And indeed, there was increasing menace in the kingdom. Guinevere was not so sure, and saw perils that looked like magic all around her. But we will beat back the chaos and the darkness.” We do not need a dark queen when we have so much darkness within ourselves. She would live up to Merlin’s legacy.”Īs for Arthur, he thought the problem was elsewhere:
As ill-prepared as she felt, she would not fail him. She would be the shield against any magic seeking to destroy what Arthur was doing here.
“Until magic was truly gone, it could threaten him. While she did not possess the full panoply of Merlin’s skills, she did know some elements of magic, and she knew how to sense it in others:
Although she felt like a fraud, Guinevere also believed in Arthur’s vision, and would do whatever she could to protect him from any threats. Thus he sent his daughter to claim she was Guinevere, the princess from a faraway kingdom promised in marriage to Arthur. Merlin believed in Arthur, and refused to leave him unprotected. Alas, this also meant banishing Merlin from the land. In order to do so, he had to push back the forces of the Dark Queen and magic. Arthur, thus recognized as King of Camelot, vowed to bring goodness to the Kingdom. The great wizard Merlin, Arthur’s mentor, pointed out that only the “true king” of Camelot could remove the sword from the stone. Arthur was anointed after he was able to remove the sword called Excalibur, deeply embedded in a stone, which had previously held fast against all other attempts to extract it. Princess Guinevere, 16, comes to Camelot because Guinevere has been matched in marriage with 18-year-old Arthur, the King of Camelot. As the author writes in her Acknowledgments at the end, she wanted to emphasize “the girls and women overlooked in stories and in life, who still find ways to create magic and grow in power and truth.” Most significantly, the focus in this version of the legend is on Guinevere, Arthur’s bride, rather than on Arthur. This appealing re-telling of the legend for young adults adds diversity, a coming-of-age aspect, and unexpected romance and gender reversals. The King Arthur stories are so numerous and varied that they offer a lot of opportunity for reworking.
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