CHAPTER NINE #2
I exhaled slowly through my nose and kept my expression neutral, the way my father had taught me before I was old enough to understand why it mattered. Then I dismounted while the last of the light was still useful.
Wraith stood patiently at the tree line as I stripped his saddle and tack, working the buckles by feel.
I folded everything into a tight bundle and wedged it into the hollow of a broad oak, covering it with loose bark and leaves until it looked like nothing worth investigating.
Wraith nosed at my shoulder once, his breath warm against my neck.
Even though my shadows would disguise us, it was always best to make their job easier by giving them a blank canvas with which to work.
And that meant stripping Wraith of his accoutrements.
It was a shame, but I doubted I’d get the saddle back.
Of course, such was the cost of escape attempts.
I just hoped Guin and I wouldn’t pay with much more.
I stepped away from him and into the deeper shadow beneath the canopy, where the trees grew close enough that the darkness between them was absolute.
I closed my eyes.
The shadows were always there, waiting. Most people felt darkness as an absence, the removal of something.
I’d spent thirty years learning they were wrong.
Darkness had weight, and it had texture.
It gathered in corners, pooled in hollows, and moved along surfaces the way water did, finding the low places and filling them slowly and completely.
And when I reached for it, the darkness reached back.
I pulled it toward me now the way you’d pull a cloak from a hook, not forcing it.
The magic in my blood recognized the motion, and the shadows responded, thickening around my feet first, then curling upward along my legs like smoke given intention.
The shadows climbed my torso and spread across my shoulders and neck, and where they touched me, they changed me.
My height compressed incrementally, a deep freeze settling through my spine as the shadow folded itself against bone and sinew, rearranging what was visible to the outside world.
My broad shoulders narrowed and rounded forward as my posture, the upright bearing of a man who’d been trained to take up space, now stooped beneath the weight of borrowed years.
My jaw thickened, and the stubble on my chin and cheeks began to grow into a long and snarled beard.
My nose broadened at the tip and nostrils and developed a redness that hinted at too much ale.
Next was my jaw, which was now much fuller, followed by my cheekbones, which took on a round softness.
My hands were the last things to change, and I watched them as the shadow laid itself over my knuckles, thickening the joints and mottling the skin.
They were now an old man’s hands: weathered to the texture of old rope, knuckles prominent, veins visible at the wrist.
I flexed my fingers, and the sensation was strange, like wearing a glove that fits poorly at the fingertips.
I breathed out and then turned to my right.
The wagon was where it was supposed to be: forty yards east of the main track behind a stand of hawthorn, covered with a canvas sheet weighted at the corners with stones.
It was a rented thing from a farmer in Brentwick who hadn’t asked questions about why I was requesting an old wagon to be left unattended by the castle gates.
The trick there was in overpayment: simply pay enough to make questions seem impolite.
I pulled the canvas off the wagon and folded it under the bench seat. Then I motioned to Wraith, and he approached with a quick whinny. This was his least favorite part, but he stood still while I worked the shadows over him the same way I’d worked them over myself.
It was harder with an animal. Horses felt magic differently than people did: not with suspicion or fear, but with a full-body awareness that made them want to move away from it.
Wraith had learned to hold still, though.
And now he locked his legs and dropped his head, breathing through his nose in long, measured pulls while I drew the darkness across his coat.
The deep black of him dulled first, fading to a washed-out gray that aged him twenty years in mere seconds.
His powerful haunches softened under the illusion, the lean muscle blurring into the rounded, dropped lines of an old working horse past his prime.
His mane thinned, and his back swayed slightly.
Next, it was his hooves; the trick was to make them look worn, the way a horse looks when its owner can barely afford the farrier.
He turned one eye toward me when I finished.
“I know,” I said in a way of apology.
He didn’t move while I backed him into the traces and buckled the harness across his chest. The leather was plain, cracked, and deliberately ugly. Everything about us needed to look like it belonged to a man too tired and too old to matter.
When I climbed up and took a seat on the rickety wooden bench, the wagon creaked under my weight in a way that felt appropriate to the character of an old man and his failing cart. Wraith turned his head and looked at me with one milky eye.
I clicked my tongue, and he started walking.
By the time we reached the main road and fell in behind a cluster of farmers heading for the gates with the last of the evening’s deliveries, I was simply another old merchant coaxing an older horse toward home.
The guards didn’t look at us twice.
I rode through the gates as Morgan’s ravens sailed overhead, entering Camelot without any fuss or fanfare. I couldn’t help my smile.
The compass within me went absolutely still the moment I passed under the arch. And then, in the next breath, it lurched so hard I pressed a fist to my chest.
She was close.
-LANCE-
My squire, Alec, was fighting his sword again.
I watched him perform the third sequence for the fourth time, and there it was, in his wrist; that tiny, frantic clutching before the parry, as if he was squeezing water out of his sleeve.
He was sixteen or seventeen years old, and had that focused look on his face like he’d stolen it from an adult.
There was no doubt in my mind about what his goal was: to be good, and that was exactly his problem.
I let him finish the sloppy sequence.
“Do it again,” I instructed. “But slow down this time.”
“I thought—”
“—You’re fighting it. Don’t fight it.”
He tried it once more, this time with a little less tightness. I moved closer and placed my two fingers on the underside of his wrist, letting him know gently that I wanted the blade moved differently; he complied, and the sword took its natural path.
Improvement.
I stepped away and nodded quickly at him. He seemed to stand half an inch taller than before.
The yard was deserted at this late hour, save for us. The torches around the inner perimeter were low, and the sky above Camelot was playing that little trick it did in the hour before the dark truly took over. I could see my breath, but the chill didn’t bother me.