margaret that her child come free as easily as Margaret escaped the dragon’s stomach, the baby was stillborn.” Merlin paused. “And a boy.”
Lady Lunette closed her eyes for the briefest of seconds.
Merlin continued his tale. “Knowing the dead child would snuff out her claim to the throne, the Queen Regent huddled with the midwife and devised a plot. And so, by the light of the moon, the midwife snuck away from the castle to a peasant home that was known to her, one that had recently celebrated the birth of a baby boy.”
Lady Lunette began to carefully fold the dough of another tart.
“It is said the mother was paid handsomely in gold coins from the royal coffers,” Merlin said. “Yet days later that same woman was found dead from a curious suffocation. Poisoned, some surmised.”
Lady Lunette smirked and chuckled softly.
Merlin stood up, folded his hands behind his back, and breathed in deeply. “Indeed, most anyone who might have known of the foul conspiracy met similar ends.” He turned to Lady Lunette. “All except for the midwife, who, fearing for her life, fled the kingdom, never to return.”
Lady Lunette closed one of her shutters against the setting sun.
Merlin pulled on his ear, thinking. “One imagines that were she ever found, she would represent quite a danger to the king.”
Lady Lunette set down her dough. “Which I suspect is why she remained hidden forever, given the grim outcomes of the other characters in the story. Or perhaps the simpler explanation is that she never made it out of the kingdom at all. And shared the fate of that poor mother who sold her child for a few gold coins.”
Merlin nodded. “Yes, that has always been my suspicion as well.” He walked slowly to the door, paused, then turned back. “There is a third option, of course.”
“Is there?” Lady Lunette asked sharply.
Merlin’s eyes gleamed. “That perhaps the midwife is alive and well and under my protection. Good day, Your Majesty.”
Lady Lunette clenched her jaw as Merlin opened her oak door and stepped onto the tower stairs. When the door closed, it was silent in the tower. Lady Lunette turned to her hourglass. The sands had piled at the bottom.
“Spspspsps,” she softly called for the shorthair. “Spspsspsps,” she tried again. After no response, Lady Lunette leaned over in her chair. The gray shorthair stared back at her with lifeless blue eyes from where it lay dead on the velvet bench. Lady Lunette smiled with satisfaction. She reached down and plucked the half-eaten cake from the floor and set it carefully back on the tray.
THIRTY-TWO
GRAYMALKIN CASTLE,” YEVA MUTTERED as she fed her kite, Marguerite, a dead mouse in her hand. “The castle of the lovers Festa and Moreii. Dark spirits there. That drunkard is up to something.”
Nimue stared at the words on Merlin’s note as Gawain, his traveling companion—the woman in purple robes whom Nimue had learned was named Kaze—Morgan, and Wroth debated their next steps.
“Going alone is too dangerous,” Gawain stated. “There are Red Paladin checkpoints up and down the King’s Road. You’ll have to take the forest trails. I’ll ride with you.”
“Ech bach bru,” Wroth rumbled.
Wroth’s son Mogwan turned to Gawain. “My father says we need you here.”
“Food runs and finding survivors are the priority,” Nimue agreed.
“Why go at all?” Gawain appealed to the others. “The man works for Uther Pendragon. How can we trust him?”
“Agreed,” Morgan added.
Nimue stared at the sword. “Arthur would say Uther Pendragon is our best chance for survival.” Uttering Arthur’s name gave her a small ache in her chest.
“And where’s that brave Man Blood now, eh?” Gawain snarled. “And what has this ‘king’ done for us except sit idly by while Fey have been slaughtered from Cinder to Hawksbridge to Dewdenn?”
“I’ve seen that slaughter with my own eyes and require no lectures on it,” Nimue shouted at Gawain, who took a seat on a rock and simmered. “This was my mother’s dying wish. And this Merlin has given me no reason not to trust him.”
Yeva chuckled at this.
“You can leave the sword here,” Morgan offered.
“He asks me to bring the sword.”
“I don’t like it.” Morgan shook her head.
Nimue decided. “I will go. I will bring the sword.” She took Morgan’s hand. “And you will ride with me.”
“With Kaze as well,” Gawain added. “I trust Kaze with my life.”
The woman in purple robes simply nodded beneath her cowl. The tip of her leopard tail flicked on the floor.
“It’s decided, then,” Nimue said, rising and turning to Yeva. “Tell Merlin I will meet with him at sunset in three days at Graymalkin Castle.”
Yeva wiped the blood from her hands as Marguerite swallowed the last of the mouse down her throat.
The Widow stood at the edge of a jutting cliff above the freezing green surf of the Bay of Horns. Looming in the distance along the same cliffside, atop a sheer black tower of ancient volcanic rock, were the windswept ruins of Graymalkin Castle. Gulls and blackbirds cried and battled for nests in craggy pockets of the tall sea walls as Merlin rode up behind her, shoulders hunched against the biting winds. He climbed down from his horse and approached.
“Aren’t you cold?” he asked her, as she wore only a black dress with a high collar up to her neck, black sleeves and gloves, and her customary veil.
“I like the cold,” she said, producing the Snake clay of Fey Fire that Merlin had hidden in the saddlebag of her horse.
Merlin took the fire and placed it in a large pouch on the belt of his robes. “I thank you.”
“Do you still plan to use the Fey Fire to destroy the sword?”
“Aye,” Merlin said sadly. “I no longer believe in a ‘one true king.’ Nor in an old Druid’s skills to guide him. The sword is too powerful a weapon for this barbaric age.”