The Wicked Day by Mary Stewart

Author:Mary Stewart
Language: eng
Format: epub

This, dry as spice-dust, made Lamorak, even through the grief and rage of the moment, look sharply at the younger man. He said, slowly, as if making a totally new discovery: "You — why, you're one of them.

Her own son. And you talk as if… as if…"

"I am different," said Mordred, shortly. "Here, your cloak. No, that bloodstain's mine, you needn't mind it. Gaheris stabbed my hand. Now, for the Goddess' sake, man, go, and leave him to me."

"What will you do?"

"Lock the room so that the women don't screech the place down when they wake, and get Gaheris out the way he came in. You came in through the main gate, of course? Do the guards know you're still here?"

"No. I left in due discourse, and then… I have a way in. She used to leave a window open when she knew…"

"Yes, of course. But then, why trouble—?" He was going to ask. Why trouble to drug the women? but then he saw that Morgause's sexual affairs would necessarily have to be hidden from the abbess. The holy women could hardly be expected to connive at them.

"I'll have to leave court, of course," said Lamorak. "You will tell the King—?"

1"I'll report exactly what happened. I don't imagine the King will blame you. But you'd do well to get away until Gawain and the others have been settled. Good luck and good speed."

Lamorak, with one last look towards the silent bedroom door, went from the room. Mordred glanced once again at the sleeping women, propped Gaheris's blood-stained sword in a shadowed corner where a faldstool hid it from view, then went back into the queen's bedchamber and shut the door behind him.

He found Gaheris on his feet, swaying like a drunken man and looking vaguely round him as if for something he had forgotten.

Mordred took him by the shoulder and drew him, unresisting, away from the bedside. Stooping, he twitched the stained coverlet across to cover the dead body. Gaheris, rigid as a sleepwalker, let himself be led from the room.

Once in the antechamber, and with the door shut, he spoke for the first time, thickly. "Mordred. It was right. It was right to kill her. She was my mother, but she was a queen, and to do thus… to bring shame on us and on all our line… No one can gainsay my right, not even Gawain. And when I kill Lamorak —that was Lamorak, wasn't it? Her — the man?"

"I didn't see who it was. He snatched up his clothes and went."

"You didn't try to hold him? You should have killed him."

"For the love of Hecate," said Mordred, "save all that for later. Listen, I thought I heard footsteps. It could be time for the night office. Anyone could come by."

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