“You taught me that the king is always accountable. Does that not apply to the queen, as well?”
Arthur finally sat. He closed his eyes and repeated himself. “Did you kill him?”
“No. But I might as well have. He is gone regardless. Whatever Merlin did to me—to my mind—I did far worse. Arthur, I—I erased him.”
Arthur was still for a long time; then he nodded. “Did anyone see you? Will they be coming for Isolde?”
“No. They think her dead in the fire.”
“The fire?”
“I also burned down the castle.”
“Guinevere.”
“I know. It was—nothing went how I had planned. It was a good plan. A safe plan. But he was going to burn her at the stake. There was no time.”
“You should have left.”
“I could not. Would you have?”
“That is beside the point.”
“It is exactly the point! Why should I have valued my life over hers?”
“Because you are the queen!”
“Actually, I am not!”
Arthur looked as though she had struck him. But she was too upset to comfort him or to take her words back. She was not the queen. Both because she was not actually Guinevere, and because their marriage was not legal. Arthur seemed determined to pretend that they had a normal marriage, but she could not and would not allow it any longer.
She clasped her hands tightly so she would not reach out to him. Even this angry, her impulse was to comfort him. To support him. “She could not save herself. I could.”
Guinevere wished she sounded triumphant as she said it, wished it sounded like the tales of Arthur’s quests, but she just sounded tired. Remembering everything did not feel like a victory. It felt like a tragedy, even though she had won.
“What did they think happened to the king?”
“They already condemned Isolde as a witch. They believed she did it.”
“You made them think a woman destroyed their king?”
“He hurt women. They are better off without—”
“No, Guinevere, this will hurt women. If any men are inexplicably sick, or die unexpectedly, they will blame the wives for being in league with the witch who broke the king. We banished magic to weed out the chaos of the Dark Queen, but we also did it so people will forget. So they will stop using it as an excuse to accuse women of wrongdoing, to blame them for the unknown and unexplained. You used fear as a tool, but fear and terror only lead to violence.”
“With a king like that, they were already living in violence!” Guinevere stood, panicked and angry. Arthur was wrong about this. He had to be. She could not have made things worse than they already were.
“I know. But violence can never beat down violence. Only justice can replace it.”
“No one was coming to bring them justice! No one was saving Isolde! No one was fighting King Mark! I am sorry if they did not have their own King Arthur to bring peace and goodness. All they had was me, and I used what I had to and I hurt who I had to in order to—”
A flicker of memory. Had she discussed this with Mordred? What had they said?
Mordred had told her she was not like Merlin. But the truth hit her so hard she could scarcely breathe. She was just like Merlin. She wanted to do something, and she did it using magic. Violent magic. She changed things to be the way she thought they should be, and she hurt someone permanently. But unlike Merlin, she could not see the end result of her actions. Maybe she helped things. Maybe the next king would be a better ruler. But maybe she made the entire kingdom worse. Maybe women—innocent women—would die because of what she had said and done. And she had no way of knowing.
Just like she did not know how much devastation she left behind when she escaped with the dragon. She knew what it had cost her, what it had cost the dragon. But what of Hild? What of those men, greedy and lazy as they were? Would they freeze in the coming winter? Would they starve? Would their injuries fester and kill them?
She burned with shame. “I wanted to be different from Merlin. But I am not even the same. At least he knew what he was doing. When he hurt people, it was planned. I do it without any thought whatsoever.”