The King's Wizard by James Mallory Page A

OF P RIDE
    D eep under the Hill, in the Land of Magic, Mab gazed into a scrying crystal that showed her only ice, and a battlefield long
     cleared of bodies. She felt a curious pain in the place that had once been her heart at the knowledge that Vortigern was dead.
     The two of them had fought from the moment they had met. Mab had tangled the threads of his life and denied him the chance
     to found a dynasty, but now that he was dead, she would miss him. Of all her cat’s-paws down through the centuries, Vortigern
     had been the only one to go to his death clear-eyed and accepting.
    She waved her hand over the surface of the glass, and the scene changed. Now the crystal showed a nun’s cell in Avalon, where
     a Healing Sister helped Nimue to take her first unsteady steps. The heavy bandages were gone, and the girl’s face was veiled
     in ahopeless attempt to conceal her scars, even when there was no one to see.
    So Merlin’s love hated the very sight of herself, did she? That might prove useful, as time went on. Mab smiled as she waved
     her hand to clear the glass once more.
    Now the scrying glass showed her the makeshift chapel at Pendragon Castle. Its stained-glass windows cast rainbows of light
     over the nobles standing to watch their new king being crowned. Mab’s gaze wandered over the crowd until it settled on the
     Duke of Cornwall. His lovely dark-haired wife Igraine stood beside him, holding the hand of their only child, a girl who’d
     had the misfortune to be born with a cast over her left eye. Her pious father naturally assumed that such misfortune was due
     to divine—or infernal—punishment, and reproached both his wife and his daughter frequently for their imagined sins.
    Yes, here was something she could use to pull down Merlin’s puppet king and show him he must take the power for himself. Mab
     smiled as she raised her hands above her head.
    Igraine would do what Vortigern had not. And Merlin would not suspect his doom until it was too late for the knowledge to
     matter. …
    The coronation took place at Pendragon Castle on New Year’s Day.
    Word of Uther’s victory had spread across the land with the speed of summer lightning, and the nobles of Britain hurried to
     do him honor—or to fortify their castles—according to their natures.
    The Bishop of Winchester was to have his early loyalty rewarded by being the one to crown the new king in the name of Holy
     Mother Church. Old King Constant’s crown had been lost with Vortigern’s body beneath the winter’s ice, and so Uther had ordered
     a new one fashioned, its band carved with symbols drawn from the Christians’ Holy Book—loaves and fishes, stalks of wheat
     and spring lambs. Upon the brow was the image of a rising sun. A Christian crown for a Christian king, and Merlin thought
     that if Uther had the perspicacity to rule with a light hand, the people of Britain would do for love what they never would
     have done for fear, and Britain would become wholly a Christian land at last.
    And that would be Mab’s destruction.
    The Great Hall at Pendragon had been decked for feasting. It was filled with tables laden with delicacies to the point of
     collapse, and with nobles arrayed in their best clothes and largest jewels. They had been at the church earlier, with their
     wives and their brothers and their families, to see Uther crowned, and in every heart, Pagan and Christian, was the same prayer:
Please let him be a better ruler than the old king
.
    At the top of the room, Uther seated himself upon his throne as his nobles cheered him. His rich vermilion robes gleamed,
     but not as brightly as the wide band of carved Welsh gold that sat upon his brow. Excalibur was by his side, and his hands
     lingered upon its golden hilt.
    Merlin stood beside the throne, as Uther had asked him to. He had stayed for the coronation and the feast that was to follow,
     though he yearned to be withNimue. But this was Uther’s moment, the day he had worked