CHAPTER TEN
-CORVIN-
The outer wall hadn’t changed since the last time I’d been here. ‘
It was the same pale stone, the same iron-tipped battlements, the same smell of torch smoke and horse sweat rising from the courtyard below. But the wards had changed.
I sensed their presence even before I touched the wall.
They gave me an impression of pressure; of something that was methodical, well thought-out.
It took extraordinary craftsmanship to weave them into each gate, arrow slit, and drain that was wide enough to accommodate a man’s shoulders.
This was the second version; the latest design done by Mordred.
Morgan hadn’t given me much information on them and I hoped that wouldn’t prove to be a problem, now that I’d be right in the middle of them.
Arthur had been busy. Or rather, Mordred had been busy on Arthur’s behalf, which was a different thing entirely and considerably more dangerous.
I pressed myself flat against the treeline and waited. A patrol passed along the eastern parapet: two guards, gold and red, King’s Guard insignia catching the moonlight. They moved in sync, which meant they were trained, which meant I had exactly the window between their rotation and the next.
Forty seconds. Maybe less.
Two of Morgan’s ravens cut lazy circles above the eastern gatehouse. One cawed. Then the other. And that meant the way was clear.
I moved.
The gap between the treeline and the wall was thirty yards of open ground, frost-hard and pale under a half-moon. I crossed it low and fast, boots silent against the dead grass, and pressed into the shadow beneath the gatehouse arch before the next patrol crested the parapet.
Above me, the wards hummed. It felt like a faint vibration in my back teeth, but I’d felt worse.
Merlin had created much worse. But what Mordred had built here wasn’t to be dismissed.
The first revision I’d known about. As the Fox, I’d overheard him discussing the specifications with a servant I was sure he was fucking.
He’d spoken with the confidence of a man who’d never once considered that walls have ears.
The second revision was a different matter.
Morgan had given me what information she could: that the suppression sigils were carved into the cell thresholds and linked to a binding stone that was somewhere in the tower’s upper chamber.
Break the stone, free the wards. It was simple in theory, but never simple in practice.
Still, they’d built the wards wide and thin rather than narrow and deep, and maybe that meant I wouldn’t have to go for the binding stone at all.
It was a common mistake among talented young mages who hadn’t yet learned the hard difference between coverage and quality.
The first revision had the same flaw, if better concealed.
The second had corrected some of it: I could feel as much in the way the outer layer pressed against me.
It was now more deliberate, less uniform, but it wasn’t perfect, not by a long shot.
Yep, the wards’ connections to the binding stone in the upper tower were definitely weaker in certain spots.
I’d exploited such wards before, and I would do so again.
The ravens circled once more overhead, flying in tighter formation now. It was a check-in: Morgan’s version of asking if I was still breathing.
I didn’t look up; she’d know soon enough.
The shadow at the base of the wall was deep and still.
I breathed into it. Let the dark recognize me the way it had since I was a boy in Blackhollow, hiding in the burnt-out shells of houses while things that shouldn’t exist moved through the dark outside.
I hadn’t understood it then, but I understood it now.
Shadow magic wasn’t summoned; it was recalled. The darkness didn’t obey what you wanted it to do. It did what it wanted to do all along, and you learned to want that too.
I stepped into the wall’s shadow, and the world became quiet.
I could still hear the guards above, still hear the distant stamp of horses in the stable yard, but the sound was muffled, like hearing noise through deep water.
The wards slid over me, but they found nothing.
They were built to stop force, to stop light, to stop the deliberate crossing of a person with intent to do harm.
But shadow had no intent. Shadow simply was. And I was shadow.
I came up on the other side of the wall and crouched behind a stack of barrels near the kitchen entrance.
A cat sat on top of the nearest barrel, black with emerald green eyes.
It was by far the most stunning cat I’d ever seen, and that could only mean one thing: Morgan.
The creature turned its head slowly to the left without looking at me, then returned to grooming its paw.
Left it was.
The kitchen passage was unguarded at this hour, which meant it was either unwatched or watched by something I couldn’t see. I moved along the wall with my back to the stone, counting the doorways.
The lower corridors smelled of damp and old stone. The dungeon level always had, even when I’d lived here. Seventeen years of memories pressed at the edges of my attention, and I held them off with the discipline of a man who has learned that nostalgia gets you killed.
The knights’ bedchambers were two floors above my head. That meant I’d have to be very careful. And the solar where Arthur used to stand with his back to the room, staring at nothing, carrying the weight of a kingdom on his shoulders like it was slowly snapping his spine; that was to the east.
I didn’t let myself think about any of it. I only focused on her and the mounting pull inside my chest that told me she was close. So fucking close.
A raven croaked once from some place close to the high window at the end of the passage.
I froze and pressed into the space in the alcove near the guttering wall torch.
A patrol rounded the corner. This time there were three of the guards, moving fast and speaking in low tones.
I let the shadows at my back envelop me as if I were wrapping a cloak around myself.
The guards walked by close enough for the torchlight they carried to throw my shadow in the wrong direction, long and pointing back the way they’d come.
One of them looked at it.
I didn’t breathe.
Then he looked away.
They turned at the far end of the corridor and were gone.
I released my breath slowly and moved on.
I didn’t know how long it took me to reach the dungeon.
It could have been minutes or mere seconds.
Regardless, I was here, now facing a broad and tall iron door.
One single torch was mounted outside it, the flame burning low.
A guard sat on a stool beside the door, his chin already tipping toward his chest in the boneless way of a man who was fighting sleep and losing.
I waited until he lost. Then I moved.
Still wrapped in shadows, I approached the door.
The closer I got to it, the more I could feel the difference in the ward structure here.
It was tighter, more concentrated. Mordred had paid particular attention to this section, which made sense.
The suppression sigils Morgan had described would be carved into the thresholds of each cell beyond this door.
That was what she’d told me. What she hadn’t been able to tell me was whether the binding stone’s influence extended this far out or whether it was localized to the cells themselves.
I was about to find out.
I was mere inches from the sleeping man, but if he were to wake, he’d see nothing.
The lock was old. Whatever Arthur had spent his coin on, it wasn’t the dungeon hardware.
Clearly, he was placing all his trust in the guards.
And owing to the fact that this one was now snoring, that had been a mistake.
I had the lock open in under a minute, moving so slowly the tumblers made no sound worth waking for.
But the lock was the easy part.
I pressed my palm flat against the door and felt them: three distinct layers of warding, stacked so tightly they read as one to anyone without the patience to look deeper.
The outermost was a simple alarm ward, the kind that would send a pulse of heat through the stone walls if broken carelessly.
Beneath it was something more deliberate: a binding lattice, not designed to keep people out so much as to register what passed through.
And at the base of both, threaded through the grain of the wood itself, a suppression net.
Step through it with active magic and everything I carried would collapse inward on itself.
This was definitely Mordred’s work. I’d know his patterns anywhere.
I let the shadows bleed back from my fingertips.
Not dispelling them, but containing them, folding them down until what I carried registered as nothing more than the cold draft of a dungeon corridor.
Then, working from the outside in, I found the anchor point of the alarm ward which was a knot of intent no larger than a thumbnail.
It was tucked into the upper corner of the frame, and I unraveled it one thread at a time.
Not cutting. Never cutting. Mordred wove trip-lines into his cuts, secondary triggers for anyone who tried to force a clean break.
The binding lattice took longer. It had no anchor. It was ambient, distributed evenly across the surface, which meant I had to thin it rather than dismantle it, coaxing it apart the way you’d ease a knot from wet rope, finding the one loop that bore no tension and working outward from there.
When it finally went slack, I exhaled slowly through my nose.
The suppression net I left alone. There was no defeating it cleanly, not without Morgan standing at my shoulder. But suppression only acted on active castings, and by the time I stepped through, I was carrying nothing it could find.
The door swung inward.
The air beyond it was colder than the corridor and wrong in the way that warded spaces were always wrong.
There was a subtle flatness to it, like the silence in a room after a scream.
I could feel the binding stone somewhere above me, and it felt like a pressure at the crown of my skull, steady and patient.
It had been doing this a long time, and it would go on doing it because I was fairly sure it wouldn’t detect my shadows.
The smell hit me first: stone damp and something underneath it: herbs, maybe.
Something that had been used to clean wounds.