Children of the May (Children of the May Book 1)

Chapter Thirty-Four: Winter on the Island

I slipped down the broken stairs to where the two of them lay. The beast's body was no longer twitching, but Mordred was alive. He was unconscious, his face solemn, covered in Hilda and the beast's blood. I kicked his leg and fell back onto the grass. His hands were locked around his gore-covered sword.

And then I began to cry. There was no need for this, no need for me to be in the world anymore. I'd offered myself as sacrifice, he'd had no reason to take the holy woman. When I found my breath and opened my eyes I saw that, quite unsummoned by me, the watersnakes were working on Mordred's chest, encouraging the tissues to reknit. I was glad he was unconscious: I didn't want to know how he would try to justify what he had done.

When the snakes decided they had done enough I hauled his body back up to the hut. I could not bear to look at him in the firelight. I laid him by Hilda's bloodied corpse, and sat by the fire with the baby in my arms.

When Christian woke during the night I gave him water from my finger. The calming sensation of his thirst being quenched was my only rest.

The stormed passed over. When the sun rose it came into an icy blue sky.

Mordred woke a little after the dawn, shivering with the cold. He groaned at the pain in his chest, and again when he saw the corpse of the hermitess beside him. He got to his feet, pushing himself up with the hilt of his stained sword, and went outside. I sat with the baby, feeding the fire from Hilda's little wood store.

Outside, a blade broke the cold, wet earth.

An hour later Mordred came back into the hut, covered in dirt. He threw his sword to the ground. It was blunted and bent from digging. He staggered to Hilda's body and took it by one cold hand. He was too weak to drag her on his own. I took the other hand and helped him pull her into the day.

We buried Hilda in the grave Mordred had dug for her on top of the bald hill.

'Ashes to ashes, dust to dust,' he said when it was done, and the earth was piled upon her. 'May the Lord Jesus take His faithful servant into His embrace.'

'H-H-H-Here lies H-Hilda. One hundred y-y-y-years the hermitess of Avalon.'

I fetched the sword from the hut, and drove it into the ground above her head. The hilt made a cross against the sky. It felt like a fitting gesture.

The Questing Beast's remains had disappeared from the bottom of the hill. Lady Bertilak lay there in its place. She was cold, dead, but looked exactly as Avalon remembered her on the day she had arrived with Merlin and Hilda. A trickle of blood had dried to the side of her mouth.

Mordred was going to walk past her, but I stopped him. I didn't want to give him Christian to hold, so I went to put the baby on the ground, but Mordred stopped me with pleading eyes. Reluctantly, I handed the child to him.

My back and legs ached from dragging Mordred up to the shelter, but I managed to get Lady Bertilak to the edge of the river, which was still swollen from the storm. I looked down at her face before giving her back to the waters of Avalon, the island that she'd hoped to destroy. The current caught her, and she was carried slowly downstream.  

* * *

We found them in the bathhouse, the only warm place left in the whole of Castle Eudaimon. The hot spring under the island, it seemed, had not been a lie. They were bruised and battered, but they were all alive. Only Aglinda and Alisander had escaped the forest unscathed. With the robustness of the very young, they dashed to us when we came through door, full of garbled tales of heroic deeds accomplished in the dark.