It nudged her hand again. This time, in the emptiness of the dragon’s future, she saw it curled around itself, slowly fading. And then she saw…herself. Alone. Slowly fading.
Why was the dragon showing her that?
“What do you need?” she asked. She had been ready to fight. Instead, she wanted to weep and comfort this creature. But how could she comfort it against the relentless destruction of time?
The dragon glanced at Sir Bors, still asleep. Guinevere sensed the fear of pain, of the cruel bite of iron. The dragon crawling, pursued. It was right. Sir Bors would never stop hunting it. And she did not know if she should stop him. As much as it pained her, the dragon was still a threat.
“What would you do if I could stop him from hunting you?”
The images changed. The dragon stayed in the wilds, basking in the sun, rolling in the autumn leaves, relishing the snow for one more year. Then it crawled into the earth and went to sleep. And it did not come out again.
“You want one last year to say goodbye,” Guinevere said.
The dragon dipped its head once in acknowledgment.
Dragons had been terrible menaces, but…to be the last of one’s own kind, alone, knowing that your time was ending and there was no way to return to how the world had been. Merlin was right. The old was buried to give life to the new. Even though it was for the best for men, for Camelot, for Arthur, she could still mourn what it cost this ancient creature.
She could give it the gift of a year for farewells.
“If you stay far away from men, I can promise this one will not come after you. He will think you dead. But first, I must know. Have you been called by darkness? Is anything stirring?” They had met with darkness twice now. The forest that swallowed the village, and the mist and wolves while fleeing Maleagant. Neither seemed tied to Rhoslyn. Guinevere hoped they were like weeds of leftover magic, clinging to life.
The dragon’s eyelids slid half-closed. A low hiss sounded in its throat. Demands. Sharp tugs. The trees and the men screaming. The dragon turning its back, leaving the Dark Queen to her fate. The dragon had abandoned the Dark Queen during the great battle. That was a relief.
But then…Tendrils. Something small, something searching. Darkness looking for something to hold.
The dragon huffed, making it clear it had no interest in being held. It was enough. Guinevere believed that the dragon was not under dark sway. But something had searched for it, or tried to call it. Something powerful enough to guide darkness, but not command it as the Dark Queen had. Rhoslyn’s rock was heavy in her pouch. The witch needed to be dealt with.
But not today. Today, she had terrible work to finish. Guinevere knelt next to Bors. There was an old magic that blurred more lines than she cared to. It was one thing to influence objects or events. It was another thing entirely to reach into minds and change things. Merlin had done it to the nuns at the convent so they would not realize Guinevere was a stranger to them. With a sick twist, she suspected he had also used it on Igraine the wretched night that Arthur was conceived.
She knew how to do it. She was not entirely human, after all. Her hands already brought information in. They could send it out, as well. But she had only ever used them to see. Never to show. And never to force a change.
It was a violent act. Magic of conquest and force. Was it justifiable when being used to protect a vulnerable creature? Her hands shook as she lifted them to Sir Bors’s temple, and she pushed.
The trick to changing a memory, Merlin had said, carefully setting seven white stones in a row, is to make the replacement memory so unpleasant, so viscerally awful, that they will never poke too hard at it. Make them flee from the memory. It is the skin on old milk. If they force it, it will break and the truth will spill free. So make the milk rancid. Who would ever touch rancid milk? He had looked up then. You should not have told him. You should never have told him.
Shaking off the terrible weight of Merlin’s gaze in the memory, still unsure what he had meant by the last part, she got to work. She let her hands sink into Sir Bors’s memories. She did not have to go far, nor did she want to. Once at the dragon, she whispered the story to the knight with her mouth, and put it in place with her hands.
“The dragon blew fire, but you shielded yourself. Then, as it drew a breath that would end you forever, you plunged your sword deep in its belly. Your moment of triumph turned sour. Its belly split open, spilling a week’s worth of rotting sheep and stinking, half-digested offal all over you. You stumbled away, vomiting on yourself. You vomited so hard, you also soiled yourself. The dragon is dead. That is all you will tell anyone, and all you ever need think of again.”
She smoothed his forehead, feeling the memory settle. Bors’s mind was a simple, determined thing. He was a creature of pride. He would never want to remember the shame of the memory she had crafted.
She sat back, exhausted. She could feel something was missing. She was forgetting something. A memory, lost, as she pushed the new one on Sir Bors. What had she given up? She would never know.
She felt as dirty as the memory she had created for Bors. He was a good man, and she had violated his mind.
Something dropped in her lap. She stared down at a large, worn tooth. Like the scales, it had a pearl sheen, oddly lovely. A gift.
The dragon nudged insistently at her. She put her hand on
its head once again. It fixed one sorrowful golden eye on her. One last message pulsed through to her:
Familiarity. The dragon saw her, and felt they were the same. She shook her head, confused. A lake. The dragon’s reflection in it as it flew overhead, terrible and glorious.
Huffing a last puff of scorching air, the dragon ambled away, free to see one last year of solitary decline.
Guinevere did not know if she had truly done it a kindness. She hoped so. At least it would be free, now, to choose its own death. Was everything old and magical doing the same? Finding holes to crawl into, to slowly fade in peace? She prayed her mercy would not come back to haunt her. An old, battered dragon was still a dragon, and the darkness had always loved them.
But the dragon was not fighting or plotting. It was barely existing. Lonely and weary, she wanted nothing more than to rejoin Brangien and Sir Tristan. Tell them that she had been too late, the dragon already dead.