CHAPTER SEVENTEEN #2
The solar was empty when I entered. I dismissed the guards with a gesture and walked to the window. The courtyard below was lit with torches against the early dark, and a pair of stable boys were chasing each other between the water troughs.
I stood by that window for a while, my mind in shambles as I replayed everything from earlier.
The Wardens: she’d confirmed the truth that they were tied to the land, and she’d done so without meaning to.
Of course, I’d had my own suspicions based on intel from intercepted correspondence and from The Fox, who had reported on something along those lines.
But suspicion wasn’t intelligence, and I’d been working with suspicion for too long.
At the thought of The Fox, I further thought about the fact that there had been no sign of him for months. He’d simply faded back into the shadows as quickly as he’d stepped from them.
Faded back into the shadows...
The thought arrived without warning, and when it landed, it did so with a weight that spread outward and kept spreading until it reached every edge of me, because the word ‘shadows’ now equated to one person in my mind and one person only.
Was it possible that The Fox was Corvin?
I turned from the window.
My first instinct was to dismiss the possibility.
The Fox had served me for years. Years of intelligence from the borderlands, from the shadow-roads between Logres and Annwyn, from places no ordinary man could reach.
He’d given me names, movements, whispers of Merlin’s positioning that I’d never been able to fully act on but that had kept me from walking into more than one ambush, or so he’d said.
I stood very still and let myself think it through properly. I’d never seen The Fox’s face, not even once. He’d come to me in darkness, always darkness, wrapped in that particular quality of shadow that didn’t behave the way shadow should. It clung to him, moved with him, answered him.
I pressed two fingers to the bridge of my nose.
How many shadow workers were there, truly? It wasn’t a common gift. It wasn’t even an uncommon one. It was rare. Truly, I’d known two in my lifetime. One was The Fox. The other was Corvin. And now I wondered if it had only been one I’d known.
Not only had I never seen The Fox’s face, but I’d never even heard his true voice, as he’d always disguised it with some type of resonance working, or so I’d always assumed.
It would have been a simple enough trick for a man with the right training.
At the time, I’d taken it as professional caution, just a spy protecting his anonymity.
Now I began to think otherwise, began to wonder if this wasn’t so much a spy protecting his anonymity but a man protecting his identity from someone who knew the sound of his voice better than almost anyone alive.
I walked to the table and put both hands flat on it as the rush of shock completely overcame me.
The intelligence The Fox had brought me was always just enough; it was always intel that hinted at Merlin’s movements without ever giving me anything solid I could use to find him.
Coordinates that were three days stale, names of intermediaries who turned up dead before I could reach them, reports of shipments of magical artifacts that had already been relocated by the time my men arrived.
It had never felt like failure; it had just felt like the nature of the work.
I was a fucking idiot.
The information hadn’t been useless by accident.
It had been calibrated, given with enough truth to maintain my trust and enough absence to protect Merlin’s operation entirely.
Years of it, years of me sitting across a darkened room from a man I’d once called brother, handing him my questions and receiving answers that led precisely nowhere.
And then Guinevere.
I straightened as I remembered the exact moment I’d tasked The Fox with locating her, the moment he’d gone silent. There had been no reports, no contact, nothing. I’d attributed it to the difficulty of the search, but I hadn’t considered who The Fox might actually be.
The Ghost of Blackhollow.
That was what they’d called him because he’d moved through villages like smoke, appeared and disappeared without even one witness. He’d made himself a legend along the borderlands before Arthur Pendragon had ever even heard of his name.
Of course Corvin was The Fox.
The thing that struck me, standing there with my hands on the table and the torchlight guttering in the draft from the window, was that even though I was surprised by this realization, I wasn’t that surprised.
The shock lasted perhaps ten seconds, and then something beneath it simply settled into place with the grim satisfaction of a puzzle piece that had always belonged exactly there.
I should have seen it sooner. Why the fuck hadn’t I seen it sooner?
He was in my dungeon right now. My oldest friend and my most trusted intelligence source. Both of them the same man, and both of them Merlin’s.
I pulled out the chair and sat down. Slowly.
The candle on the table burned without flickering as I poured a cup of wine but didn’t drink it.
Instead, I turned to take in the room around me, as if seeing it for the first time ever.
The solar was one of my favorite rooms in Camelot, small enough to feel intimate, lavishly furnished enough to remind me of what the Pendragons had built.
It was then that there was a light tap on the door.
“Come in,” I said, because I’d been expecting it.
The door opened, and Lance entered. “You wished to see me, Arthur?”
I nodded and pointed to the chair at the far side of the room, beside the fire in the hearth.
He said nothing more but nodded and then made his way to the chair.
Lance was a big man, and the chair seemed entirely too small for him, but he sat in it regardless.
Neither of us said anything for a while. How long? I wasn’t certain.
I briefly debated telling him about this newest revelation but decided against it because Lance had never known about The Fox at all, and having to explain the whole backstory now was something I didn’t want to be bothered with. What was more, the nature of this meeting wasn’t a social visit.
The fire snapped and sent sparks skittering across the stone. I watched them die and then poured a glass of wine for Lance, which he accepted but then didn’t touch. Neither had I touched mine.
I’d called him here for a reason, and as such, I’d rehearsed the words three times over while Mordred droned on about border supply chains in the war council.
I knew exactly what I meant to say. You pulled your sword on me.
In front of my men. In front of knights who measure their own courage against yours.
I’d planned to be cold about it, clinical and detached, the way I handled every breach of loyalty. Name the wound, salt it, then close it.
Lance sat with his elbows braced on his knees, staring at the floor between his boots.
The scar on his temple caught the firelight.
He hadn’t shaved. That alone told me something: Lance, who kept his armor immaculate and his jaw usually shaven, sat there looking like a man who’d forgotten what day it was.
I opened my mouth. Then closed it.
Lance raised his head. His dark gray eyes found me across the fire.
“I imagine there was a reason you called me here.”
“Yes.”
The silence stretched. I should have said it then.
You drew on your king. Five words. An accusation he couldn’t counter because every man in that tavern room had seen it.
Instead, I reached for my wine and drank the whole fucking thing in one long swallow, setting the goblet back down again as I poured myself another.
“Then what did you call me here for?”
I looked at him. “Something that seemed important over the last couple of days but somehow doesn’t any longer.” Because the topic of my two prisoners wouldn’t leave my fucking mind.
Another silence, this one long enough that I took in the tapestries that lined the walls in deep crimson and gold, depicting victories I could recite from memory but no longer felt.
A table of polished walnut sat in the center of the room, scattered with maps and correspondence that had gone unread for the better part of the evening.
With one hand braced against the stone wall, I stood watching the torches in the courtyard below burn themselves down to nothing. The night was now cold and still. Even the wind had abandoned Camelot. The silence in the room now had a weight to it, and it was a weight I could feel on my shoulders.
“The nerve of that fucking woman.”
Lance didn’t respond. I took a deep breath and a deeper swig of wine and pressed my thumb against the edge of the windowsill until the stone bit into my flesh.
I’d tried to do to her what I always did when something needed breaking.
I’d stripped her of her dignity. Or, at least, I’d tried to.
And multiple times: when I’d stripped her naked in the Great Hall, when I’d thought I was forcing Corvin on her...
I’d orchestrated both, just to show her I could, to show her that I held all the cards.
I’d thought to make a lesson of her, or at least, I’d tried to.
My thoughts returned to the scene in the Great Hall when she’d stood there as naked as the day she was born.
I’d put her on display in the fullest, most humiliating sense, reduced her to nothing but a vulnerable woman in a room full of men.
I’d attempted to cut away any dignity she might possess so that I’d own her completely.
Such things had worked on men twice her size, on lords who’d crossed me.
I’d watched such lords weep in the hall, but never had I done to them something so wholly dehumanizing as what I’d done to her.
Yet, she hadn’t broken. She hadn’t even wept.
A chill hadn’t even crossed her skin. Instead, she’d walked the length of that aisle like it was a throne room she owned, her head up, her eyes forward.
That fucking chin tilted at an angle that made grown knights step back and out of her way with the expression of intimidation on theirfaces, their fucking faces!
And then she’d lied to me while I’d questioned her.