The End of Magic Read Free Page A

window at the shifting weave of mist. Once she had ruled all this land and the Land
     of Magic as well. Now her earthly domain was confined to this one small headland, cloaked and saturated with magic.
    She could no longer remember the day upon which her fight for survival had begun, so long had it endured. Nor could she remember
     what life had been like before the New Religion had come to Britain, to steal all that was rightfully hers. Once Mab would
     have mourned the loss of her past, but generations of fighting had burned that softness from her. She did not know when she
     had stopped believing in a victory that would erase all her defeats, but she no longer cared that the Old Ways—the very thing
     that gave her life through her worshipers’ belief in her—had been changed irrevocably by the New Religion. Making things the
     way they once had been no longer mattered to her, so long as she could have victory—and revenge.
    Against Merlin. Against Arthur. Against everyone who had betrayed her, thwarted her plans, destroyed her shrines and her worshipers,
changed
her by the very way they thought of her, through curses where there had once been prayers. They had made her what she was,
     and they would pay the terrible price.
    She would give them
Mordred,
whose very name meant “the fear of death.”
    She had learned from her failures, for this time Mab would not leave the raising of her champion in someone else’s hands.
     She would mold her child—her Mordred—from his first breath to the moment he fulfilled the destiny she had decreed for him:
     ruler of Britain, destroyer of Arthur, Camelot, and the New Religion.
    And Merlin would be there to experience every moment of her triumph. Mab smiled, telling over her dreams of the future the
     way a miser might gloat over his hoarded wealth. Killing Merlin was no part of her plan. She wanted him to suffer, to agonize,
     to yearn for what he had lost. She did not mean him to escape that.
    But Mordred was still a young man, untutored in the Old Ways, and Arthur was still far away from Britain. Even Mab could not
     quite see how to take a throne away from someone who didn’t currently have it. Defeating the Queen alone would be no sport.
     Let Guinevere destroy herself with Lancelot first; her betrayal would soften up the people until they were
happy
to welcome Mordred as their rightful King.
    But for the moment Mab truly did not have any interest in what went on in Britain. She had her dreams of future glory, and
     she had Mordred. She walked away from the window and took her place at the long table in the great hall of Tintagel.
    Unlike Arthur’s Round Table, this table had a definite head and foot, and Mab was seated near the head. As five of the castle
     servitors shuffled into the room, their eyes rolling with terror, Mab’s brow wrinkled as she tried to remember what they’d
     originally been before Frik had transformed them with his magic. Mice, she thought, or perhaps rabbits. They certainly looked
     like scared rabbits at the moment, but no matter how terrifying his forms of amusement, no one in Tintagel was brave enough
     to rebel against Mordred.
    As the years had passed, Mab and Frik spent more and more of their time at Tintagel, until the castle was nearly as magical
     as the Land Under Hill. Mab lavished all of her care and attention on Mordred. She had erred in leaving Merlin’s raising to
     Ambrosia, and the old priestess had corrupted him with soft human emotions. Mab would not make the same mistake twice. She
     would burn all the softness from Mordred’s heart, leaving it as hard and crystalline as her own. Every game, every gift that
     she gave him was aimed toward this, toward the day when he, her perfect instrument, would take his rightful place as King
     and sweep the New Religion and all its works from the face of Britain.
    She glanced around the Great Hall at Tintagel, and even the sight of Frik in his ridiculous swashbuckler’s disguise