Page 15 of To Love a Dark Lord

The beast ran through the grass, looking like someone had drawn a spooky monster horse onto some bucolic nature painting. He looked out of place. But also, he looked beautiful—his gait quickly reaching a gallop as he ran through the field and toward the woods.

She didn’t know what’d happen to him. But at least he wasn’t rusting away in his stall. Letting out a long breath, Gwen turned and headed back into the keep. She needed coffee. A lot of coffee.

Because today was the day she went to war.

It was midday when Gwen and the others set out, this time on much more normal-looking horses. Eod was running ahead of her. Tim was walking, as he wasn’t coordinated enough to sit on a horse and stay up there. He’d tried a few times before she decided they’d just hike. Lina and Mirkon, Bert’s loyal companions, were in the back, chatting and bickering like the old married couple they were. Mae had stayed behind, saying that road life was not for her, and somebody had to look after the place while everyone went off to war. Gwen couldn’t blame her.

Gwen preferred riding to the city this way, as opposed to in the back of Bert’s cart. It was a lot less bouncy, at any rate. She had picked Sunshine, the mare that she had befriended when she had first arrived. It felt like forever since she had crash-landed in Avalon.

She’d been so afraid. And for good reason. The memory of meeting Mordred for the first time—and how abjectly terrified she’d been of him—made her smile, if a bit morosely. The whole thing had seemed so impossible. And she supposed it still was. If this turned out to be some fever dream, and she woke up in a hospital bed learning that all her friends here were the staff, and Eod was the therapy dog that came to visit her, she still wouldn’t be surprised.

There was even a part of her that missed Grinn. Missed that asshole cat who had caused so much turmoil in her life. She hoped he made it back to hell to his family, but she knew that things like that didn’t just happen because she wished them. Life wasn’t fair. Grinn certainly had taught her that.

You know what else didn’t feel real? The fact that her panic attacks were gone. She still didn’t know why, but she suspected she had Avalon’s magic to thank for it. It was such a relief.

Her parents would be proud of her.

That brought a small pang to her heart. She hoped they were okay. Idly, she wondered if she could send them a letter somehow. Just something to tell them that she was alive and all right. At least for now. Give it a week, that might change. In fact, now that she thought about it, it was probably for the best they didn’t know anything. It might just end up causing more pain than it was worth. When she never showed back up, they’d think she was probably dead from some mysterious abduction and eventually mourn her loss and move on with life. If they thought she was out there, somewhere, they might never stop searching. They might never let go.

It was always something she wondered about when she watched Peter Pan as a kid. What about the parents? Didn’t they notice Wendy and the others were missing? Weren’t they panicking? But they got their kids back eventually, after all. Plus, a bonus kid, if she wasn’t mistaken.

Hi, Mom. Yeah, we went missing, sorry about that. But hey, meet Peter. You always wanted a third son, right? Maybe that’s what she should’ve done with Mordred. Hi, Mom, I’m home. Meet my boyfriend. Turns out I’m into older men. Older, stabbier men. She snorted to herself.

“What? Everything okay?” Bert asked from the horse next to her. Sunshine kept trying to eat the hay out of Bert’s pant leg, so Gwen had to make sure to leave some distance between them. His own horse was eyeing him like a midday snack.

“Oh, nothing. Just thinking about home. And how ridiculous all this is.” She smiled at him, doing her best to be reassuring. “I’m all right.”

“It’s a big thing, what you’re doing. It’s all right to be reflective about it.” Bert gestured out at the woods around them. “But you remember how this place was when you got here—muted and trapped in a state of decay. None of this color, none of this beauty. Don’t forget what you’ve done for us already and how much you mean to Avalon.”

“Mordred broke the Crystal, not me. I tried and failed.”

“Yeah, but he did it because of you. My friends would still be trapped in there, and I’d still be on the shelf in that general store if you hadn’t come along. This island picked you for a reason. And I have faith that you’ll see us through.” She could hear the smile in his voice, even if his rusted metal jack o’lantern of a head never moved.

“I hope you’re right.”

“It hasn’t led you astray yet, has it?”

She snorted again and shot him a look. “Grinn is dead. Doc is gone. Mordred’s imprisoned. Lancelot is dead.”

“One of those things isn’t a bad thing,” Bert retorted. “And I’ll let you pick which one.”

“Fair.” Her half-laugh ended in a sigh. “Is it weird that I miss all of them?”

“It’s weird that you miss one of them, and I’ll let you pick which one.”

That got her to laugh for real this time. The more she got to know Bert, the more she liked him. He was still overly zealous about a so-called revolution, but if she’d spent three hundred years hiding in plain sight, she’d probably be a little twitchy about the subject too. “What was it like?”

“Hum?” He pulled his foot back out of the way of his horse’s hungry mouth, grumbling something about vultures.

“Being stuck on that shelf for, like, three hundred years. What was it like?”

“Boring. Really, really boring.” Bert finally convinced his horse to stop trying to eat him and put his foot back in the stirrup. “I wasn’t there for all that time, though. I was in some lady’s shed for a while. Then I was a garden decoration. Then I was in an attic, and then I wound up in that store.”

“What did you…like…do for all that time?”

“Told myself stories. Like I said, I don’t sleep—I don’t dream, not really—but I can tune out. If it wasn’t for that, I’d have gone insane, I expect.” He chuckled. “And I told myself that my waiting would pay off. That if I just held on a little longer, we’d all be saved. Lo and behold, I was right.”

“I’m not Joan of Arc.”

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