Men.
The men Guinevere had saved it from so it could have one last winter.
Sleep, it implored her, sending her images of darkness and rest. It wanted her to come with it, still.
“We have to split up,” Guinevere said. “I am sorry. Please, go. Hide.”
The dragon answered her call because it thought she had changed her mind and wanted to burrow deep into the earth and sleep, letting the changing world go on without them. She had promised it peace, and instead she had tricked it into another fight.
She stepped back, her face wet with hot tears. She held out the tooth with her good hand. “Go. I am sorry.” The dragon rolled out a long purple tongue, taking the tooth from her. It limped away into the trees, alone and injured, body and soul.
Fight like a queen, Merlin had said. Merlin, the liar. Merlin, the monster. Merlin, whose advice she should not want or heed. But she kept fighting like a forest witch, like herself, like him, and everyone and everything around her paid the price.
It was for the best. The dragon would be safe from her reach. She leaned against a tree, looking back at where they had come from. The dragon’s trail was impossible to miss, a patch of lumbering destruction. She imagined Ramm, his beard smoldering, his dirty knife ready, stalking toward them.
Cursing herself, she tore out hairs and tied knots of confusion, throwing them over the dragon’s trail. It cost far more than she could afford to cover it up, but she would not let the dragon be found.
Clutching her injured arm to her chest, she began to move in the opposite direction. The dragon had gone east toward the coast, but Guinevere was going west. She tied more knots, dropping them behind her as she went. The world spun in a dizzy blur. It was too much. Her own sense of direction, even her sense of balance, were thrown off by the confusion she had created. She stumbled as far as she could. Minutes or hours passed. She was too disoriented and in too much pain to know. Finally, when she could no longer smell smoke or even see it, she collapsed next to a tree and closed her eyes to rest for a minute. Just a minute.
* * *
“Guinevere? Guinevere! What are you doing here?”
She peeled her eyes open. Everything was fuzzy, as though viewed through a veil. She lifted her good hand to her face to pull away the veil but there was nothing there. Mordred leaned closer and she patted his cheek. “What are you doing here?” she asked.
“I was looking for something. I saw smoke so I came to investigate, and then I found a very confusing trail that demanded I not notice or follow it, so naturally I followed it. What happened?”
“I do not want to say. Not right now.” She tried to stand, then gasped in pain and sat back down.
“Your arm.” Mordred sounded upset. She did not like it. He was supposed to be smiling, trying to kiss her. “Try to relax.” He took her wrist in one hand and her elbow in the other. “I did this for Arthur, once. And he did it for me. Twice. So now we will be even, I suppose.”
“Did what?” Guinevere asked.
Mordred pulled and twisted.
She gasped in shock as the pain flared incandescent and then lessened to almost nothing. Whatever had been wrong with her shoulder was fixed. “That hurt.” She slapped Mordred’s side while he wrapped a strip of cloth around her shoulder and bound her arm to her waist. “I like it better when we kiss.”
“What?” Mordred paused, his fingers light against the skin of her wrist.
“This is a bad dream. I do not want this one.” The edges of her vision were still hazy. When she tried to speak, it took several seconds for her tongue to catch up to her words. She wanted to wake up.
“You prefer the ones where we kiss.” The laughter in his tone made her smile. She had missed the way he could say things without saying them, could laugh without laughing, could confuse her in the most aggravatingly delicious ways.
“Yes. This is— Mordred, I hurt the dragon. It is sad now, and it is my fault. And I hurt someone, he was bad but what I did might have been worse, and the dragon burned another bad man, and—” She could not see anymore, but this time because of tears. She hated this dream. Hated that her feelings had invaded this space, too. She wanted an escape, a sleep without guilt. But her guilt was too strong and it followed her here. “I am as bad as Merlin.”
“Far prettier, though.”
Guinevere glared, or tried to, but then the world was spinning again, blue and brown and orange, and she could not focus. She anchored herself to the green of Mordred’s eyes. “I am being serious.”
“As am I. You are not as bad as Merlin.” Mordred shifted closer and she lost his gaze, but it was nice being next to him. She felt less like she was about to tip off the edge of the world and tumble into the sky.
She rested her head on his shoulder. “You asked me who gets to define wrong and why.”
“I did? And what did you tell me?”
“I did not have an ans
wer. I still do not. But I can feel it. Right and wrong. Only after, though. Why can I not feel what will be wrong before I do it?”