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“I wish I could be Arthur for you. I really do. Walk in the sunlight, cut through the world with a sword of justice and absolute surety. But I am the night. My eyes have always been open to the darkness, and there are so many shades once you get used to the dark. So many subtleties. I cannot unsee them, or unfeel them.”
“Passion,” he whispered. “You saw me when she tapped passion! I dare to hope, now. I tried to want only your happiness, really, but I do not want you to be happy with Arthur. I want your happiness to be with me, and it makes it difficult to be good.”
“I know exactly how strong you are, and it terrifies me that your strength could be diminished at Arthur’s side,” Mordred said. “That he would subsume you. I hate that you could love him, and I also understand, because how could you not? I hate him and I love him and I wish I could walk away from all of this. I wish I were enough for you to choose to walk away, too.” “It is not about you. It has to be about me.”
A witch with false memories. A queen with no history. A girl with no past.
“I do not know, but it makes me sad, and I love it. Some sorrows are sweet enough to be worth feeling.”
Life is short. Death is swift. Some sorrows are sweet enough to be worth feeling.
“We did not ask to be who we are, but we can choose how we live. I thought I did not have choices before. I thought my life was a tragedy. But you are here, and I am…” He closed his eyes, an expression like pain on his face contradicting the exquisite happiness she felt in his touch. “I am made anew. Come. I want to take you somewhere and tell you the moment I fell in love with you.”
But now she knew she could hold the wrongness of what he had done and at the same time forgive him, because people were so much more than the worst things they did.
Time passed in a dreamy haze punctuated with sparks of laughter. Want turned to drowsy satisfaction.
A person did not have to be good for there to be loss when they left this world ahead of their time.
But she did not feel finished, because it was not actually a quest. It was not a story, neatly contained and tidily ended. The stories were all lies, leaving out the before, the after, and all the characters the tellers did not deem worthy.
“I wish you were slightly less good.” Mordred smiled ruefully. “But then you would be slightly less you, and I never wish to see you diminished.”
She missed the spark she had always felt from him, and knew she would miss it for the rest of her life.
Perhaps it was human nature to cling to simple stories. Stories of right triumphing over wrong, of wizards who were powerful and good, of kings who always saved their people. Stories that made sense, with a beginning, a middle, and an end. Guinevere could not say whether the stories helped—inspiring and comforting the listeners—or hurt, leaving out the messy truths in favor of shining falsehoods. But they would continue to be told, she had no doubt.
She had been sent to Camelot as a lie, fought for it as a witch, abandoned it as a queen. Now she would make the choice to serve it for as long as she could, however she could, as the most powerful thing she could be. A girl.
