The Darkest Knight (Guardians of Camelot #3) - Victoria Sue Page 0,32

eyebrows rose. That hadn’t been the question he was expecting. “I originally came from Bavaria. My family fled to England when the Romans invaded.”

“You had a sister?”

“An adoptive one,” Kay admitted and met Lance’s shocked eyes in the mirror. “I don’t know why I never told you. It hardly matters now, but he wasn’t my father.” He’d been unwanted all his life. It was why his father had so easily sold him to Arthur. Sold? He would have given him away. Lance hesitated.

“He wasn’t my birth father, I should say,” Kay repeated and scrubbed a hand over his tired eyes. “I was an orphan.”

Lance’s eyes widened in surprise. “What?”

“I was adopted because he needed an heir to claim his English lands from his cousin.”

“But…” Lance’s words trailed off, and Kay understood. Foundlings or orphans were common in their time, but it was unheard of that a lord would try to pass one off as a son.

“I never dared say in my time because I wouldn’t have been accepted to train to be a knight, and I never gave it much thought afterwards until now. His wife had six other children, and they all but one—Rochelle—died without taking even one breath. Four of them were boys. If my father hadn’t been able to produce a male heir, he would have forfeited everything to his cousin. My mother was in a constant state of pregnancy so no one would question anything. Every quack my father employed insisted her body needed to be with child to get used to not rejecting them, so she was given no rest in between.” Kay shook his head in abhorrence. He wasn’t surprised she had turned to alcohol.

“How do you know?”

“Maids talk especially when they know you can’t understand what they’re saying. There was one called Florence who used to rub my hair and call me a proper bastard. I grew up in Bavaria, and we fled to England when the Romans annexed the area as my father’s family had huge estates in Cornwall he could claim.” Kay shrugged. “By the time we arrived in England, I was my father’s son and heir. I imagine I was some servant’s child originally.”

“And when did you understand it?” Charles asked carefully.

Kay swallowed. “When I learned to speak English. It had stopped years before obviously. The maids wouldn’t have dared, but I remembered.”

“What about your real parents?” Lance said.

Kay shook his head. He remembered a couple very vaguely and knew he’d lived simply. He had a feeling they were servants, but he had no other brothers or sisters and had been very young when they’d had to flee to England. “I wasn’t the son of an earl when we set out. I think my birth mother was a maid, but what would become the Justinian Plague was spreading through most of the Mediterranean as we fled, and by the time we reached England, over half the servants were dead. The earl needed an heir to claim the lands in England, and so when we arrived, I was his son. I learned to speak like an English nobleman, but later on I purposely needed my accent, so I made sure I kept it. Now it seems natural. I can of course speak like an English lord.”

Charles’s eyes widened as Kay’s voice changed.

Kay met Lance’s eyes once more and saw the understanding and the shared memory. 1941 had been hell on earth, and for years he couldn’t sleep without the nightmare of that time and what he had attempted to do in secret. Posing as a German officer had saved some lives, just not enough.

Lance’s phone rang, and they all heard Gawain’s voice. “Just two Ursus still. They seem to be just waiting.”

“For us,” Lucan said.

“Possibly,” Gawain admitted and rang off.

“But it was Aalardin controlling them before,” Charles said. “Are you saying they are being proactive again?”

Kay shrugged. They hadn’t seemed organized in the last six months, as they had with Aalardin. The problem had been their numbers and the fact they had appeared every night.

“They were proactive in the tunnel,” Lance pointed out. “Someone with access to magic was responsible for the engines cutting out.”

And the water.

They parked relatively easily and headed for the entrance just as a crowd of people left. “What’s with the elephants?” Lucan grumbled, still in a bad mood for some reason.

Kay looked up at the gate archways they were just going to walk under. “It’s because of the zoo in the park. It was remodeled in