CHAPTER ELEVEN
-GUIN-
We rode hard until the trees thickened and the road narrowed to a deer trail.
Wraith picked his way through the roots without being told what to do or where to go.
But I could tell by his gait that he was tired.
So was Corvin, for that matter. And it didn’t help that the morning was now fully on us, which meant the shadows that animated them both were waning, growing weaker. Soon, they would have no magic at all.
Corvin had stopped correcting his posture an hour back. Now, he sat forward, almost falling into my back, his elbows loose, his head dropping on the long straightaways.
“When did you last sleep?” I asked, turning to face him over my shoulder.
“Days ago.” He said the words like he’d simply forgotten to eat breakfast.
“That’s not a number.”
He gave me a little smile. “I rode from Annwyn without stopping.”
His jaw was set in that particular way men set their jaws when they’re running on stubbornness alone.
“We need to stop so you and Wraith can rest.”
“No. I need to get you somewhere safe first.”
“You’re about to fall off your horse, Corvin.”
Wraith stumbled on a root just then, one foreleg catching and dipping before he caught himself and lurched forward.
It was a small thing, and the horse recovered in a single stride.
But Corvin’s hands tightened on the reins, white-knuckled and sharp, and it took him a half-second too long to release them.
“Fine,” he said. “Next town we come across, we can stop. But just for a little bit.”
The town materialized out of the mist like something half-remembered: a cluster of low buildings, a well, the orange smear of firelight behind tavern shutters. The smell of wood smoke and boiled meat reached me before the first fence post did.
“We can stop here,” he said.
I put my hand on his arm. “Wait.”
He drew Wraith up.
“We can’t go in like this, as ourselves.” I kept my voice low out of habit, even though there was no one on the road and hadn’t been for hours. “If Arthur hasn’t already discovered that I’ve escaped by now, he’ll find out soon. And then he’ll send the Guard after me...”
Corvin looked down the road toward the tavern, then back at me. Something moved through his expression, something that looked a lot like assessment.
“Your magic or mine?” he asked with a grin.
“You can barely stay awake.”
“Yours it is.”
I swung down from Wraith first. My legs were stiff from riding, and the ground felt strange under my bare feet, too solid after hours of motion.
Corvin dismounted beside me, and up close, in the thin light that filtered through the canopy, I could see the dark shadows under his eyes that hadn’t been there hours ago.
The air was damp, but it always was in the forest, moisture clinging to every surface, drinking into the bark of the trees and the soil beneath my feet.
I pulled at it gently, the way you’d pull a thread from a bolt of cloth without unraveling the whole thing.
It came to me in a soft curling ribbon of mist that wound between my fingers and caught the low light.
I raised my hands between us and drew a slow breath in through my nose. Corvin watched my hands. He’d always watched them like that, back in Annwyn, with focused attention, like he was trying to understand a language he hadn’t been taught.
I stepped closer as the mist thickened between my palms. Tilting my head up at him, I tried not to notice how he was smirking down at me. It was that same boyish, playful grin he wore in Annwyn when he’d been victorious in one of our many childish competitions.
“Hold still,” I scolded.
“I am holding still.”
“You’re breathing too loudly.”
“I’m breathing normally.”
“It’s distracting.”
A corner of his mouth moved. The smirk deepened. “My apologies.”
I started to work the illusion over him, and my own breath turned shallow, though not from the effort.
The magic itself wasn’t particularly taxing, even if I was tired and hungry myself.
No, it was the closeness between us and the amber of his eyes catching what little light made it through the branches.
“I’m surprised,” I said finally, the words coming out before I’d decided to say them.
“By what?”
“That you came.”
“It’s not good form to offend your rescuer, Guin.”
I shook my head as I kept my eyes on the working, on the shift of his features beneath the glamour that was taking shape above the surface of his skin. “I meant to say that I was surprised you’d risk your life... for mine.” And then something occurred to me. “Unless Merlin told you to come?”
Corvin looked at me, and there was still offense in his expression. “Merlin didn’t ask me to come, Guin.”
Then there was silence. It wasn’t the uncomfortable kind, but the kind that has weight to it.
“And you’re not surprised that I came,” he finished.
I frowned at him. “I just said I was.”
“Right. You said you were surprised, but you’re not.” His voice was quiet and certain, the way he said most things. Usually, that sureness irritated me. This morning, though... it didn’t.
My hands slowed and the mist curled between us, thin and half-formed, coiling around my fingers like something living. It took everything I had to hold my focus on the working rather than on the way he was watching me. Not to mention he was standing so close. Close enough that we could...
The magic kept stuttering, kept losing its shape because the warmth coming off him seemed to be the only thing I was aware of. That and his eyes hadn’t moved from my face.
“Focus,” he said.
“I am focusing.”
“Then focus harder.”
I was focusing harder. In fact, I was focusing with everything I had: trying to change his features into someone no one would recognize. It was strange, but I was finding it difficult to remember what a face looked like when it wasn’t his.
“Guin.” He said my name the way he always said it: like it was a complete sentence. “You should have known… even if I tried to be subtle about it… I’m sure I wasn’t.”
I smiled up at him. “You were.”
The cleft in his chin seemed even deeper as he gazed down at me. “Still… You should have known how I—”
“—I hoped.” The words came out small. “I hoped you did. That you felt something—” I stopped. Started over. “But I didn’t let myself believe it. I... I thought the feelings were only on my end.”
His hand came up slowly in a motion that had no urgency in it, no demand.
Just his fingers, warm and certain, curving around my wrist like a question he already knew the answer to.
The mist between my palms went perfectly still, all that restless coiling energy suspended, as if the magic itself had decided to hold its breath.
The space between us had shrunk to nothing, which was strange because I didn’t remember either of us moving. His eyes dropped to my mouth at the same time that mine lifted to his.
“Corvin,” I whispered.
The air between us went thick and still as my pulse beat hard in my throat. Every thought I’d had in the last five days: the wet dungeon, the cold stone, the skull moth, Arthur’s hands around my jaw, Lance...
All of it dissolved into Corvin’s face, which was tilted down toward mine, his thumb tracing a slow arc across the inside of my wrist.
He was going to do it. After so many fucking years of careful distance, of sidelong looks, of words that stopped just short of admitting what they truly meant.
After countless training episodes and arguments that ended in silence because neither of us could say the real thing.
After Lance had shattered my heart and I wondered if I’d ever feel anything again, I felt something now.
I felt something… now.
Corvin’s head dipped a fraction, barely a breath’s worth of movement. His fingers tightened around my wrist as his eyes lifted from my mouth to my eyes, and something in them, something raw and long-held, made my chest pull tight.
I stopped breathing entirely.
The mist curled between us, forgotten. Wraith shifted behind Corvin as if to remind us this wasn’t the place or the time, but neither of us looked away from each other.
And then Corvin stepped back. One clean step, one deliberate step. One step that cost him to take. A moment later, his hand fell away from my wrist.
“Shelter first,” he said, but his voice had gone a little rough. “Everything else after.”
My chest did something complicated: a tight, twisting sensation that started beneath my ribs and worked its way up into my throat. But he was right, and I knew he was right, and I hated that he was right.
“Yes.” I turned back to the work.
The illusion settled over Corvin in layers, the way frost spreads across still water: slow at first, then all at once.
His proud, straight nose softened and broadened, losing the sharp aristocratic line of it.
The high planes of his cheekbones flattened and rounded, and that strong jaw blurred, grew jowly, ordinary.
His brown hair lightened by slow degrees until it faded to the dull, unwashed color of dirty straw, hanging limp against a brow that no longer belonged to anyone remarkable.
The fine cut of his traveling clothes rippled and shifted, dissolving into rough-spun wool the color of dried mud, patched clumsily at both elbows and fraying at the collar.
Even his posture changed, the glamour dragging his shoulders into the particular defeated slope of a man who’d worked himself old before it was his time.
When the last thread of the illusion settled into place, a tired, unremarkable farmer stood where Corvin had just been. He was now the kind of man a person’s gaze slides right past.
He looked down at himself.
“Adequate,” he said, in Corvin’s voice, which was deeply wrong coming from that face.
“Adequate?” I repeated with a shake of my head.
That smirk again. “Don’t fish for compliments.”
I didn’t comment but gave him a knowing smile as I turned my magic on myself.
It was easier, going in, like stepping into familiar water.
I let myself shrink inside the glamour, let my hair darken and shorten, let my face round and soften into something boyish.
Soon, I had the appearance of a young boy: eleven, perhaps twelve years old.
A peasant’s son with muddy boots and a gap between his two front teeth.