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Mordred stormed into the camp bloodstained and full of fury.

The guards at the entrance of the king’s pavilion tried to barr his way, but a glance at Mordred’s face killed their words.  He shouldered past them and into the pavilion, where he had stood just that morning and helped plot the defense. It felt like a year past.

King Arthur was seated on the edge of his bed, already out of his armor, and submitting himself to Guinevere’s ministrations.  Sir Kay was lounging at the foot of the bed, with Sir Gawain leaning against him in an exhausted half-sleep, and Sir Lancelot on his feet making some sort of point.  He had just enough time to register the tableau before the words came spilling out.

“You knew!”

Everyone but the king started, the knights’ hands going to their swords in one motion as they saw Sir Mordred.

Mordred knew what a spectacle he must look; striding in fully-armored, bloodspattered, muddy, looking half-mad.  He felt half-mad.  The words Lady Morgan spoke over her dying paramour had gone straight to his soul, infecting it beyond hope.  He felt the same disconnect as he had the first time he killed a man; as if part of himself had gone cold, and the rest had slipped his control and was running mad as a wasp-stung horse.  

“What’s this, Mordred?” Lancelot said, striding forward.

The king, who alone had yet to move, waved a hand.  “Let him past.”

“Sire-”

“Lance.”  Arthur’s tone was fond, but unyielding.  

Lancelot stepped back, but his hand remained on the hilt of his sword, eyeing Mordred with a suspicion.  They were all looking at him like that, he realized, even the Queen, even Gawain, as if he had returned a stranger and an enemy, instead of one of their beloved own.  Did they know already? Had they known all along? Had they been waiting, watching for the moment when he would-

“Mordred,” he heard Gawain say, and realized he had just been standing there.  His brother was trying to get his attention, but he had eyes only for the king.

“Knights, my queen,” Arthur said.  “Please leave us.”

“Arthur-” Lancelot began, but Arthur silenced his argument with a look.

“I appreciate your care of me,” he said,  holding Lancelot’s gaze. Something passed between them, beyond words.  “However, I must have private conference with my nephew.”

 His gaze swept around to encompass the others.  

“Mordred’s not himself,” Gawain started up, moving as if to step between Mordred and the king.  “Let me-”

“I need to speak with the king.”  Mordred’s voice sounded strange to his own ears, harsh and distant.

Gawain started, but nodded after a moment of hesitation.  “Very well. We’ll speak after, yes?” His hand brushed Mordred’s shoulder as he left the pavilion.

Lancelot followed Gawain, but not before throwing one last glance between Arthur and Guinevere.

“If this is family business,” Kay said, sprawling back onto the king’s bed.  “I think I’m well qualified to participate. It will be nothing I haven’t heard before.”  He shot a glance at Mordred, his lips twisting into a sardonic smile.  

Arthur sighed.  “So long as Sir Mordred minds not, and you keep your peace.”

There was something in Kay’s smile that said he knew.  Mordred forced himself to smile back, but it came out more as a dog’s baring of teeth.  “If you must.”

“I would stay as well,” Guinevere said.  She had bent over Arthur again, examining the wound on his shoulder.  “As your queen and lady wife.”  

Arthur nodded again, this time raising no conditions.  “Come, Mordred,” he said, beckoning. “Tell me what is troubling you.”

Mordred stepped forward, and went down on one knee before his king.  The room was silent, every ear waiting for him to speak, and he could find no words.

“Lady Morgan said I am destined to kill you,” he said at last.  “She told me there was a prophecy, that had been spoken before I was born,”  He kept his head down, eyes fixed on the floor. A part of him hoped that the king would fly into a rage, rise to his feet and name Mordred a traitor for believing the words of a sworn enemy.

“You believe her.”  There was no accusation in Arthur’s voice, no disbelief.  Behind him, Guinevere’s hands stilled and Kay stared at the ceiling of the pavilion with a practiced look of nonchalance.

The last vestiges of Mordred’s hope dissolved to ash in his mouth.  “She told me she read it herself, in the loom of the future, when she stood at your side.” “If she had told it to me in rage, or spite, I would never have listened.  But she was… she was... ” He shook his head. There had been a deep grief to Lady Morgan, one he had never imagined the enchantress was capable of, a grief that went beyond the lover that lay dead in her arms, beyond even the battle that would make the earth itself bleed with the dead.  It was a grief that seemed as old as Morgan herself. “She seemed to take no pleasure in the words.” He swallowed. “She said that it was my right to know my fate, and that you… had hidden it from me.” There had been more, about Arthur’s cruelty and kingship, but he couldn’t call the words to mind.  

“Lady Morgan spoke the truth,” Arthur said, after a long moment.  Mordred felt a hand settle on his shoulder.  

“You knew.”  He half-rose, knocking Arthur’s hand away.  “How could you welcome me to your table, as a kinsman, all the while watching for the moment I would betray you?” His eyes met Arthur’s, searching their clear gray surface for mistrust, for hatred, for guilt, for something, anything.  Try as he might, he could not read the king’s expression. “How could you lie to me?”   

Arthur was silent for a moment.  “I did know,” he said at last. “Morgan came to me and Kay and Guin, when you were only just born, and told us she had read my death in the future, at the hand of the last son of Orkney.” 

“Why not drown me?  Put me to the sword?  Leave me out for the cold?” Mordred said.  

“You were a babe in arms,” Arthur said.

Mordred laughed.  “There are plenty of ways to get rid of an unwelcome child.  Perhaps you didn’t act then because I was born in my mother’s court, and you had little reach there.  But I came to you as a page. You could have poisoned me, or arranged for Sir Kay or Sir Bedivere to create an accident.  There are almost as many ways to kill a child in your care as there are to kill a baby.”  

“Sir Mordred-” Kay began, a warning note in his tone, but Mordred ignored him.

“Why welcome me?  Why train me? To fit my sword for your neck?” he snarled.  “Or to make me a more gallant opponent for you to cut down one day?  Another Accolon?” His stomach twisted at the memory of the traitor in death, lying in Morgan’s arms, so smote in blood that it was hard to make out his features.  Mordred had felt no pity then- it was a traitor’s due.  

A traitor’s due that would one day be his own.

Guinevere tried to speak, but Mordred raised his voice.  “Was it your hunger for glory? Or did you simply wish to see me suffer?”  His voice cracked, and he realized tears had rose unbidden to his eyes.  

“Mordred.” 

Arthur’s voice was gentle.  It called to mind the days when Mordred had first come to Camelot, when the world of the Round Table had seemed so unbearably grand that Mordred could only stare around him in wonder.

“Mordred.”  

He lifted his eyes again and met Arthur’s clear gray gaze.

“I never wished to see you suffer,” Arthur said.  “I’m sorry you learned of it like this.” He sighed.  “It is my wrong for not telling you. I wanted you to have the chance to grow up without the weight of a prophecy to shadow it.  I know what it is like to grow up under fate’s expectations.”

It took Mordred a moment to realize the hollow, bitter sound was his own laughter.  “The sword and the stone is a far more auspicious fate than treason.”

“The sword in the stone brought me to war when I was fifteen,” Arthur said.  “Plenty of men would have called me a traitor, to one king or another, and I killed plenty of men for it.  No, I cannot fully comprehend the weight of such a prophecy- but I know something of it. I wanted you to go up free from that, and free from men’s expectations.”

“I don’t see why you wanted me to grow at all,” Mordred bit out.

Guinevere looked up, and a look passed between her and Arthur.  Arthur took a breath. “I won’t I didn’t fear, when Morgan told me what she had seen,” he said.  “Fear can make the gravest of errors seem just and right.  If I gave into being the sort of king who would hate and fear a child, my sister’s child, because of one sorceress’s interpretation of the future- if I had accepted that sort of fear, what else would it drive me to do?  If I killed you one day, the next a sorcerer might come to me and tell me that my brother Kay, or Lancelot, or my Queen herself, would bring about my downfall. What would I do then?”

From his knees, Mordred looked- really looked- at the king for the first time since the battle.  He had set aside his crown with his armor. The flicker of the torchlight shadowed the lines on Arthur’s face, and caught in the silver in his hair, and the fever-bright shine of his eyes.  An enemy’s sword had laid into his shoulder, and the wound was still weeping, darkening Queen Guinevere’s fingers as she tended to it.

The sight of his uncle’s blood, brighter than any of the other colors in the rooms, and the smell of it in the air, made sickness coil in Mordred’s stomach.  That, combined with he smoke from the torches and the aftereffects of a day spent in armor under the sun combined to dizzy Mordred’s senses, making the room blur around him.

The Arthur that sat before him now, gray with weariness and pain, seemed as fragile as the spun web of a spider. Camelot’s king was no longer a young man.  Camelot’s king, the untouchable, golden monarch of Mordred’s youth was no more, and perhaps never had been at all.  

In his mind’s eye, Mordred could see himself rising, pulling the dagger, and sinking it into the king’s chest.  He knew, as he knew his own body, that he was close enough to do it. That the king would be brought beyond help with one decisive thrust.  Not even Sir Kay would be fast enough to stop him. After, he might die, but how could his death make up for undoing the life’s work of King Arthur?

As soon as the thoughts came to him, his mind rebelled against them.  But how could he trust himself to carry a sword for Arthur, if he was capable of such thoughts? 

Love and devotion and fear and hatred twisted in his chest, putting Mordred at their mercy.  All he could do was lift his eyes to the king’s again.

Mordred stood, barely aware of the pavilion around him, of the eyes of the queen and Sir Kay, of anything but the thoughts that tumbled through his mind.

Fear was a sickness- a wasting sickness, a parasite that burrowed deeper and deeper into the recesses of a man’s soul, consuming all that was good and kind and chivalrous and turning it hollow and shrivelled.  How had Arthur born it, sitting in Caerleon at seventeen, crowned king over a tenuous, hard-won peace? How had he born at twenty-six, staring death in the face of the shy, dark-haired child who came to kneel and swear his fealty?

 I cannot live under this burden.   Perhaps the right thing to do would be to flee, follow Lancelot’s example and exile himself far from Camelot.  But fate had brought Lancelot back to his place at Arthur’s side- there was no way to know it wouldn’t bend to place Mordred back in the way of the king.

There was only one solution.

“Kill me. ” Mordred said.  

Arthur made as if to rise, but Guinevere caught his good shoulder and kept him seated.  “Mordred-”

“I speak in all sense,” Mordred said.  A giddy sort of calm washed over him with the words, like the rush of adrenaline when a charge was called, the knowledge that the die had been cast.  “You spared me as a child for my youth, and I am a child no longer. I am a man, and a knight of the Round Table. It is my duty - my right - to die for my king.”  

In the long silence that followed, Mordred found himself on his knees again.  He could feel the three pairs of eyes on him, but he bowed his head, too much of a coward to meet their gazes.

Arthur was saying something to Guinevere, or Kay; the words seemed muddled and far away.  He was unbearably aware of the carpet beneath his knees, the scratch of his gabardine, stiff with sweat.  A night breeze caught the cloth of the pavilion, carrying with it the smell of death and wine and meat roasting over the army’s countless fires.

That morning, he had risen before dawn and went to be shriven with the others before the battle.  That would please Galahad, at least. Belief in such things did not come easy to Mordred- the forces that bound his world together were the ones whose influence he could see, blowing the winds of his life.  The love of family that ran as plainly through the brothers of Orkney as their shared blood. The bonds of chivalry and trust between him and his fellows of Round Table, the way his blood sang taking the field with a trusted friend beside him.  The bonds of duty, to the land and its people, and to the king.

It was not a bad day to die.  He had acquitted himself well in the battle.  He had made his farewells before the army set forth, as he always did, as if he was like to die.  His mother was far away in Orkney, and had had no word of him, but there was nothing he could do about that now. If one of Accolon’s knights had struck true, knocked him under the hooves of his horse or cleaved his head from his body he would have died a death that men would call honorable, as a beloved knight of the round table, and never have learned of any prophecy.  Then Arthur would have been safe.

He could not go back and will his death, but this was the next best thing.

“Mordred.”

His name drew him from his revere.  With a start, he realized the king had knelt before him, so they were eye to eye.

“Morgan saw the future as it stood at that moment, when we were near to war with Orkney,” Arthur said.  “At that moment, I chose to take it as a warning about your father- that if I didn’t build strong alliances with King Lot,  one day their sons would be as dangerous as snakes in my court,” Arthur said. “So I bade Morgan to keep her peace about her glimpse- it could cause nothing but harm- and I made peace with your father.  I welcomed Gawain, and made him one of my most trusted knights, as I have done with all his brothers after.” Arthur met Mordred’s eyes, his eyes clear and his voice strong. “You have never given me any reason to regret it.” 

Mordred tried to say something, to call Arthur a fool.  What sort of man threw away prophecy, just like that?

Arthur caught Mordred’s face in his hands.  “It doesn’t matter what Morgan saw,” he said.  “I trust you.”

At the words, something twisted and broke inside of Mordred, something that the conversation with Lady Morgan had wrought to ice inside his chest.

“I don’t- I-”  A sob rose in his throat.  “I don’t want to- I can’t- I don’t want to betray you.”

Arthur pulled him into an embrace.

Once the tears began in earnest, he couldn’t stop them.  Sobs tore from his chest, stealing his breath. He wept until all the strength was gone from him, heedless of the pavilion, of watching eyes, of anything but the fear burrowed deep in his soul.  It felt freeing to give in to that, to not be a knight, or a prince, to just be afraid.  

After a time, Mordred’s tears ran dry with his strength.  He tried to pull away from Arthur, suddenly conscious of the spectacle, but he his limbs wouldn’t obey him.  He stumbled, and would have fallen if the king hadn’t called out to Kay.

The seneschal caught him, and lifted him.  After that, things grew muddled. He was elsewhere now, and a crowd of voices drifted around him, one talking over the other.  Someone eased him out of his armor, and began to prod at his wounds. Someone else talked in low tones to Arthur, who answered steadily.

Eventually, the other voices departed, and Mordred was alone with Arthur.  Arthur settled down beside the bed, reaching over to muss Mordred’s hair like he was a fevered child.

“There another thing to consider,” Arthur said, his voice soft.  “You’ve seen enough death to understand. There may come a day when some battle, some enemy, leaves me suffering a slow death.”  Arthur smiled. “Of all my knights, I can believe you would be the one to give me mercy.”

The words slipped into Mordred’s ears, and he could do nothing but nod.  

“I need you to live on.  Even if it should come to that.  One day, I will be gone, and my successor- my son, or Gawain, or whoever it should be- will need you to stand at their right hand, just as Sir Lancelot stands at mine.  Will you do this for me?”

“I will.”  The words did not come easily.

“Then that is your destiny,” Arthur said.  Crownless, bathed in the fragments of moonlight shining through the flap of Mordred’s pavilion, the king looked every bit as strange and powerful as Lady Morgan had looked in the blood of the field.  “And it will remain your destiny even if some day- some distant day, God willing- you must give me mercy.”

Mordred nodded.  The world felt strange and cold around him, the air itself lying heavily across his shoulders, with Arthur the only point of light.  He did not trust himself to speak.  He knew enough of magic to know that fate could not be commanded, even by a king.

But Arthur was no ordinary king.

Arthur’s hand brushed his forehead, the only point of warmth in the night.  “Sleep.”

Mordred did as his king commanded.