The midday sun sat high over Camelot when Mordred stepped out into the courtyard in her full armor.
Secret of Pedigree was sealed around her head, the silver plates and horned shape throwing a sharp shadow across the stone.
To a courtier passing by, she looked like a walking siege tower.
Inside the bucket, she was humming a jaunty tune to herself.
Maeve had not been happy about it.
“You’re spending the afternoon with the ledger woman,” she’d said while pulling the last strap tight, her voice deceptively light and her green eyes dark with suspicion.
“Try not to come back smelling of ink and quiet judgment.”
“I’ll do my best,” Mordred had said through the visor, her voice metallic and muffled.
Maeve had given her a long, evaluating look in response—the kind she usually saved for volatile alchemy pots.
‘She’s going to smell the cookshop on me anyway,’ Mordred thought, crossing the inner court as the steel plates clanked softly together.
‘And then I’ll get the whole ‘I told you the bureaucrat was trouble’ speech while she pretends she doesn’t care about a woman who talks about grain percentages.’
She waited by the southern gatehouse as planned.
Princess Rowena walked up with her usual unhurried precision.
Her dark hair was bound back, her blue gown practical for walking, and a leather satchel full of quills hung across her chest.
A small leather wand holster sat at her hip, and she carried three thick ledgers tucked under her arm.
She looked Mordred up and down once, taking in the horned helmet without a flicker of surprise.
“Punctual,” Rowena said.
“A promising start.”
“I aim to impress,” Mordred said from behind her visor, her voice cheerful despite the fearsome armor.
“Lead the way, Princess.
I hear merchants turn honest when a Round Table knight shows up.
Time to test that out.”
‘Please let that actually be true,’ Mordred thought.
‘I didn’t strap on fifty pounds of iron just to listen to guys lie about rain damage for three hours.’
A faint smile touched Rowena’s mouth.
“They get quieter.
Honesty costs extra.”
The Lower City didn’t smell like the upper castle courts.
The high courts smelled of beeswax, lavender, and Arthur’s boiled carrots.
Down here, the streets smelled of roasting sausage, wet dog, sour ale, and the salt breeze coming off the harbor.
Rowena walked like the noise wasn’t even there, keeping the steady pace of an auditor entering a market under investigation.
The commoners—bakers, blacksmiths, street kids, and potters—gave the Welsh princess plenty of room.
They recognized that uniform and those books.
They meant fees, inspections, and tax dates.
And today she brought along a horned silver shadow that tilted its head politely at children as it passed.
Mordred didn’t march.
She sauntered.
‘Oh, look at this place,’ Mordred thought, scanning the street through her T-shaped visor slot.
‘No solar magic speeches, no moody druids, and not one golden lion flag anywhere.
Just normal people hustling for a living.
I love it.’
Near the corner of a busy alley, a wooden cart stacked high with crates of turnips and apples gave out.
An iron wheel slammed into a deep rut, the main axle snapped with a crack of dry oak, and the whole frame tipped sideways, sending heavy timber and loose fruit sliding toward Rowena and a handful of kids playing in the street.
There wasn’t time to haul the cart back by main force in heavy plate.
Instinct kicked in.
‘Shortcut time,’ Mordred thought, leveling her pulse.
‘Thank you, Maeve, you insane plant addict…
Don’t blow up, don’t blow up…’
Mordred drove her gauntleted boot hard into the cobbles.
She sent a tight pulse of mana straight down through the stone beneath them.
She had no natural feel for nature magic, but forcing her raw reservoir of mana through the basic formulas Maeve had hammered into her worked just fine.
Thick, living green vines and braided roots tore out from the cracks in the street, forming a woven cradle under the falling weight.
The timber settled into the roots with a heavy thud instead of crushing the pavement.
The crowd gasped.
The cart owner backed up two steps, muttering prayers under his breath.
A moment later, the green roots dried up into scrapings of dry moss and fell away.
“Woah, easy there!” Mordred said through her helmet, catching the edge of the tilted frame with one iron hand.
‘Act like it’s just heavy armor strength,’ she reminded herself, turning her visor toward the driver.
“If you drop those apples, the Princess is going to make us count every one of them.
And she has a quill.”
The old driver froze, staring at the horned faceplate.
He held his apron tight in both hands, waiting for a fine or a guard’s cudgel.
A light chuckle echoed out from inside the bucket.
“A-apologies, My Lord!” the driver stammered out, bowing fast.
“The axle…
I don’t know how it caught!”
“Happens,” Mordred said, picking a green pear out of an upright crate with her steel fingers.
She dropped a silver piece into the man’s hand—well past what the fruit was worth.
“Fix the axle with the extra.”
Mordred tossed the pear up, caught it, and held it out to Rowena.
“Entry fee for his street.
Eat up, Princess.
You look like you live on ink fumes.”
Rowena didn’t take it right away.
She looked down at the cobbles where the vines had dissolved, then raised her eyes back to the helmet.
“Timely,” Rowena said, taking the pear with a slow hand.
She ran her thumb across the skin once before putting it in her satchel.
“You overpaid by three coppers.”
“I paid for the good mood,” Mordred said, stepping up beside her as they kept moving.
“People give you real numbers when they like you, Rowena.
When they’re scared of you, they just hide the grain under the floor.”
Rowena didn’t reply to that.
She shifted her satchel and kept her eyes on the horned helmet while they walked down the lane.
Their main stop was a grain warehouse down by the river—a large timber barn that smelled of threshing dust, damp burlap, and fat dock rats.
Master Varley stood on the wooden loading dock.
He was a broad man in a thick velvet coat, with greasy thumbs and a nervous eye-twitch.
Three heavy guards with wooden clubs stood behind him.
“Ah, Princess Rowena!” Varley called out, wiping his forehead with a rag.
Though I’m afraid you caught us right in the middle of a recount.
The winter harvest was…
well, disappointing.
Deficits across the board.”
Rowena opened a ledger on a nearby barrel.
“The gate record from two weeks ago shows eighty wagons of northern wheat entered this gate under your mark, Master Varley.
Your paper here says forty.”
Varley laid a hand over his chest.
“Rats, Your Highness!
Rot in the bins!
The weather has been brutal—”
“Master Varley,” Rowena began, her voice crisp as she took a step toward the dock, while the three guards adjusted their grip on their clubs.
Mordred didn’t draw a weapon.
She didn’t raise her voice.
She walked past Rowena, stepped right onto the wooden dock with a heavy clatter of iron boots, and leaned her shoulder against a pile of grain sacks.
She turned her visor toward the largest guard.
“Nice clubs,” Mordred said casually to him through the plate.
“Oak?
Or ash?”
The guard blinked, looking down at his stick and back up at the silver horns.
“Uh.
Oak, cap’n.”
“Good weight,” Mordred said, tapping her chin with a steel finger.
“Hard on the wrists though, standing around out here all day.
You guys get break times, or does your boss just let you cook in your boots?”
Varley’s smile vanished.
“Ser Knight!
I am a guild master—”
“I can tell!” Mordred turned her helmet toward him, her tone light despite the demon silhouette.
“Rich food, fine velvet, hint of imported brandy…
Which brings me to one little thing.”
She stepped off the sacks and took two quiet steps toward him.
She didn’t touch her sword.
But as she bent down slightly, the narrow slit of her visor locked onto his face, and Varley stopped breathing for a second.
“You see,” Mordred said softly, her voice carrying an easy, conversational purr inside the iron, “my friend Rowena over there handles numbers.
She knows where every grain goes.
And if she goes back up to the castle and tells King Arthur that forty wagons of wheat rotted away…”
Mordred leaned an inch closer.
“…Arthur gets sad.
And when Arthur gets sad, he stops eating his carrots and starts sending knights down here to look around himself.
Guys like Gawain.
You know Gawain?
Big guy?
Smells like hot iron?
Broke his own nose yesterday because he was having a bad afternoon?”
Varley swallowed hard.
The guards behind him shifted their feet, letting the tips of their clubs drop toward the boards.
“Now,” Mordred said, putting a heavy iron glove on Varley’s velvet shoulder, letting just enough weight rest there to make his knees bend a fraction.
“I don’t want Gawain down here kicking your doors in.
You don’t want that either.
So…
why don’t we check the back room?
The one behind those sacks?
I bet if we look real close, we’ll find those missing forty wagons just waiting to get logged.”
Nobody said anything on the dock for three long seconds.
Varley stared into the faceplate.
Mordred tilted her helmet slightly to the side and opened her hands.
“I…
ah…” Varley wiped his forehead again, fast.
“It’s possible my clerk put the second lot in the wrong ledger!
A mistake with the books!”
“There you go!” Mordred turned toward Rowena, gesturing at the merchant.
“Mistake with the books!
See?
People get honest fast if you give them a chance to fix it!”
‘She does the math, I stand here looking like an iron menace, and suddenly everyone remembers how to count,’ Mordred thought as Varley hurried inside to pull out the real papers.
‘I could get used to this.’
Rowena stood at the bottom of the ramp, her quill held still above the page.
“You didn’t even threaten him,” Rowena said under her breath.
“Threats take too much work,” Mordred said, leaning against the door frame.
“You threaten a guy, he hates your guts.
You give him a way out of his own mess, he thinks you did him a favor.”
Rowena adjusted her glasses, her eyes fixed on the armor.
They did the same thing at two smaller storehouses along the eastern wall.
Rowena handled the tallies; Mordred’s presence and quiet comments through the visor handled the rest.
No swords came out.
Nobody yelled.
‘This is almost easy,’ Mordred thought as they left the last barn behind.
‘Nobody throwing spears at my horse.
No sun beams in the face.
Just books and sweating merchants.
I might actually like paperwork.
Better not let Maeve hear that.’
As they hit the main street again, Mordred’s stomach gave a long, loud rumble that echoed right off her breastplate.
‘Traitor,’ she thought.
‘We had a real meal yesterday.
Rowena glanced sideways, the corner of her mouth twitching.
“There’s a good cookshop two streets over,” Rowena said.
“They’re used to knights, and the plates are full.”
Mordred stopped in her tracks and put a hand over her chest plate.
“Princess Rowena,” she said, “I might have to take back everything I’ve said about castle auditors.”
‘God bless this woman and her memory for food spots,’ Mordred thought.
‘Maeve is going to hate her even more now.’
The shop was small, warm, and smelled like roasted bird, rendered fat, and fresh bread.
Rowena ordered without asking and paid out of her own purse before Mordred could reach for a coin.
They took a small table in the back corner, away from the rest of the room.
Once they were settled in the shadow of the booth, Mordred reached up, unlatched Secret of Pedigree, and pulled the horned helmet off.
She set the iron down on the bench and shook out her hair with a long breath.
“Air,” Mordred muttered, rubbing her chin.
“I love the gear, but it bakes you alive in there.”
The food was simple and hit the spot.
Mordred went through a quarter of a chicken and half a loaf of bread in minutes, while Rowena ate slower, writing small notes in a leather notebook.
Rowena put her quill down after a bit.
She leaned back, her dark eyes settling on Mordred’s face.
“Green is a strange color for a Round Table knight,” Rowena said quietly.
“Especially one whose raw mana reads like a hot furnace.”
Mordred paused with a piece of chicken halfway to her mouth.
She didn’t shift her stance, but her eyes narrowed a fraction.
“The cart was falling, Rowena.
I used what was right there.”
“You used druid root-magic,” Rowena said softly.
“That takes a long time to pick up from the earth—not something they teach in sword drills.
But when you pushed those roots up, the mana underneath wasn’t green.
It was red.
Dragon blood, Ser Mordred.”
Rowena rested her chin on her fingers, looking straight at her.
“Which gives me a weird set of numbers,” Rowena said.
“King Arthur is thirty-five years old.
For him to have a warrior your age, he would’ve had to be running around in the woods with a forest priestess when he was still a kid holding his first sword—and somehow kept both of you secret from Merlin for twenty years.”
‘Yeah, right,’ Mordred thought, taking a bite of chicken while her brain spun up fast.
‘Arthur was barely managing his own armor at seventeen, let alone hiding a secret kid in the woods.
Plus I came out of a tank five years ago—tell her that and she’ll ask for my birth papers.’
Mordred let out a quiet laugh and leaned over the table, dropping the formal tone now that nobody was listening.
“You’re great with numbers, Rowena, but your court rumor mill is terrible,” Mordred whispered, her eyes bright with dry humor.
“Arthur’s no secret dad.
He’s my uncle.”
Rowena stopped.
Her eyes scanned Mordred’s face—taking in her jaw, her brow line, and the sharp blue of her eyes.
“Well,” Rowena said slowly, staring at her forehead.
“You do look like him.”
‘The Clark Kent trick never fails,’ Mordred thought, keeping her face steady.
‘I am literally his identical copy, but because she isn’t looking for Arthur’s face on a knight in the Lower City, her head won’t make the jump.
Give her the word ‘nephew,’ and suddenly the resemblance makes sense.’
“An unacknowledged sister’s child,” Mordred said, putting just enough truth into it to make it hold up.
“Sent off to be raised on the border—where nature magic is a lot easier to learn from the locals than proper table manners.
Arthur brought me to Camelot to keep an eye on his family, but keeping it quiet stops the High Lords from losing their minds over who gets the chair next.”
Rowena watched her face a second longer, tapping the back of her quill against her fingers.
“A secret nephew from the border,” Rowena said quietly, the edge of a smile showing on her lips.
“That…
actually makes sense.”
‘Makes sense and holds water,’ Mordred thought with a quiet grin inside.
‘Sorry, ‘Uncle’ Arthur.
You just got a dead sister and a foster kid.
You can thank me when I finish fixing your grain supply.’
“You drop my title when nobody’s looking, Ser Mordred,” Rowena noted softly.
“Most knights are scared of saying the wrong thing to a Welsh princess,” Mordred said, leaning back against the bench with a half-smirk.
“I just think life’s too short to salute over chicken stew, Rowena.
Unless you want me to bow every time you pass the salt?”
Rowena let out a short, real laugh.
“The salt is fine.
Just pass it.”
By the time they stepped back out into the street, Mordred had her helmet sealed tight again, the horned shape catching glances from the crowd in the evening light.
The sun had dropped low, throwing long shadows across the stone walls of the keep.
At the gatehouse to the inner court, Rowena paused, holding her satchel against her side.
“I’ll need an escort again next week,” she said, her voice turning practical again.
“The northern traders are coming in, and they don’t move as fast as this lot.”
Mordred gave her a thumbs-up with an armored hand.
“Say the word, Princess.
I’m around.”
‘Of course I’m around.
Free food, local news, and a woman who can spot dragon mana over dinner,’ Mordred thought.
‘Best assignment I’ve had since I got here.’
Rowena’s mouth twitched into that small smile again.
“I figured.”
She turned and headed up the walk toward the offices without looking back.
Mordred watched her blue dress disappear around the stone corner before turning toward her own hall, her heavy boots clanking on the paving stones as the air turned cool.
‘The auditor is smart, the food was good, and I didn’t have to hit anybody,’ Mordred thought, walking up the steps while the helmet tilted as she hummed under her breath.
‘Maeve is still going to question me for an hour and check my cloak for ink.’
She flexed her fingers inside the iron gauntlets, feeling the weight of the day settle into her shoulders.
‘Somewhere out there is a throne, a prophecy, and a mother who thinks I’m her rigged bet,’ she thought, sauntering up the stairs.
‘Today I counted wheat, used borrowed plant tricks, and got a decent meal.
Tomorrow I’ll figure out what I’m actually doing here.
But for now?
Not a bad start.’