The Round Table Hall smelled of damp stone, old wax, and the chill that settled into rooms where men had spent three hundred years arguing over who sat closest to the salt.
By mid-morning, thin white light cut through the high lancet windows, slicing across the long oak trestles in pale bars that caught dust kicked up by the guards shifting their pikes outside.
Arthur stood at the head of the board, her arms flat against the wood, her fingers spread just enough to anchor her weight.
She didn’t look at the men filing in.
She didn’t have to.
She knew the exact cadence of Kay’s boots—heavy, flat-footed, complaining about the damp—and the lighter, almost silent tread of Galahad, who moved like he expected the floorboards to offer an opinion.
When the heavy oak doors finally latched shut with a dull thud, Arthur didn’t call for order.
Silence simply accumulated until it grew heavier than speech.
“The midsummer assembly will proceed,” Arthur said.
Her voice was level, stripped of the tone she used when she wanted the bailey to hear her.
“We will host the usual cattle.
The southern barons will bring their daughters to stare at the tapestries.
The merchants from the western ports will bring their ledgers to complain about road taxes.
We will provide three hogs, four casks of sour cider from the upper orchards, and enough lute music to convince visiting legates that we spend our lives in a state of agreeable idiocy.”
Kay let out a dry, rattling cough from the third chair down.
“And the official reason for turning the Great Hall into a rabbit warren of masked strangers, Sire?”
“To celebrate recent victories,” Arthur said, her green eyes fixed on the ink stain near the center of the board.
“To strengthen noble relations.
To encourage trade, diplomacy, and the health of the realm.
The court will accept it because the court prefers any excuse to buy new velvet.”
She waited.
Her gaze swept once around the table—over Gawain’s stiff posture, over Bedivere’s weathered hands, over Lancelot’s quiet stillness—before her fingers tightened against the oak.
“Dismiss the junior officers,” Arthur said.
A shuffling scrape of iron-shod boots followed as squires and minor banner-men backed toward the doors, their shoulders dropping three inches before the iron rings clicked home from the outside.
When only the core remained, Arthur stayed standing.
“This is not a celebration,” she said softly.
The silence in the hall changed.
It stopped being the absence of noise and became dense, the kind of quiet that precedes an unsealing of tombs.
“A masquerade,” Arthur continued, her voice barely carrying past the first four chairs, “causes people to drink three measures more than they ought.
It causes them to lean in close when they should keep their distance.
It makes them boast in corners where they think the candlelight is too dim to read their coats of arms.
Masks do not hide people, gentlemen.
They make them careless.”
She looked straight at Kay.
“Servants hear everything while they pour wine.
Musicians hear everything while tuning strings in the galleries.
Dancers hear everything while catching their breath between measures.
People guard themselves against a crown, Kay.
They guard themselves against a king’s standard.
Few people ever think to guard themselves against a dancer.”
Arthur’s hand moved across the table, touching the edge of a blank parchment.
“Kay,” she murmured.
“Watch the military nobles from the Welsh marches.
They have been buying extra grain for their destriers since the spring thaw, and I want to know whose corn they expect to grind.
Bedivere, keep your eyes on trade guilds near the east gate; the salt merchants are growing fat on loans they have no intention of repaying before autumn.
Lancelot, foreign legates will bring translators—listen to what the translators say when they think nobody understands the native tongue.”
She paused, her gaze drifting toward light by the window.
“Rowena,” she added, though the princess had not moved from her corner by the sideboard, “listen to administrators and minor scribes.
They are the ones who know where the silver is buried.”
She looked at Galahad.
His young face was set in an expression of intense solemnity.
“And you, Galahad.
Do nothing.
Wander through the crowd like you’ve lost your wits or your purse.
If someone looks strange, look stranger.
If someone speaks quietly, lean in and nod until they tell you more than they intended.”
Arthur’s hand lifted from the wood, her fingers curling into a loose fist.
“There will be no interrogations,” she said, her voice dropping into a register that brooked no misinterpretation.
“No drawn swords in corridors, and no heavy-handed inquiries in the dark.
We are not hunting traitors this week; we are letting them talk until they name themeselves.”
She turned away from the board before anyone could answer, her boots clicking against the flags as she walked toward the high gallery.
“The meeting is ended.”
The silence dissolved into the loud scraping of heavy iron-bound chairs and the low rumble of men eager to leave the cold air of the Great Hall.
Mordred lingered only until Arthur vanished through the high archway, then slipped past Kay and Bedivere into the drafty side corridor.
The heat of the council room gave way to the damp chill of the eastern tower.
She walked down the vaulted passage, her knuckles brushing sweating granite walls until the sound of guards’ boots faded.
The transition from the Great Hall to the upper scriptorium meant climbing seventy-two stone steps that smelled of dry sheepskin and cold grease.
By the time Mordred reached the heavy walnut door of the workrooms, her lungs burned with that high-altitude sting she still hadn’t trained out of her ribs.
Rowena was already there.
She sat at the long trestle table with her sleeves pinned back by bone bodkins, an array of brass instruments and a single silver coin laid out before her like instruments of minor surgery.
“Levitation,” Rowena said without looking up as Mordred let herself in, “changes force.
It is crude leverage—you reach out with your will and push against mass until the earth forgets it has a claim on the object.”
She reached out with two fingers, sliding the coin an inch across the grain.
“Weight reduction is more subtle,” Rowena continued, her voice dry and stripped of pedagogical warmth.
“You do not alter mass; you alter interaction.
You teach iron or gold to ignore the pull.”
She picked up the coin, held it between thumb and forefinger for a single heartbeat, and set it back down.
“Transfiguration,” she said, raising dark eyes to meet Mordred’s, “is different.
You do not change substance.
You change form.”
Her fingers hovered over metal.
For a second, the coin shimmered, its edges blurring into a greasy smear of amber light before snapping back into focus as a solid gold ring.
Before Mordred could blink, the ring elongated, notched itself at the joint, and became a heavy, two-pronged brooch with a tiny pin of yellow wire.
Another flick of the wrist turned it into a flat, jointed bracelet, cool and heavy, before it settled back into the round disc of a standard sovereign.
“Gold,” Rowena said, her voice dropping into a flat, instructional drone, “remains gold.
Atomic density is identical.
You are simply teaching the lattice to fold differently.”
Mordred stared at the coin.
Rowena nudged a small tray of scrap trial-gold toward her, along with an old, worn gold seal coin from Arthur’s desk.
Mordred picked up the trial-gold first.
Beneath her focus, the scrap softened, shifting from a flat leaf into a lumpy button.
Encouraged, she reached for Arthur’s gold seal coin, focusing her will on the heavy face of the metal until the king’s crest flattened out, buckling into a misshapen, half-formed dish.
Jewelry, she thought.
Ornate fastenings.
Small clasps that won’t slip under tension.
Pins.
Hooks that hold fast without needing a smith’s forge.
Rowena watched her.
The princess’s pen stopped scratching against the margin of her ledger.
She saw the moment Mordred’s pupils contracted—not with confusion, but with that quiet comprehension that usually came right before someone rewrote the rules of an exercise.
“…What?” Rowena asked, her voice dropping an octave.
Mordred’s mouth twitched into a slow grin.
“Nothing.”
Rowena’s pen did not return to paper.
She stared at the girl for three long seconds, her expression hardening into settled regret.
Then she stood up, gathered her brass calipers into her leather satchel, and walked toward the door without another word.
“Where are you going?” Mordred called after her.
If I do not return within twenty minutes, tell Arthur my notes are under the third flagstone from the altar.”
The door clicked shut, the heavy oak bolt sliding home as Rowena went down the spiral stair to rejoin the administrative wing.
Mordred let out a slow breath, scooped up the trial-gold and the ruined gold seal, and slipped out the side exit.
She walked down the gallery to her own private chambers, pushing open the heavy timber door to set her tools down on the oak table.
Maeve stepped in right behind her.
She didn’t knock.
She moved with a heavy grace that belonged more to an animal than a courtier, her dark green wool tunic smelling of damp pine needles and scorched earth.
She closed the door behind her with her heel, her arms crossed over her ribs, her eyes fixed on Mordred with an expression that combined territorial hostility with a glint of amusement.
“So,” Maeve said.
Mordred leaned against the edge of her table, hands tucked into the pockets of her riding trousers.
“So what?”
“How much gold do you have?”
Mordred blinked.
“What?”
Maeve didn’t answer with words.
She reached into the deep pocket of her wool skirt, hauled out a grease-stained leather sack that looked like it had been dragged through a peat bog, and dropped it onto the table with a dull thud.
The pouch hit the wood and rolled, disgorging six heavy, irregular lumps of native ore and a dozen coins stamped with the profile of a long-dead emperor whose nose had been beaten flat with a hammer.
Mordred stared at the pile.
“Where did those come from?”
Maeve’s face stayed smooth, her green eyes wide.
“My savings.”
“Your savings,” Mordred repeated flatly.
“Druids,” Maeve said, leaning her hip against the corner of the table and picking up a rough gold nugget with thumb and forefinger, “do not receive a regular stipend from the Lord Treasurer.
We take what soil provides.”
Mordred didn’t ask further.
Experience had taught her that asking Maeve where she acquired anything heavier than a turnip led to a three-hour conversation about ancient blood-debts and the legal status of sacred groves under pre-Roman common law.
“You’re making jewelry,” Maeve announced, sliding the leather pouch across the grain until it bumped against Mordred’s knuckles.
“Rowena said—”
“Rowena,” Maeve interrupted, pitching her voice into a dry imitation of the princess, “is an academic.
She thinks metal is something you look at through a brass tube and measure with a ruler.
Metal is meat, Mordred.
You have to tell it what to do before it remembers it’s just dirt.”
What followed was twenty minutes of pure frustration.
Mordred’s first attempt at a ring resulted in a lump of gold that looked like a badly scorched pewter spoon.
Her second attempt—an ambitious pass at a thin neck-chain—coagulated halfway through the transmutation into six inches of solid wire that bit into the grain of the table like a spring trap.
“Too much heat,” Maeve muttered.
She stood right behind her now, chin nearly touching Mordred’s shoulder as she watched metal twitch under the girl’s fingers.
“You’re treating it like a forge fire.
Relax your wrist.
You’re not punching a hole through an infantry line; you’re convincing a stubborn dog to roll over.”
“I hate this,” Mordred muttered, her teeth clicking together as another attempt at a filigree brooch melted down into something resembling a horseshoe.
“Keep going,” Maeve murmured, her breath warm against the shell of Mordred’s ear.
“Or I’ll tell Arthur you spent the morning trying to turn her spare riding boots into silver spoons.”
On the fourth try, something clicked.
Mordred stopped fighting metal and watched how raw gold caught afternoon light, letting her hand steady.
Instead of forcing the lump to obey through willpower, she let her instincts soften, feeling where metal wanted to stretch and yield.
Her fingers twitched.
The ugly lump of native ore flattened out, thinned its margins, and began twisting upon itself in a series of tiny, tight loops.
When light hit it, the gold caught the gray northern sun and threw it back in sharp, delicate lines that looked like fine metalwork rather than something hammered out in a rush.
Maeve reached out, her fingers brushing Mordred’s wrist to stop the work.
She picked up the finished piece—a narrow band of interlinked gold leaves that looked delicate enough to crush under a thumb, yet had the cold weight of hammered metal—and turned it over in her palm.
Her eyebrows went up.
A slow smile touched the corner of her mouth.
“Well,” Maeve said, her voice dropping into something close to approval.
“You aren’t useless.”
The second sack—the one Maeve had dragged into Mordred’s room while Mordred wrestled with gold—wasn’t leather.
It was rough-woven hemp, tied at the neck with green vine that still had damp leaves clinging to the knots.
Mordred eyed the sack with the deep suspicion of someone who knew that whenever Maeve said prepared, someone usually ended up wet, cold, or tied to a beech tree in a thunderstorm.
“What is that?” Mordred asked, pointing a gold-smeared finger at canvas.
“Cotton,” Maeve said simply, reaching down and tipping the sack over.
A grey-white cascade of raw bolls spilled across the oak table, smelling of dry earth and sun-warmed dust.
Mordred stared at the pile.
Then she looked up at Maeve.
“Why are you carrying raw cotton around in a sack like a wandering peddler?”
“Because,” Maeve said, her tone serene in the way she got whenever she was about to break a rule, “the court tailor is a cousin of Agravain’s, and if he sees you walking into the Great Hall in riding trousers and boots, he will have an apoplexy before the first lute is tuned.”
“Why the dress?” Mordred muttered, arms crossed over her chest as she glared at the pile on the table.
“Arthur wants the hall full of masked bodies.
I could wear a velvet tunic and a domino mask like everyone else.”
Maeve leaned against the table, her head tilting slightly as a slow smile touched her mouth.
“Because you’re going as a woman, obviously.
Don’t you want to be yourself for once?
Actually feel like a woman?”
Mordred stiffened, looking away toward the narrow window.
“Yeah, well…
I am a woman.”
Maeve’s smile widened into something sharper, though devoid of mockery.
She stepped closer, her green eyes fixing on Mordred with an intense, challenging warmth.
“Sure, sure.
So tell me—how exactly do you feel like a woman?”
Mordred’s jaw tightened.
Shut up, she thought to snap back, but the defensive words caught in her throat.
She looked down at her hands—calloused from sword hilts, smeared with gold-dust from Rowena’s transmutations—and back up at Maeve’s steady gaze.
“I don’t know,” Mordred muttered, her voice dropping an octave as her defensive armor slipped an inch.
“It’s…
heavy.
It’s not about wearing velvet or hiding behind a painted fan.
It’s just…
knowing the weight of your own skin without having to pretend you’re built out of iron and bad temper all the time.”
Maeve reached out, her fingers brushing lightly against Mordred’s inner wrist, right where her pulse jumped beneath skin.
“See?” Maeve murmured.
“That wasn’t so hard.
Now put the gown on before I lose my patience.”
Before Mordred could tell her where she could stick her tailor, Maeve’s hands moved.
There was no loom.
No spinning wheel, no wooden spindle, no bench with bone needles.
Maeve simply laid both palms flat against the pile of raw bolls, her fingers splaying out over grey fluff like roots sinking into a damp riverbank.
A low, vibrating hum—felt in the teeth rather than heard—rose from floorboards.
The green vine that tied the sack didn’t break; it unspooled itself, slithering across wood like a living thing before plunging into the heart of the cotton.
Hair-thin shoots of green fiber—fresh, wet with sap, smelling of crushed mint and summer rain—sprouted from stems, weaving through raw bolls with terrifying speed.
It wasn’t sewing.
It wasn’t weaving.
It was growth.
Fibers twisted, locked, and tightened, the living plant shoots saturating pale cotton with rich chlorophyll as they pulled stray bolls into a continuous green thread that coiled around the table leg like a sleeping adder.
As Maeve’s fingers traced a slow pattern in the air above the heap, the thread tightened, darkened, and flattened out into a wide bolt of fabric with the deep hue of a forest floor at dusk—neither green nor grey, but that intermediate shade belonging to things that grow under deep shade.
Within three minutes, the pile of loose bolls was gone.
In its place lay a gown—long-sleeved, high-collared, with a fitted bodice grown around an invisible ribcage, falling away into heavy, pleated skirts that moved with the liquid drape of wet moss.
Mordred backed away from the table until her heels hit stone.
“Put it on,” Maeve said, tossing heavy green fabric across the table like a dead hare.
“I am not wearing a shrub, Maeve.
I have a sword.”
“You have a dress,” Maeve corrected, stepping around the table with her eyes narrowed into two green slits.
“And if you try to wear your sword with that bodice, steel will cut through the side-seams before you reach the second landing.
Hands behind your back.”
“I feel naked,” Mordred snapped, her hands coming up defensively as Maeve reached for the toggles of her leather doublet.
“Good,” Maeve said, her fingers working stiff horn fastenings with efficiency.
“That means nerves are still connected.”
For the next ten minutes, Mordred’s private room sounded like a training yard where two recruits were trying to kill each other with wet towels.
Mordred twisted, ducked, and tried to avoid the reach of the druid, but Maeve was faster, her reflexes moving with the unbothered certainty of someone who spent winters wrestling calves and summers dodging angry foresters.
When the last toggle gave way, the leather doublet hit the floor with a heavy clack.
Mordred stood there in her linen shift for half a second before Maeve jammed heavy green cotton down over her head.
The fabric was cold—not the manufactured chill of linen stored in a chest, but the damp temperature of a spring morning in Welsh hills.
It settled over her shoulders with an instinctive weight, the green bodice tightening around her ribs like a second skin that reminded her where her lungs were without restricting her breath.
Maeve stepped back, head tilted, eyes running down the length of the girl from the crown of her blond hair—which was rebelling against hairpins and falling in long strands down to her shoulder blades—all the way to heavy boots poking out incongruously from beneath the hem of moss-green cotton.
Maeve reached down, grabbed a handful of gold wire Mordred had hammered out five minutes earlier, and pinned it directly into the high collar like a twisted leaf.
“There,” Maeve said, her voice dropping into a dry hum.
“You almost resemble civilization.”
Mordred looked down at her hands.
The sleeves were long, ending in tight cuffs of embroidered green vine-work that seemed to pulse with a faint, lazy warmth against her wrists.
She looked suspiciously at the hem.
“…This isn’t going to disappear halfway through the evening and leave me standing in the middle of the Great Hall in my drawers, is it?”
Maeve looked personally offended.
She drew herself up to her full height, chin lifting with dignity that didn’t quite match the smudge of charcoal across her left cheekbone.
“I am a druid,” Maeve said cold.
She paused.
“…Not a fairy godmother.”
Another pause, longer this time, during which Maeve’s green eyes flicked toward the ceiling and back down with mild calculation.
“It only unravels,” she added, “if you’re caught flirting with someone who isn’t me.”
Mordred froze, her jaw tightening.
“You’re joking.”
Maeve smiled—a slow, sharp flash of white teeth in the dim room.
“…Probably.”
Afternoon light shifted from white to deep gold, slanting through high arrow-slits in Mordred’s chamber and catching dust motes dancing above unspun bolls of cotton.
Maeve’s fingers drifted away from Mordred’s collar, though she didn’t step back.
Her green eyes narrowed slightly, glittering with a sharp edge as she took in the heavy green folds of the newly grown gown.
“We should discuss names,” Maeve said, her voice dropping into a dry cadence.
“The whole point of masks is anonymity, but everyone in the northern marches knows your face and your miserable posture.”
Mordred crossed her arms over the restrictive green bodice, testing the give of fabric against her ribs.
“I’m wearing a mask.
Half the court won’t look past the velvet.”
“The court won’t, but legates and spies will,” Maeve countered, tilting her chin up.
“I am going as Maeve.
It’s my name.
I am not changing it.
It is an old name of power.”
Mordred stared at her for a second, a sardonic flicker touching the corners of her mouth as she weighed the sheer arrogance of it.
“Fine.
I’ll be Morrigan then.”
It’s my name in my previous life after all.
Maeve went still.
The easy slope of her shoulders vanished, her gaze locking onto Mordred with an intensity that made the quiet room feel three degrees colder.
“…That is…” Maeve started, her voice dropping into a low hum.
“…That is…
surprisingly appropriate.”
Mordred blinked, unfazed as she uncrossed her arms and smoothed a heavy fold of moss-green cotton over her thigh.
“I just thought it sounded nice.”
The next hour and a half was the closest Mordred had come to asking Arthur for permission to lead a suicide charge against Saxon iron-walls.
“Stop walking like you’re carrying a dead boar on your left shoulder,” Maeve said, her voice cutting across the room like a whip.
Mordred, who had been attempting to cross her chamber while maintaining what she had been assured was an appropriate noble slouch, stopped dead and glared at the doorway.
“I am walking.”
“You’re marching,” Maeve corrected, walking around her in a wide, critical circle like an appraiser inspecting a three-legged mule at a country fair.
“You’re swinging your right arm like you’re about to draw a broadsword from a gummed scabbard.
Do it again.
And this time, try to remember your hips are attached to the rest of your body.”
Mordred turned, took three steps toward the window, and caught her heel in the hem of heavy green cotton.
She instinctively dropped her center of gravity, her knees bending into a wide stance.
Maeve let out a long sigh and pressed the heels of her hands against her eyes.
“Why are you spreading your legs like that?
You aren’t about to mount a destrier in a bog.
You are standing in a hallway.”
“My balance is off,” Mordred hissed through her teeth.
“There’s no weight on my right thigh.
Where’s the belt supposed to go?”
“There is no belt,” Maeve said, her voice dropping into a level register.
“There is no steel.
There are no weapons tucked into your stockings.
You have a fan, you have a small embroidered handkerchief that smells of lavender, and if anyone tries to bother you, you are expected to look helpless until Kay comes over and rescues you with an insipid remark about the weather.”
Mordred’s right hand twitched toward her empty thigh with an automatic reflex.
“Don’t,” Maeve warned, swatting the girl’s knuckles away.
“Keep your hands together.
Like this.”
She demonstrated—fingers laced loosely over her lower ribs, shoulders dropped, her chin tilted up just enough to look down her nose at anyone standing lower than her.
Mordred copied the posture.
It felt like standing in a splint.
Every time she tried to breathe, the green bodice reminded her she wasn’t wearing three layers of leather and iron plate to hold her together.
“Now,” Maeve said, stepping back and folding her arms.
“Walk toward me.
And when I ask you how you find the quality of mutton at the lower tables, you do not say ‘Aye, it’ll stop the hunger.'”
“What do I say?”
“You say,” Maeve murmured, pitching her voice into a breathy simulation of courtly idiocy, “The kitchens have truly outdone themselves this season, though I confess I always find the red wines of the southern reaches a trifle heavy on the tongue.”
Mordred stared at her for three seconds.
Then she let out a short, bark-like laugh that rattled inkwells on the sideboard.
“I’d rather eat the mutton raw.”
“Then you will spend the evening standing by the pillar in the north gallery looking like a condemned murderer waiting for the drop,” Maeve said, her eyes narrowing with amusement as she stepped in close—too close—until her breath stirred loose strands of blond hair around Mordred’s ears.
She reached up, her fingers light and dry as they brushed the heavy gold wire at Mordred’s collar, straightening the knot with an intimate, unhurried care that ignored every rule of courtly distance.
“My Lord, you look like the queen you ought to be now.” She bit her lip.
“I can’t wait to undress you once this is all done.”
Mordred didn’t move.
She couldn’t.
Between heavy green cotton, the tight bodice, and the sudden closeness of Maeve’s presence, her spatial awareness—usually good at calculating every vector in a room—stalled out.
“You’re insane,” Mordred muttered, though her voice had no teeth in it.
Maeve smiled—a slow, sharp flash of white teeth in the dim room.
“…Probably,” she whispered, stepping back with a final adjustment of the girl’s shoulder seam.
“Acceptable.
That is the highest praise you’re getting from me today.
Now practice your curtsy before I tell Arthur you spent the morning trying to turn her gold seal into a cooking pot.”
Kinda got too excited with this one, making it way too long.