CHAPTER THREE #2
Whatever he meant by the word ‘receptacle,’ whatever dark, precise, deliberate meaning he’d packed into it, I didn’t accept it.
I wouldn’t accept it. The idea of her being made into a vessel for something, a container shaped to hold another’s purpose, another’s power, another’s destruction, sat in my chest like a coal I couldn’t swallow and couldn’t spit out.
“The receptacle for what?”
“You know what.” He held my gaze.
“The dragon.”
He nodded. “She is the only vessel capable of containing it.”
I felt my stomach drop down to my toes and immediately wanted to fight his words with everything in me. How could she be the vessel for a beast that would no doubt kill her just as it had destroyed Uther and was, without question, doing to Arthur? “You believe Guin is meant to take the dragon?”
“I do not believe it; I know it to be true.”
“How?”
“Because every vision I have received since the night Guinevere was born has shown me this truth. The dreams. The auguries. Decades of them, all converging on the same point.”
His voice, for the first time, held something that sounded almost like awe.
“She was born for this, Corvin, whether we like it or not. Both her bloodlines running together; mine and her mother’s, created something neither of us could have designed deliberately. She is the answer to a problem that has been building for a very long time.”
I stared at him even as I didn’t know what to say. I couldn’t have spoken if I’d wanted to.
“She is the vessel, Corvin.”
“The vessel.” The words sat in my mouth like ash, bitter and wrong, and I had to force them out between my teeth before they could calcify into something permanent. I would never think of Guin as a vessel. I didn’t understand how Merlin, how her own fucking father, could.
“You raised your daughter to become a vessel.”
“I raised my daughter to survive long enough to fulfill—”
“—she isn’t a fucking chalice, Merlin.” My voice came out hard, flat, and final. Angry. Every candle in the room snuffed out in sequence, and Merlin turned to face them. With a wave of his arm, they all lit themselves once more.
“I know she is not a chalice.”
“She’s a person.” My chest ached with the force of keeping my voice level.
“Do you think I have not realized that?” he demanded, glaring at me. “Do you think I have not attempted to argue otherwise against myself all these years?”
“You’ve been planning all along to fill her with something that will do to her what it’s doing to Arthur and Uther before him?” I shook my head. “If she takes the dragon, it will kill her.”
“No. It will not. It won’t destroy her—”
“—you don’t know that.”
The shadows in the room were no longer mine. That was the truest way I knew how to describe what happened when my control slipped: the darkness stopped obeying and started responding. And that was when I had reason to be alarmed.
In general, when I worked with intention, I pulled shadow the way a weaver pulls thread: in a measured way.
I shaped it to my purpose. I could bend shadow around my body until I vanished from sight: not becoming invisible exactly, but more swallowed by the dark.
I could step from one pool of shadow to another the way other men step between puddles.
One moment I might stand in a doorway, and the next, beside the fire.
And I did so without sound, without displacement of air.
When I chose, I could harden shadow into something with weight.
I could use it to create bindings as thick as rope and blades as cold as obsidian.
But in full daylight, I was nothing. Just ordinary.
The sun burned the shadow out of me the way it burned fog off a river.
In the daylight, I was just a man with a curved blade and better-than-average instincts.
It was why I’d always been a creature of night operations: why the villages along the borderland had called me the ‘Ghost of Blackhollow’ and meant it literally.
I moved best in the dark, not because I was afraid of the light or disliked it, but because the dark was where I was made.
Right now, the darkness in Merlin’s observatory was beginning to breathe on its own.
“You must get control of yourself, Corvin,” Merlin whispered as he took in the change in the air, the change in the pitch of the room.
He knew what could happen if the shadows took over: they were nearly impossible to get back under control again.
I pressed my hand flat against the table and forced the anger back.
The shadows retreated a fraction, but they were sullen and slow.
“I know what will happen to Guinevere because, as I said, I have seen it.”
“I want you to hear me very clearly,” I started and took the steps that separated us.
“I will never support this. I don’t care that you’ve seen it in dreams or visions. I don’t care that you believe Guin is the vessel. I don’t care if it’s the fucking truth. I don’t care that sacrificing her might destroy the dragon. Not only will I never support her being the vessel for the dragon,
but I will defend her from exactly that. I will fight any man, even you, Merlin, who attempts to harm a hair on her fucking head.”
“It isn’t harm.”
“It’s her death. And you will have to kill me before you ever attempt to force her into being the dragon’s host. Because if you do attempt it, I won’t hold back, Merlin. It will be you against me, and I very much do not want it to come to that.”
Merlin swallowed hard. “This is a conversation that cannot come to a mutually beneficial conclusion.” He inhaled. “But it matters not at the moment because there is something else.”
I waited.
“One of Morgan’s ravens arrived this morning.”
The name settled between us like a door slamming.
Morgan le Fay. She was long known as the ultimate seductress, and I believed her to be one of the most powerful sorceresses.
Not that I knew much about her. I didn’t.
But my shadows had always recognized her as something powerful and something old.
I also didn’t know much about her history with Merlin, other than the fact that they despised one another.
As to why one of her ravens had arrived in Caer Gwyll?
That was a mystery I was interested in solving.
“Why is Morgan sending her ravens to you?”
“To tell me Guinevere has been captured.” He eyed me then. “The same information I assume you were soon going to tell me?”
I nodded. “How did Morgan know?”
“How does Morgan know anything?” He shook his head.
“Morgan has eyes I cannot account for.” Then he picked up a small orb of clear glass from beneath the star charts and set it on the surface between us.
Almost immediately, the globe filled with mist that soon gave way to a series of images.
They wove themselves together to reveal the woman with raven hair and emerald green eyes.
When I’d first encountered her at Camelot, Morgan le Fay had been the most beautiful woman I’d ever seen. Well, that was until I’d met Guinevere. But, unlike Guin, Morgan was dangerous to a man’s soul.
“She is already traveling,” Merlin continued, gesturing toward the glass orb.
The mist shifted and parted inside it like curtain folds drawn back, and the image that replaced Morgan’s face revealed riders cutting through a dense woodland, their cloaks dark against the pale trunks of silver birch.
The horses were moving at a hard, urgent pace.
“The founders of the rebellion ride with her. They will arrive here within three days. Perhaps four, depending on the weather in the passes.”
He let the orb settle back into its quiet, clouded stillness, then folded his hands together on the table and lifted his gaze to meet mine. “She has called for a council.”
“A council.” The words came out flat. “They want to sit around a table and deliberate while Guin rots in Arthur’s dungeon.”
The shadows in the corners of the room began to recoil. Merlin turned to face them before looking at me with his furry eyebrows raised. I breathed in deeply, and the shadows rescinded.
“Together we are stronger than we are alone, Corvin.”
“We don’t have time to deliberate.”
“Rushing in will do no one any favors.”
“And waiting might mean Guin’s death.”
“Arthur will not kill her,” Merlin said as he shook his head. “Not when he realizes he has something of value to me. He will keep her alive as pure leverage alone.”
“Do you even want her rescued if you believe she’s meant to house the dragon?”
He frowned at me. “Of course. Her destiny is a fragile thing that must be handled as such. Her imprisonment does no one any favors.”
“I don’t even know what you mean by that.”
“And neither do you need to at the moment.”
I could only hope that Guin’s destiny, as he’d termed it, didn’t find him as my enemy. Gods knew I already had enough enemies as it was.