CHAPTER SIX #3
There was just some type of hidden conversation between the two of them that was playing out in their eyes.
Soon Corvin faced the rest of us again. “If I fail, which I won’t, but if I do, Carlisle and Vaelen’s men come after us.”
Vaelen’s network was real; I’d helped build parts of it myself in those early years before we’d become whatever we currently were to each other.
He’d threaded operatives through every northern village between the Caldwyn hills and the Ashmark border.
That included safe houses behind millers’ walls, escape routes carved through the oldest forest paths, and runners who could move a message from the mountains to the coast in under four days.
But runners weren’t soldiers.
The people Vaelen’s network sheltered were farmers who’d discovered they could coax rain from a cloudless sky, mothers who’d woken to find their youngest daughter levitating in her sleep, and old men who’d spent forty years hiding the fact that they could read the land’s intentions.
They were now frightened people. Yes, grateful but intimidated all the same.
They were people who had survived by becoming very small and very quiet.
The point was that they weren’t fighters. Not even close.
I’d sat across from three of Vaelen’s regional contacts over the past month.
The one in Thornfield had wept when I’d suggested they might need to defend themselves.
The one outside Keltric had seventeen people in his care, including four children, and just one single iron knife between them.
The third hadn’t met my eyes once during our entire conversation. He’d kept looking at the door.
They were scattered, untrained, and ungovernable in the way that terrified people always were when you needed them to hold a line.
I looked at Merlin.
He studied the map with those dark, patient eyes of his, and for a moment, I was struck, as I sometimes was, by how young he appeared. Not in years, but in scope. He was ancient, yes, but ancient the way libraries are ancient: knowledge stacked in careful systems, everything indexed, nothing wild.
He had no idea what I was, nor what moved in my blood. I’d been old when the first stones of Camelot were still riverbed.
And still, looking at him, I felt it, that particular ache that had never fully calcified into something I could ignore. Perhaps it was the reason I despised him as much as I did. It wasn’t a hate directed at him so much as it was directed at what he represented: memories.
Memories of her.
Nimue.
I thought her name and once I felt that pain, I buried the memory again.
It was the way I’d buried it a thousand times before, deep beneath the scar tissue of centuries, where it couldn’t reach me until the next unguarded moment when something (a quality of light, a name spoken aloud, the particular blue of water in a certain kind of dusk) would pry the wound back open,
and the whole process would begin again.
He’d taken her from me.
Or that was the story I’d told myself for a very long time. It had the appeal of all good stories: it was clean, simple, and it allowed me to consider myself as the wounded party. But it was also entirely wrong.
Merlin hadn’t stolen Nimue from me. I’d stolen her from myself.
The moment I’d made the decision, the moment I’d chosen my love for myself over my love for her, for us, for the love we’d built together.
The moment I’d chosen to allow her to tether herself to that lake and that sword, that was the moment I’d lost her.
Because I’d known I’d never be able to look at her again.
It wasn’t so much that she hated me, knowing that I was the one who had walked away free, but it was more that I hated myself for choosing the easy way out.
And I still hated myself for that decision I’d made before the world had grown old enough to carry the weight of its own history.
Before the Standing Stones had been raised, the wars had been fought, and the crowns had been hammered into shape.
Before any of it. When the only thing that had existed was her, and me, and the terrible clarity of a choice I’d made with my eyes wide open.
The meeting broke apart the way all such meetings did: without resolution and with too many silences that had gone unaddressed. As the others filed toward the door, I gathered my gloves from the table and permitted myself one last look at Hailey.
She was speaking quietly to Vaelen, her head tilted toward him, one hand moving as she made a point.
He was listening. Actually listening, the way he only listened to people he trusted entirely or found genuinely surprising.
His expression had none of its usual performance.
Whatever she was saying, he believed it.
She glanced up and caught me watching her, but she didn’t look away.
She just held my gaze for a moment with those calm hazel-brown eyes, then gave me a small, unhurried nod: the kind that meant, I see you seeing me, and I find it neither threatening nor surprising, before returning her attention to Vaelen.
I pulled on my gloves one finger at a time.
Vaelen had always had good taste. I’d just never expected to come face to face with the evidence of it.