Oathbound (The Legendborn Cycle #3)

Chapter 32

32

SIXTY-FIVE HOURS

AFTER brIANA MATTHEWS DISAPPEARED

Nick

IT’S WELL PAST two o’clock in the morning, so when the Northern Chapter archive’s door clicks open, I know the person who entered did not stumble in by accident. No one would be in the archives the night before the Regents arrive, digging through the journals of the Scions of the Northern Chapter, unless they had a good reason to.

No one but me—and my guest.

“Hello, cousin.”

The dim lamplight plays shadows off the face of the figure who stands in the doorway, and the sconces in the open hall behind him throw his body into silhouette.

“Donovan.” I straighten behind the table. “I suppose we are cousins, yes.”

The last time I saw Donovan Reynolds, he was the Scion of Lancelot, and I was the Scion of Arthur. Now we are neither.

“Mmm.” Donovan hums an agreement and holds up a small piece of yellow paper between his pointer and middle finger. “Got your note.”

I’ve kept the lights low in here on purpose so that my late-night research sessions are not immediately evident from the hallway. Luckily for me, this wing of the Keep has not been busy the past two nights; too much activity in the residential and dining areas with members of the Order’s chapters acclimating to close quarters in a time of crisis.

“Close the door.” I add, “Please.”

Donovan shuts the door behind him, then walks into the quiet room with both hands in his pockets. “Wouldn’t want someone to realize you’re sneaking out of your cage, now, would we?”

“They need to think I’m still in the tower,” I admit. “I leave at night and return before dawn so that nothing appears amiss.”

“How are you getting out?” Donovan asks curiously. “When I found your note the first night of your imprisonment, I thought it was a trick. ‘Meet me in the archives after two a.m.’? Could have been a booty call.”

I raise a brow. “Don’t let me keep you from your anonymous hookup.”

“I checked, and the tower door is still latched shut—from the outside. Are you jumping down? Or climbing?”

“I’m not afraid of heights,” I respond.

“It’s not just the height; it’s the triple-layered wards on the way back in. Each laced with truly devastating doses of terror, doubt, and dread.” Donovan chuckles.

When he said the word “devastating,” a small grin crossed his face. The Reynolds cruelty streak that I remember from my youth. One that I hope I haven’t inherited myself.

“I can handle the wards.”

“Risa could have been Kingsmage. She’s powerful enough, you know. Her wards could take an experienced Mageguard to his knees , and Nick effing Davis simply says he can ‘handle’ them?” He regards me, head tilting. “How?”

I level him with a gaze. “Doesn’t matter how I got past the affective wards. What matters is that no one will believe you if you claim that I did.”

Donovan hears the threat. Disregards it. “I had a feeling you’d find your way here eventually.” His voice holds the aristocratic drawl that I grew up hearing, first around my father and the Legendborn families, then at private schools and dinner parties and country clubs. His stride around the long study table is measured and easy, as if he has no other place to be in the middle of the night. Hands in loose designer slacks, white button-down open at the throat and untucked.

“Did you, now?” I ask, and hear the echo of my own Southern affluence rounding the vowels of my words. “If you knew I’d be here, might have been nice for you to use that knowledge to meet me one of the last two nights.” I keep my voice light, amused, and dry. Keep up the game. No need to start a fight; I certainly don’t feel like getting into one. I hold an arm out and gesture at the table I’m standing behind. It is strewn with heavy, thick, leather-bound journals, all handwritten, all normally kept in a locked cage at the back of the room. “There are dozens of these things.”

Donovan sees through my attempt at peace and congeniality.

“Is a scrawled note slipped under a door your way of asking for help , Davis?” He paces toward me until we are standing over the same long study table. His eyes trail over the piles of books with recognition for their covers and their authors. “Three hundred years of journals of the past Scions of Lancelot not telling you what you wanna know?”

I grew up with boys like Donovan. I was raised by a man like Donovan, who grew up with other boys and men like Donovan. They—we—don’t ask real questions. Not questions that have answers that could possibly knock us off our expected paths or betray our vulnerabilities.

But here I am, having snuck a note beneath Donovan’s bedroom door like this is grade school, asking for his help blatantly and without hesitation. And here he is, forcing me to say it again, as if once was not enough and I need to plead—or grovel—for it to count. For it to hurt.

I don’t have time to play these games. I gave them up years ago.

“The journals discuss training. They discuss life at the Keep. They discuss battles and glory and ways to properly hone an aether blade until it can cut through silk with a single stroke. They are the journals of dead men , Donovan. I can’t ask them questions, and even if we could speak to our dead”—I press my lips together, involuntarily thinking of the girl who can speak to her ancestors, the girl who can ask her questions and have them answered—“the Reynoldses of the Line of Lancelot could have never comprehended the situation we find ourselves in today. The views of those ‘founding fathers’ are useless to me.”

Donovan places both hands on the back of a chair to lean across the table. “And what situation is that, Davis? The one where you aren’t a Davis at all?” Something hard slides in behind his gaze, spreading to his cheeks and jaw, tugging at his mouth until his teeth are bared to the light. “The one where a single bad decision created the accident that is Briana Matth—”

My hand wraps around Donovan’s throat before I even realize I’m moving.

“Do not speak her name again.” I hear the distant, quiet thunder in my own voice. “And while I have your attention, let me explain how you got here. What happened to Bree’s ancestor Vera was not a ‘bad decision.’ It was rape. A violation Samuel Davis should have been punished for. One I’m personally happy to punish anyone for, really, if they try to defend him.” I pause. “Which is why your spine feels particularly crushable right now.…”

“Okay. Okay! ” Donovan grunts out. He swallows against my fist. “Are you going to… let me go? I thought you brought me here… because you wanted… to… talk?”

I release him, and his hands slap down against the table as he coughs once, twice, and tugs on his collar. “I do want to talk.”

“You just choked me!” Donovan croaks. He rubs at his throat while I search internally for remorse for my own actions.

I don’t find it. “I did. I even explained why. I still need your help.”

He glares at me. “Would serve you right if I left you here in the dark.”

“I grew up anticipating Arthur’s powers, not Lancelot’s. I’ve been on my own with this.” I take a slow breath. “Zero preparation, no guidance. I was hoping you’d want to offer assistance. Just as you would have been called on to mentor the next eligible person in the Line of Lancelot as soon as your eligibility ended, like your younger brother or another cousin—”

“Except that I never planned on not being eligible in the first place, Davis! And I was never meant to mentor you .” Donovan’s eyes are blue daggers, cold and cruel in the lamplight.

I try another tactic. “Neither of us is in the role we’ve been raised to assume. Neither of us is prepared for this. We are not so different—”

“We are different, Davis!” Donovan takes up one of the heavier tomes—the journal of an Alexander Reynolds, 1732—and tosses it against the wall so hard, it breaks at the spine. “Because while you are no longer the Scion of Arthur, you are still a Scion . Second-in-command, second-ranked. As crucial to the Table as one can be without being the damn king himself. Herself. Whatever .”

I watch Donovan recover without responding. He stares down at the broken journal, chest heaving against his own anger, and runs both hands through his hair. He paces away from me a few steps, then paces back. “Do you have any idea how many people would have to die for me to be Called?”

I have honestly not given it a single thought, but it doesn’t surprise me that Donovan would. I try to comprehend the size and structure of my new family tree. Donovan is my own distant cousin, a descendant of the original Reynolds’s second son. The Spell of Eternity creates warped, greedy math; I’d rather not journey down that road. “No idea,” I answer. “I don’t generally count how many people would have to die for me to gain something I want.”

“Dozens, Davis. Dozens . All because your ancestor was the firstborn and mine was second. Because of the line of succession, I will never be eligible. I will never be Called.” He points at me, snarling, “You and that Onceborn-raised —”

“I’d hate to have to choke you again, Donovan,” I calmly warn.

His eyes flash, then darken at my expression. “You and the Crown Scion took my life from me.”

I groan. “Jesus Christ—”

“You did!”

I throw up my hands. “No, we didn’t . If anything, the Spell of Eternity did! The Order did! Bree and I didn’t take anything from you. We didn’t know the truth. I was there when she pulled Excalibur from the stone. Neither of us went into the ogof expecting it to go that way!” I huff out a breath. “Our lives changed that night too and, in case you haven’t noticed, not for the better. Camlann is here. Multiple parties are trying to kill us, and if they don’t, Abatement will. You just got your entire life back while the Regents want to end mine. I’ve bought myself time, Donovan. That’s all I have. Borrowed fucking time . I’ll die soon, one way or another.”

Donovan quiets at this, jaw working as he simmers over my words. He may feel robbed, but his life is safe from here on out. I wonder if he even realizes that he can walk away from it all while Bree and I can’t. Not really. Not truly.

“Fine,” he mumbles. “What do you need?”

The knot that has lived in my chest since the moment I saw Bree collapse after the battle of the ogof loosens the merest fraction.

“Information. I’m starting from scratch.”

He nods at the books. “What have you read?”

“Everything,” I answer. “Some things twice.” I shake my head. “There’s nothing here about the inheritances. Just the same shit we were all taught about the Lines’ abilities: ‘The Scion of Lancelot will receive speed and vision enhanced beyond that of any man.’?”

It’s my turn to shove my fingers through my hair. I grimace; my hair is getting long. The sides of it rest at my cheeks instead of my temple now. When I rub my hand over my chin and mouth, pale stubble scratches at my fingers.

“Well, of course, the experience of the inheritances is left out,” Donovan says simply. “The Lines don’t keep their personal accounts lying around for any random Page to read.”

“I thought each Line kept their records at the chapter that houses them. We have Line of Arthur materials in the archives back at Southern—”

“Think, Davis.” Donovan raises a brow. “Do you have every Scion’s account there? Every single personal item and artifact? Every record and detail?”

“I—” I think back to my father’s collection. “My father was obsessed with the Line of Arthur. He collected a few artifacts in his private library at home.”

Something several shades away from grief wraps my heart at the memory of my father sitting in his study over a book. It’s not the memory of him I treasure… but the peace of those moments. The times when I was not his focus or his project or his weapon. When I could not disappoint him, because his attention was so wholly focused on the potential of our bloodline.

“That is one way to keep secrets. Another is to pass information down orally, father to son.” Donovan dips his chin, bitterness sweeping his face briefly. “Or parent to child, rather, as we are now led by a daughter.”

“Oral tradition?” I ask. “Does that mean your father told you things? About the inheritances?”

Donovan watches me with callous amusement. “Oh, let me think.…” He taps his chin, and the game is on again. “The inheritances? What could you mean? The speed?”

“Do me a favor and stop being a dick.”

“Wait…” Donovan makes a curious sound. “Have the visions started?”

My eyes snap up to find him leaning over the back of the chair now, eyes watching me with ill intent and fascination rolled into one. “Yes.”

“Oh, damn.” Donovan’s eyebrows rise high on his forehead. “I bet you’re having a horrible time of it, aren’t you, Davis? ‘Enhanced vision’ without a manual.” He slaps his thigh, laughing. “How long?”

“A while,” I reply stonily. “They’re getting… clearer.”

Curiosity sparks across his face. “Care to tell me what you’ve been seeing? You know, since we’re cousins and all.”

“I’ll pass.” I stare him down. “That’s not what we’re here for. I’m asking you—”

“This close to the curia and this far into the effects of an inheritance you were never raised to anticipate, I think you can do better than ‘ask,’ cousin ,” he sneers, voice dripping with venom.

I take a slow and steady breath. “All right, Donovan. I am begging you. Please tell me what you know about the visions of the Line of Lancelot.”

Donovan crosses his arms over his chest, satisfied. “The ‘enhanced vision’ can’t be predicted or stopped. The first thing to know is that ‘vision’ is a complicated word. It’s both something you possess and something you receive. Something you use and something you create. What you see? And what you can do with that sight? No journal can tell you those answers. The best you can do is learn by experience, but as each Scion has different kinds of visions—”

“Wait, wait.” I hold up a hand. “The visions change from Scion to Scion?”

He raises a brow, as if this were obvious. “Yes? That is, if that Scion inherits Lancelot’s visions at all. Some never do.”

I rock back, stunned. “That’s—I’ve never heard of an ability that only some Scions of a Line inherit. Why? And why me?”

“Well, in a more typical timeline for Camlann, not one accelerated by your war-thirsty father, you would have noticed something… peculiar about your visions.” Donovan’s voice turns serious for the first time tonight when he recounts the story of our bloodline as his father once told it to him.

“We are taught that the bloodline Scions of the Round Table are methodically Awakened one by one in the order of the knights and magical abilities best suited to keep the demons at bay. Scions and their inheritances are Called by need, beginning with the Scion of the lowest-ranked knight and continuing up the ranks. Eligible children learn that the moment a Scion is Called, their abilities arrive instantaneously. But what the Line of Lancelot knows, and what we have kept secret for centuries, is that our bloodline—well, your bloodline—is the only one whose inheritances arrive staggered, rather than all at once. The speed comes first, always, but the visions, if they come at all, arrive later. And only after a very specific trigger, for a very specific reason.” He grins.

“A trigger?” I squint in memory. “Everything happened so fast. I was Awakened, then Bree right after—”

“I’ll give you a hint.” He leans in, whispering, “The visions only begin once the Scion of Arthur has been Called.”

A chill cascades through me. “Why would Lancelot’s power be linked to Arthur’s Scion?”

“Because the heirs of Arthur and Lancelot are not typical Scions. Rarely does the fighting become so dire that the Scions of Lancelot and Arthur are even Called, and rarer still that the former is Called without the latter. In many ways, Arthur and Lancelot were a court of two.” His eyes widen in faux surprise. “By the way, Davis, I’ve heard rumors that you and the Crown Scion are your own court of two .”

Bree’s face appears in my mind, her presence ringing inside me like a bell. Resonant. Deep. Rich. As the familiar wave of her threatens to tow me under, Donovan’s eager eyes scan my face, hungry for a reaction I’ll never give him. “It’s a good thing rumors aren’t facts.”

Donovan’s face twists cruelly. “You know what is a fact, Davis? That you and our king , together, are illegal under Order law. The Lines cannot mix. If you and your girl get caught sparring without clothes on, the Regents will arrest you both for treason.”

“If you speak about Bree ‘without clothes on’ again, I’ll break a bone you use on a daily basis.” I ignore his choked response and repeat my question. “Why are the powers linked?”

He scowls and looks away. “According to my father, Arthur and Lancelot approached Merlin in secret to ask him to connect their abilities within the Spell of Eternity, and Merlin agreed. The three of them understood that each Scion of Arthur in the Legendborn cycle would be a different kind of king. A different leader born with different needs and skills, born in different eras, fighting a different version of Camlann. So Merlin embedded within Lancelot’s application of the Spell the seed of a power. A seed that requires the presence of Arthur’s Scion to come to full fruition. But the Scions of Lancelot who inherit visions gain access to a unique, unprecedented magical ability that no one else truly knows about. They can use that power however and whenever they like,” he says with a vague shrug, “even if that ability only first manifested itself in response to the king.”

“Because each king requires different insight to win the war,” I say, nodding.

“An optimistic guess,” Donovan says with an eye roll, “but that’s not what I was taught. My grandfather called the link between the Scion of Lancelot and the Scion of Arthur a type of prophecy. A promise older and deeper than an Oath. And my father says the visions are ‘a holy weapon in an earthly hand.’ You’re new here, Davis, but the Line of Lancelot has always believed that the visions are tailored to the nature of our Awakened king for a tactical reason, not an emotional one.”

I already know I won’t like what Donovan is about to say. “And that reason is?”

“Lancelot was the most powerful knight of the Table, second only to Arthur Pendragon,” Donovan says, his tone anything but harmless. “Perhaps Merlin knew that there could come a day when the Scion of Arthur’s leadership had gone astray, and that a power should arise not to support the king… but to oppose her.”