CHAPTER FOURTEEN
-GUIN-
The crystal pendant at Mordred’s throat pulsed white as I thought about attempting to use my magic against him and then escaping.
But very soon I remembered just who this was, and I stopped myself from trying anything.
Not only had Arthur given him permission to kill me, but Mordred would take him up on it. Of that, I was certain. In fact, I was fairly sure Mordred considered me a risk just by keeping me alive. So, I didn’t fight him.
Mordred said nothing when he initiated the binding. There was no grand incantation, no theatrical gestures. Just his fingers tracing a single rune in the air between us, and then it hit me.
Not like a blow. More like complete submersion.
My magic didn’t disappear. Instead, it collapsed inward, folding against itself, and the pressure was catastrophic.
Every water sense I possessed: the distant pull of the river through the castle’s foundation, the moisture in the stone walls, the blood moving through Mordred’s veins, all of it snapped shut like a fist closing over a flame.
I couldn’t breathe; the pain was so intense.
My hands found the nearest wall as I tried to remain upright, but even that was difficult. The stone scraped my palms, but I couldn’t say I even felt it. Instead, something inside me was screaming, a sound beneath sound, the kind that lived in the chest rather than in the throat.
Let me out.
My vision tunneled, going black at the edges, then the black began to spread.
Mordred caught me before I hit the floor.
“Breathe,” he said quietly. “It won’t kill you.”
-ARTHUR-
That fiery coil behind my chest signified that the creature within me was awake, whether I wanted it to be or not.
I’d sent my attendants out an hour ago and dismissed the guards from my inner chamber. Now I stood at the window with a cup of wine I hadn’t touched and watched the courtyard stones while Mordred worked below, and that had been fine. I’d been fine.
Then the binding on the white-haired witch must have snapped into place.
Because that was when I felt it. And it was the part I couldn’t explain and refused to examine: that I felt the moment Mordred’s sigils closed around her magic. There was a sound like a lock turning, except the sound was inside my skull. And then something slammed against my ribcage.
SHE IS BEING HURT!
“Stop.” I had to brace myself against the window sill to keep myself aloft.
WE MUST GO TO HER!
“I said stop.”
The glass smashed on the floor. It wasn’t because I dropped it; my hand released it without my mind even wanting it to.
I started walking, pacing the room, because I couldn’t stand there any longer.
The heat was burning me. In my throat, my face, my chest.
I looked at my hands, and there was gold around my knuckles, along with the slightest hint of scales.
SOMEONE WOUNDS THAT WHICH IS OURS!
“Mordred is restricting her powers. She’s not being injured in the slightest.” I kept my voice as even as I could. Long experience had taught me that arguing with the beast would do nothing but fuel it further, but saying nothing at all would be worse. “She’s a prisoner. This is how prisoners—”
The rush slammed into me like an enormous wave.
I gripped the table with both hands, and the wood gave a groan as I felt it compress beneath me. I forced myself to relax my fingers one by one.
TAKE HER AWAY FROM HIM!
My knuckles were growing even golder, the scales spreading. And my fingernails were beginning to arch into claws.
I made myself cross to the door and open it. There was no one there, thank the gods. The corridor air here was cooler as I stood in the doorway and breathed in and out until the gold receded from my hands.
-GUIN-
This cell was smaller than the other one.
But it still looked essentially identical.
The straw was still matted into the same damp corners, the same iron ring bolted to the same stone.
And aside from the sliver of window in this cell, nothing else had changed.
Well, except for the number of very strange moths I’d seen earlier.
Where a handful had been, now there were at least double that, all sitting on the stone wall.
But I couldn’t focus on them for long. Instead, Mordred’s binding sat on my skin like a coat I couldn’t remove. It felt both foreign and weighty. Everything felt somehow closer now too. Heavier and stranger.
I pressed my back to the wall and slid down until I was sitting on the cold floor. My wrists ached where the sigils had been drawn. Not cut into me, but drawn with something that smelled like sulfur and old blood and left no visible mark, just the sensation of something sealed. Something locked.
I tried, once, to reach for my water. There wasn’t even a trickle of response.
So, I stopped trying.
Outside, the sky had gone the color of pewter.
I stared up through the slit in the wall and thought about the fact that this was all I had.
Just this narrow strip of world; it was all Arthur had left me.
I watched as a few ravens flew by. There were three of them first.
Then seven. Then more than I could count, all of them wheeling in loose, arcing circles above the tower.
Their calls carried down to me, flat and sharp as dropped coins.
I watched them until my neck hurt.
Ravens didn’t circle like that without reason. Back in the hills above Logres, the dairy farmers used to say ravens circled for two things: storms or the dead.
The sky was clear. So that only left the other option.
My chest went cold.
Corvin.
I hadn’t seen him since Arthur had separated us.
All I knew was that Lance had taken him to the dungeon.
I’d watched it happen, watched Corvin go without a fight because fighting would have made it worse for both of us, and Corvin would never willingly make anything worse for me.
I watched his broad shoulders disappear through the gate with Lance’s hand at his back and three armed knights flanking him.
He’d looked back at me once.
Just once.
I pressed my knuckles against my mouth as I willed the tears to stay behind the bulwark I’d been erecting against them since the moment we’d been caught.
Hopefully, Corvin was in the same dungeon I was.
As far as I knew, there existed more than one in Camelot.
And I could only hope he was sitting in his cell like and not stretched out on the torturer’s slab.
But I had a feeling the second option was closer to the truth.
Corvin had broken into Camelot, broken out a prisoner, and he’d made Arthur look a fool in front of his men.
Those weren’t offenses that ended with a cell and a cold floor.
I knew what they ended with.
I’d spotted the execution yard from the window when the guards had brought me back in here.
That was probably exactly why my cell had been changed.
So I could watch what happened to those who upset the king.
Yes, I’d seen the block as well as the dark staining in the wood that no amount of rain would ever fully wash away.
“I hate you,” I whispered. “Gods, how I hate you.”
One of the ravens broke from the others and landed on the outer ledge of the window slit. It sat there, enormous, black, and absolutely still, its eye catching the dismal light like a bead of oil.
It looked at me, and I looked back at it.
Then my eyes burned, and I stopped being able to look at anything clearly.
I didn’t make much noise. There wasn’t really any noise left in me. Just the wet, stupid, helpless kind of crying that happened when the body gave up before the mind did. My shoulders drew up around my ears, and my back was against the wall, my hands useless in my lap.
Corvin had come for me. That was the part that kept catching, that kept snagging on something in my chest and tearing a little more each time. And he’d come for me by his own choice. Merlin hadn’t asked him to.
And I’d let him. Even knowing what it might cost him. I’d gone with him. I’d lain down next to him in that tavern and let myself feel, briefly, stupidly, like it might all be alright. Like we might be alright.
And then Arthur had walked through the door.
How in the hell he’d found us was anyone’s guess.
I’d been so careful about our disguises, and we hadn’t met a soul on the road from Camelot to the tavern.
So how had Arthur found us? And how had he done so as quickly as he had?
I didn’t have any answers for myself, so I retired the questions.
The raven on the ledge clicked its beak once and lifted away into the gray, folding into the circling mass of black above the tower.
I wiped my face on my sleeve, but it didn’t help much.
If Corvin was dead, it was because of me.
He’d ridden into the lion’s mouth because of me, and I’d led Arthur straight to him by being exactly as reckless and obvious as I always was.
If I’d been smarter, if I’d pushed Corvin to ride harder, farther, if I’d done anything other than sit in a warm tavern pretending, for one single foolish hour, that the world wasn’t what it was.
I pressed the heel of my hand against my throat to keep the strangled cry from releasing itself.
The ravens kept circling, and I kept watching them.
-ARTHUR-
There was something different about the lower cells of this part of Camelot, the sensation of darkness closing in from everywhere, the feeling that sound didn’t behave correctly below, as if it had been muted and swallowed by the stone.
It had a way of making a man understand the shape of his own fear.
That lesson Corvin still hadn’t learned.
He stood when he heard my boots on the stairs. Yet he didn’t flinch, and he didn’t reach for the bars. He just stood in the center of his cell with his arms loose at his sides, watching me cross the torch-lit corridor as if he were the one holding the keys.
Old habit.
I remembered when that posture had made me proud of him.
I stopped three feet from the bars and looked at him. The bruise along his jaw had deepened overnight. It was purple-black, now swollen at the cheekbone.
“You look well,” I said.
One of his eyebrows arched. “You look tired.”
“Kings don’t sleep.”
“Kings who destroy their own people don’t deserve to.”
The torch to my left guttered. Neither of us moved.
“I didn’t come to argue,” I said.
“Then why did you come?”