CHAPTER TEN #2
The corridor beyond the door was narrow enough that my shoulders nearly brushed both walls.
There were three cells on each side, iron-barred and dark.
I didn’t believe anyone was in them. And I supposed that made a level of sense since Arthur didn’t bother incarcerating those with magic or the members of the Rebellion.
He had them killed instead. Water ran in thin threads down the far wall and pooled in the grooves worn into the stone floor by years of feet and nothing good.
The torches in here were spaced too far apart.
Long stretches of black lay between each cone of orange light, broken only by the pale gleam of the bars.
A bundle of rags in the second cell on the left turned out to be a man when I looked closer.
He was old, grey-bearded, and curled on his side with his knees drawn up.
Not dead: the rise and fall of his ribs said otherwise.
Something skittered in the far corner: a rat, probably. The last cell on the right had a candle burning inside it. Not a dungeon candle, stumped and tallow-stinking. This one was thin, white, and nearly burned to nothing. I moved toward it, and then I saw her.
She was sitting in the last cell of the block, leaning against the far wall with her knees pulled to her chest.
Her face and her wrists were thin, though her tunic and braies were surprisingly bright considering her surroundings.
The closer I came, the more I realized that she didn’t appear dirty, which was strange given where she was.
The light of the torch along the outer wall threw copper light across her face, highlighting those high cheekbones, that mouth which was always set in quiet stubbornness, and the dark lashes that were fanned against pale skin.
She looked like someone had carved her from the same bone and shadow as this place and then changed their mind halfway through and made her beautiful instead.
The gratitude hit me first: gratitude that she was alive.
That single fact cracked something open in my chest that I hadn’t known I was holding shut.
I stood in the dark outside her cell and let myself have exactly one breath of it, the relief, the release of a knot I’d been pulling tight since I’d left Caer Gwyll.
Then I looked at her face more carefully.
She wasn’t a girl. Whatever she’d been when Arthur first locked her in here, she wasn’t that now. She was something angrier, something fiercer.
My hand went to the bars.
Every instinct I had told me to get the cell door open, to pull her out, and to put myself between her and everything this place represented. That wanting was immediate, and it was dangerous, so I crushed it.
Then a sudden image of her assaulted my mind, both uninvited and vivid: her head tipped back, mouth open, white hair spilled across the same stone floor she was sleeping on now, and Lance above her, Lance who had everything and still took more—
I clenched my eyes shut tight until the image of them blanched and there was nothing but darkness in my mind’s eye once more.
I wouldn’t think of things that didn’t matter.
And whatever Lance was to her, it was unimportant.
None of it mattered. What mattered was this exact moment: getting her the fuck out of here.
I tapped the bar only once, and she looked up at the same time that I released my shadows.
The shock on her face was immediate and total.
Her mouth opened, but I held a finger to my lips before she could make a sound.
She nodded as she pressed her lips together hard, and something in her expression cracked in a way I didn’t want to examine too closely.
Eyeing the sizable lock on the outside of her cell, I let the shadows unspool from my hand, thin and precise, thread-fine where they needed to be.
It wasn’t the same as picking a lock with steel.
Steel pushed, but shadow slid, finding the negative space inside the mechanism, filling it, and learning the shape of the thing from the inside out.
The first tumbler gave. Then the second.
Guin got to her feet and watched with her back pressed against the far wall, her eyes tracking the darkness with an expression caught somewhere between awe and anxiety.
The third tumbler caught and I held still. Then I let my shadows simply exist inside the lock until the mechanism forgot to resist.
There was the sound of a soft, dull click.
Then the cell door swung open an inch. I caught it before it could creak and held it, counting three breaths, listening to the corridor behind me, but there were no sounds of anyone coming.
The guard must have still been asleep or he just hadn’t heard anything beyond the thickness of the heavy cell door.
I pushed the door the rest of the way open and looked at her as I entered her cell.
“Can you walk?” I whispered.
She looked at me another half second as if she was trying to make up her mind whether or not I was really here or if she’d simply dreamed me.
“Yes,” she whispered finally.
“Are you hurt?”
Her chin lifted slightly. “No.”
A lie, probably; her chin was too high and her jaw too tight for a clean truth, but it was a functional one, and right now I’d take what I could.
What I didn’t take into account was what she’d do next.
Before I could speak, before I could even draw breath to tell her we needed to move, her arms were around me, locked around my waist, and her face was pressed hard into my chest like she was trying to disappear into the wool of my tunic.
She didn’t make a sound, didn’t sob or shake.
She just held on to me with a grip that said she’d been holding herself together by sheer stubbornness alone.
It took me maybe a second, the span of a single, slow breath, before my arms came up around her.
And I held her the way I’d always wanted to hold her but never allowed myself.
I held onto her with all of me. I didn’t weigh it nor measure it the way I measured everything.
Instead, my hands settled against her back, and I held her the way you hold something fragile that’s also, somehow, the least fragile thing in the room.
My chin dropped to the crown of her head, and her hair was so soft against my jaw.
I stayed very still, letting her take whatever she needed from me.
“We haven’t much time, Guin,” I finally whispered into her hair.
When she pulled back from me, she did it slowly, like she had to convince herself to let go.
She nodded and her eyes were bright with tears she hadn’t shed: almost luminous in the torchlight, full of something she refused to let spill.
She blinked once, and that was it. Just the one concession to the grief mixed with relief she was doing her best to swallow back down.
I looked at her and felt something sharp and cold move through me. Rage.
But it was a quiet and settled type of rage, the kind that didn’t burn hot but banked low and steady, the kind that lasted.
I’d carried that particular fire before, kindled first in the ash-filled streets of Blackhollow, stoked again in every village I’d watched the crown abandon to rot.
I knew how to keep that rage from consuming me because I’d had years of practice.
But this... this was different. This was her.
And whoever had put that look in her eyes: Arthur, his knights, his guards, that cold-eyed bastard Lancelot with his perfect armor and his entitled hands...
I noted every name like a debt. Every one of them would be paid in full, in time, in whatever way the opportunity afforded me.
I was very patient when I needed to be.
I pulled the thin cloak from my pack: dark wool, undyed, and held it out to her. She took it and pulled it around her shoulders with hands that were steadier than I expected. Good. Steady was something I could work with.
“Stay close,” I said. “Don’t speak unless I do. If I stop, you stop. If I pull you back, don’t fight me.”
She nodded once, and her violet eyes were very bright. I smiled at her, and she smiled in return.
Then I stepped back to the door and gathered the shadows.
They came the way they always did, the dark pooling outward from the corners of the room, from the space beneath the torch bracket, from the gap under the door.
They wrapped around us, and when they took her, she made no sound at all. A braver reaction than most.
“Ready?” I murmured.
“Yes.”
Now hidden by shadow, we walked back up the corridor, past the sleeping guard, and then into the lower corridors. A patrol walked by us at the first junction: four guards, and they were close enough that I could hear the creak of their leather armor. Guin froze at my side, her control impressive.
I’d trained her well.
The cat waited at the intersection, where one corridor led up to the kitchen exit and the other led deeper into the castle’s roots. It regarded us with mild interest, typical of its breed—and Morgan’s, for that matter—and then went down toward the kitchen corridor.
We followed.
The kitchen was empty, the coals banked low in the hearth, the smell of yesterday’s bread still heavy in the air. I moved us through it quickly, past the long prep tables, past the hanging herb bundles, and the row of copper pots, to the low door on the far side that opened onto the rear yard.
Two more corridors and another patrol approached, but this one was slower this time and easy to miss.
I brought us through the corridors and through the door that led to the yard.
And then I wrapped my shadows around us even more tightly and started across the large expanse of green that would bring us to the treeline.
Once there, my shadows freed us, and Guin took a long, shuddering breath as she pressed one hand flat against the trunk of the nearest tree as if to make sure it was real.
I scanned the treeline. Nothing moved.
“Corvin,” she started, but I shook my head and held my index finger to my mouth. We weren’t out of trouble yet.
Behind me, Camelot loomed pale and gigantic against the sky, aglow with internal fires. It was full of guards who didn’t yet know she was gone and full of a king who would be furious when he found out, full of a man I’d called ‘brother’ for most of my life.
I didn’t look back at it.
“This way,” I said quietly and moved into the darkness between the trees.
-ARTHUR-