“I know. I can’t see them in the trees, but I can still smell them.”
“You must let me out of here!” Guinevere pleaded. “They want me, not the riches we carry in this party.”
“How do you know that?” Lancelot asked, like he suspected she was telling the truth.
“The Picts are one of the oldest clans. They’ve handed down ancient stories about our kind—yours and mine, Sir Lancelot. They know better than to fight me, or you, head-on. Instead, they will try to lure you away, and they will leave me in this prison to starve. They’ll wait until I’m too weak with hunger and thirst to stop them. They don’t want to kill me. They want to . . .” She stopped here and struggled for a moment. “They want children from me. To strengthen their clan.”
Lancelot uttered a foul curse. She could hear his elevated breathing as he fought with himself. “But if I let you out . . . I don’t know what I’ll do to you. Are you sure that isn’t worse?”
“I’d rather die in an honorable fight with you than be used as a brood mare. At least let me fight,” she said in a strangled voice. “Don’t leave me to face that.”
“If I set you free, you might try to kill me.”
“Please,” Guinevere choked out, desperately trying not to cry. “Please don’t leave me locked up in here. I know you hate me, but don’t abandon me to such a terrible fate.”
Lancelot exhaled sharply. “Stand back,” he ordered.
The walls of the carriage shuddered with massive blows as Lancelot hacked his way through the bottom of the metal-reinforced floor with a sword. When the first blade was ruined, he collected another from a fallen man and started hacking away again.
Three, four, five swords were broken to bits, but finally a large enough gash was opened for Guinevere to squeeze out. When she was freed, they stared at each other, both of them breathless with fear and anger and some other feeling they had no name for yet.
“You saved my life,” Guinevere whispered, overwhelmed by the chance he took by setting her free. “Now I’ll save yours.”
She looked around at the scores of bodies that littered the ground. Armored men from the east were piled on top of the small, blue-painted Pictish people who wore only basic animal skins and carried stone weapons.
So many dead, or run off. Lancelot was the only man to stay behind to defend her, Helen noticed.
Guinevere took Lancelot’s hand and led him away from the senseless waste of life and into the trees.
“A trap,” Lancelot growled, pulling away from her. “You’ll lead me right to them!”
“No. They won’t come near you as long as you are with me,” she explained, trying to stay c
alm. “Look.”
Guinevere held up her other hand. A globe of lightning spasmed inside her cupped palm. Lancelot jumped back momentarily and then moved closer, enchanted by the naked power he saw dancing on her fingertips.
“Why didn’t you use that to get out of the carriage?” he asked, always inquisitive, just like Lucas.
“The metal soldered to the wood of the carriage surrounded me in arcs. My power would have died in the ground,” she said, and then shook her head. “I’ll explain someday, I promise. For now, I need to deal with them.”
Guinevere held her hand aloft and shouted up into the thick branches.
“Do you see this?” she said in a third strange language that Helen also seemed to understand, if only barely. “If I see even one arrow loosed on my companion or me, I will burn your sacred forest to the ground. Do you hear? I will burn your mother goddess like dry tinder, and the sky gods will rule this island forever!”
The sounds of scraping bark and rustling branches added their whispery voices to the wind as the Picts dissolved into the misty distance. Lancelot cocked his head and held very still for a long time, listening and smelling and looking as carefully as he could.
“They’re gone,” he said finally, exhaling with relief.
“Yes,” Guinevere breathed. “They’ve all gone.”
“You saved my life.”
Lancelot and Guinevere stared at each other in amazement, both the Picts and Furies finally out of their way. In that instant, all the burning anger they felt toward each other was replaced by another kind of fire—a tender one that smoldered more than it consumed.
Leaves fell in the forest. The sun moved in the sky and tilted itself perfectly to light up Lancelot’s sapphire eyes. The wind picked up pieces of Guinevere’s long, golden hair and sent it wafting toward Lancelot like strands of sweetly scented silk. They took a step toward each other, both open and ready for the huge gift they saw offered in the other.
They stopped abruptly.