CHAPTER ONE #4
Another breath. And more tears.
Lance.
My breath caught as the thought of his face assaulted my mind. Now the tears threatened to completely overtake me, but I couldn’t allow that to happen. Not when I was stuck in this pit in my enemy’s stronghold. I had to stay strong. I had to keep my wits about me and thinking of Lance...
No, I couldn’t allow my thoughts to go there: to his face, to the way he’d refused to look at me when Arthur had paraded me naked through the hall. Gods, his eyes had been so impossible to read, the dark gray like a door slammed in my face, refusing to grant me access to what lay beyond them.
Please stop, I begged myself.
I pressed the heel of my hand to my chest and held it there, felt my own heartbeat pushing back against the pressure. Then I put my hand back down and shook my head, my hands fisting at my sides.
No more crying.
I was done with the grief, the humiliation, the memory of standing bare while the men of Camelot looked at me like they were appraising a particularly handsome horse.
Whatever humiliation I’d experienced, whatever self-pity I now had, I locked it all away under something that was heavier than stone, something that was heavier than pride, and I left it there to wither and die.
There would be no more feeling sorry for myself. I was done. It was over. Now there was nothing left but strategy, of figuring out a way out of this nightmare.
I reached for the water in the air again, with the same patient searching, my fingers spread against the stone, hunting for that thread of moisture that always answered me.
But there was nothing. Just as there had been nothing the last time I’d attempted it.
The damp seeping through the mortar wouldn’t even respond, almost as if it was ignoring me.
Mordred. It had to be. He must have warded every stone in this dungeon, along with every shadow and every crack.
I could feel the shape of it, the invisible lattice of his signature pressing down like a thumb on a bruise.
And it was thorough work. Elegant, even, in a way that made me hate him for it.
Not that it mattered anyway.
Even if I tore through Mordred’s wards and pulled every drop of moisture from these walls to flood the corridor, to freeze the guards where they stood...
Even if I managed to escape, the Round Table knights would be on me before I reached the gates leading into Camelot.
And they wouldn’t hesitate to kill me. Not now.
Not after they knew who and what I was: their enemy.
No, attacking anyone at this stage wasn’t the answer. Neither was calling on my magic. Not yet, anyway. My situation required something more sophisticated. Survival had a shape, and its shape was attention, calculation. It was the slow and patient accumulation of small advantages.
I’d been Lioran for months. That meant I knew the patrol rotations, the guard schedules, the narrow corridor behind the armory that flooded when it rained and went unguarded because no one likes water in his boots.
I knew which knights drank and which ones prayed, which ones were afraid of their king and which ones were afraid of something older. I knew the castle’s bones.
Arthur thought he had a weapon. Well, he was right about that much. I was a weapon. But I wasn’t his fucking weapon.
And now I was playing a game that was so much bigger than it ever had been.
But the thing about games is that they have rules, and Arthur had just revealed his.
He needed Merlin deceived more than he needed me dead.
That meant I had value; it meant he’d keep me breathing for as long as I was useful to him.
He’d give me information to give to Annwyn, and I’d deliver said information, but in the delivering, I’d learn the shape of Arthur’s plans from what he left out.
Arthur didn’t keep someone alive without purpose, and he didn’t look at something he wanted without that want showing.
I’d seen both tonight. Yes, he might pretend I was a filthy prisoner: a spy and a witch, but I knew better.
I’d seen that heat smoldering just beneath the disgust.
It was the same heat that had always been there, from the moment we’d first locked eyes on one another at the lake.
The truth was that we were drawn to one another like moths to flame, and we always had been.
I was beginning to believe there was nothing either one of us could do about it.
The strip of torchlight shifted as the guard passed in the corridor. I tracked the shadow across the floor by pure instinct. Then I leaned my head back against the cold stone wall and breathed in deeply, dragging the back of my hand across my damp cheeks.
No more self-pity. It wasn’t going to do a damned thing for me, so this was where it stopped.
No. More.
The words echoed in my mind with the finality of a blade dropping.
I’d allowed myself this moment: this brief, stolen pocket of grief for everything I’d lost, everything that had shattered around me in the span of a single night.
But moments like these were luxuries I could no longer afford. Not here and not now.
The time for tears was well and truly over.
Now, it was time for planning.