The Bloody Cup Read Online Free Page B

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    ‘Lord Gawayne is returning to Cadbury with his eldest son. We met upon the road, but Gawayne wished to view the resting place of the Lord Targo, so we parted at the crossroads leading to Aquae Sulis.’
    Wenhaver smiled, and Artor cringed inwardly as he read her openly excited and lascivious thoughts.
    The bitch is in heat, he thought savagely, but his face revealed nothing but polite interest.
    ‘I remember Gawayne’s boy well. He was a large and beautiful babe who almost killed Lady Enid during his birthing. The beauteous Nimue, the Maid of Wind and Water, managed to save both mother and son.’
    With a brief flash of unholy amusement, Artor watched his wife’s chagrin at his unwelcome compliments towards another woman. Myrddion’s apprentice outdid the queen in beauty, intelligence, style and accomplishments. Regardless of the gulf of social position that yawned between them, Wenhaver knew that Nimue would always be her superior, and her hatred for Myrddion’s woman hadn’t wavered in the long decades since they had last met. In one detail only was the queen superior to Nimue - her enmity was eternal.
    Wenhaver’s dislike turned her doll-like face into a twisted and ugly reflection of its self. Yet sadness tinged his triumph, for he realized that he and Wenhaver had made a pointless, barren wasteland of their lives. He regretted the way they picked at each other, tearing off fragile scabs of mutual forbearance for the sake of a moment’s satisfaction.
    ‘What is the lad named?’
    ‘His name is Galahad, my lord, and the Otadini claim he is the greatest warrior in the world.’
    ‘Galahad,’ Artor repeated, and somewhere beyond the mortal world, he felt a tremor in the void as the wheel of Fortuna shuddered and began slowly to turn.
    ‘The boy will be welcome,’ the king said softly, and the audience was over.
     
    Far away in the cold north, Morgan swayed over her knucklebones and felt a fissure open in the fabric of the world. Her sister, Morgause, was in deadly peril. The bones presaged death, and the pattern warned Morgan that other deaths were promised. Her brother, Artor, was now threatened as never before, and she tried desperately to dredge up a feeling of triumph in his fall from eminence on Fortuna’s wheel. She had hated him for so long that she should have felt something - even relief.
    Her kinfolk were dying, but she looked in vain for a sign in the portents that revealed her own fate.
    ‘Shite!’ she exclaimed crudely. She brushed away a tear, for the Fey prayed for death every day of her pain-filled existence.
    Then her eyes whitened and rolled backward in her head until all she saw was a battered tin cup that filled and overflowed with fresh, glistening blood.
    ‘The Cup is come,’ Morgan whispered through lips that were dried, cracked and oozing with the fragility of poisoned old age. ‘The Cup is filling, filling, and we will all be washed away.’
    Her vision cleared and she could focus on her withered, tattooed hands once again. Her ugly mouth smiled and her tongue flickered over her bleeding lips like a lizard kissing the sun.
    ‘But Artor nears his end,’ she whispered thinly. ‘Praise be to all the gods! At last Gorlois will be avenged!’
    But reason threatened her momentary triumph. Artor was close to sixty years, Morgause was older still and Morgan felt as ancient as the dead heart of the Otadini Mountains. They should all have died decades ago, and now the siblings existed as anachronisms of power and illusory vitality.
    Her rational mind sighed.
    What does it matter after all these years? Who remembers the ancient wrongs?
    She answered her own question.
    I do! And so does my pestilential brother. Fortuna’s wheel turns . . . at last.

CHAPTER II
    BLOOD OATHS AND BATTLE BROTHERS
    Artor paced up and down the length of his personal sleeping quarters. Bronze lamps had been lit and Percivale and Gareth moved around the spartan room, preparing for the king’s rest and