CHAPTER SEVEN #2
I nodded and reached out to touch him but paused, asking first for his permission. He nodded, and I allowed my fingers to circle his wrist. Then I closed my eyes and felt for him, felt for his aura, and opened it the way another person might open and read a book.
“You’re thinking that this changes something. That you’ve been holding vigil for a woman who...” I stopped myself. “You’re doing the arithmetic men always do in these moments. You’re calculating what this means and whether it diminishes something.”
He turned his head just enough to look at me sidelong. “And what do you think it means?”
“I think,” I said carefully, dropping his hand, “that she’s been alone, frightened, and in enemy territory. And Lance is...” I paused, choosing honesty over comfort. “He’s very hard to resist when he decides he wants something. I know that firsthand.”
Something moved across Corvin’s face at that: a quiet recognition, an understanding. Lance had a reputation for a reason.
“I’m not telling you this to wound you,” I continued. And I meant it, which was unusual enough to notice. “I’m telling you because you’re about to walk into Arthur’s castle ready to burn it to the ground for her sake. And you deserve to walk in with clear eyes.”
“My eyes are clear.”
“Are they?”
He looked at me fully then, and the amber of his eyes was darker in the moonlight, almost brown, almost something else entirely.
“What do you want me to do with this?” he asked. He wasn’t angry, just genuinely curious.
I considered the question. It was a better question than most men would have thought to ask.
“Nothing,” I answered with a shrug. “That’s rather the point. I want you to do nothing with it. I want you to know it and keep moving because the mission doesn’t change. She’s still in that cell, and her life is still worth saving.
I want you to recognize that regardless of who fucked her and who fucks her in the future, none of that matters. I want to know your ego won’t impact your mission...”
He exhaled through his nose, something short and controlled. “She owes me nothing.”
“Then she doesn’t know of your feelings?” I gestured vaguely at him, at the whole of him, at the fractures still cooling in the stone beneath his boots.
“No,” he agreed. “She doesn’t know. I always... thought it best to... keep it from her.”
We stood there in the dark for a moment, just two people who understood one another, each in our own particular way. Each of us seemed to understand what it meant to want someone who was looking elsewhere.
I’d wanted Corvin for years, in the abstract, idle way you want things you know are unavailable.
Not love. I wasn’t certain I was still capable of love in the way poets describe it.
But desire, yes. What I harbored towards him was the specific desire for a man who possessed both gentleness and violence in equal measure and knew precisely when to deploy each.
And he wanted a white-haired girl in a dungeon who’d given herself to the most beautiful knight in Camelot. The comedy of it might have made me laugh on a different night.
“Tell me something,” I said, moving away from him, letting my gown trail across the dark stone. “Why do you think it is that so many men lose themselves over her?”
He turned to face me with real curiosity in his gaze. “What are you insinuating?”
“I insinuate nothing; I merely look at the facts.”
Then I held out my hand and extended my index finger.
“You.” I gestured at him. “Lancelot. Arthur.”
I let the names fall off my tongue as I raised two more fingers.
Then a fourth. “Even Kay, who despises everyone with admirable consistency.”
I paused as I considered the next name on my list.
“And even that fool, Vaelen...” I paused to let the name land.
“Vaelen?”
I nodded. “He dreamwalked into her sleep like a lovesick boy.” I took a breath because that one did hurt to name. Hmm, strange that.
“Explain what you mean by that.” Corvin’s voice was flat.
I turned then, facing him fully, and let a thin smile settle on my mouth. “I mean exactly what I said. Six individuals. Six different dispositions, six different varieties of pride, power, and self-interest. And yet every last one of you is circling the same woman like moths around a flame.”
He crossed his arms, waiting for more. I began to walk a slow circle around him. Not seduction this time, but something older than that. I circled him the way a scholar walks around a problem they’ve been turning over for years.
“Do you know why Merlin: cold, bloodless, and ancient Merlin, a man who seems to feel nothing for anyone beyond the abstract love of strategy... Do you know why he was so utterly taken by Nimue?”
Corvin’s jaw shifted. “I admit that until most recently, I didn’t know that Nimue was anything to Merlin.”
“Because they both were quite good at keeping their love a secret. But I knew.”
I always knew. It was part of my curse. “The reason why Merlin felt anything for Nimue was owing to the fact that Nimue is what she is,” I continued.
“Water given form and terrible beauty. Her nature carries a lure in it that no mortal and very few immortals can resist.”
The same was true of me. I’d fallen for Nimue’s siren song just as surely as Merlin had.
“Magic manipulation?”
I shook my head immediately. “No. It’s not manipulation. It’s not so simple as that. It’s simply what she is.”
“I don’t understand.”
I thought of another way to phrase it. “What is the only substance you can’t live without?”
“Water.”
I nodded. “Nimue is exactly that: she’s the pull of the tides, the call of the Siren. The song that calls you to the edge even when you know you can’t swim.”
I completed my circuit and stopped in front of him.
“That lure lives in her daughter’s blood. Just as Guin carries the shape of Nimue’s eyes, that particular bell-like cadence in her laugh, and Nimue’s water magic... she also carries the thrall of the Lady of the Lake, passed down like a birthright. Or,
I suppose you could consider it a curse neither of them chose.”
He gave me a look, a knowing one, as a sort of smile curved the edge of his lips, and he was even more handsome than he’d been only a second or so ago.
“You were in love with Nimue.”
The silence between us stretched. “That’s neither here nor there,” I said finally.
Something shifted in his expression, something subtle. It was just a narrowing of the eyes that had nothing to do with skepticism and everything to do with recognition. He was quick, Corvin. That had always been true of him.
“Morgan.” His voice was careful, measured. “You said six individuals, yet you only named five.”
The obsidian underfoot didn’t betray me the way it betrayed him. I’d long since learned to keep my feelings from bleeding into the ground beneath my feet. A woman in my position couldn’t afford otherwise.
But he was watching me with those eyes, and Corvin of Blackhollow had always been extraordinarily good at seeing what people didn’t offer willingly.
“And perhaps,” he said quietly, “there’s a reason you know so much about the precise quality of the pull Guin exerts.”
“What are you hinting at?”
“That you’re as taken with her as the rest of us.” I gave him a lofty expression, and he appeared taken aback. “I admit, I’m surprised. I thought you only hungered for men.”
I laughed at him. “Do you truly believe a woman like me would be satiated only by men?”
“I admit the thought never crossed my mind.”
“Well, suffice to say, the answer is that I’m a woman of many appetites, and women are certainly one of them.”
“Truth be told… I find nothing wrong with that.”
I chuckled at that. “Most men don’t.” Then I gave him a look.
“My point is: there’s a reason all of us have fallen under Guinevere’s spell.”
I smiled. It cost me something, that smile, but I gave it freely enough that it looked like nothing at all.
“It’s the same reason I was... moved by Nimue.”
Moved! Ha! What I’d felt for Nimue, what I felt for her still, was so much more than “moved”! So much deeper, so much more painful.
“Tell me.”
I was not, by rule, a woman who spoke about herself much.
That was by design. But those two words, offered with such sincerity, struck something within me.
The truth of it was that I needed this; I’d needed it for longer than any man in this courtyard had been alive to witness.
I’d carried the name of Nimue like a stone sewn into the lining of my chest for years beyond counting, and there had never been anyone worthy of the unburdening.
The words came out even, composed, even if they were only the edge of what existed within me.
“Years ago, before any of this. Before Camelot, before the exile, before any war worth naming, I met the Lady of the Lake, and I understood in that moment why oceans have no bottom.”
I paused. “Her daughter carries the same unnameable quality in her veins, but a different shape. It’s the same source, though, and any of us who come into contact with either of them are incapable of staying afloat. We all fall, though some of us fall harder than others.”
He absorbed this without speaking.
“It’s not a thing any of us choose,” I continued.
“That’s what I want you to understand: it’s not a weakness, and it’s not a failing. It’s simply the nature of water. It finds every crack, it gets into everything, and it doesn’t stop.”
I held his gaze. “None of you will stop in your need for her. Not you, not Kay, not Lance, not Arthur, not that wretched dreamwalker. Not even me. The desire that lives in the call of deep water doesn’t release you, not until you meet your end.”
“You can be a very dour woman, Morgan le Fay.”
I looked at him. “Truth is a dour subject, Corvin of Blackhollow.”
He was quiet for a few seconds, and in those seconds, I could see his brain working.
“She wanted Lance even though he’s her enemy,” he said, and I had to admit I wasn’t surprised he was still stuck on the subject known as ‘Lance fucked the woman you’re in love with.’
Clearly, Corvin was working through it methodically, the way he’d work through a tactical problem.