CHAPTER EIGHTEEN
-MORGAN-
One of my ravens arrived before dawn.
I heard the beat of its wings before I heard it tap its beak at the window. I was already awake. In truth, I’d been awake since the third hour of the night, lying in the dark with my hands folded over my breasts, listening to Caer Gwyll breathe.
The raven stood there, patient and still, watching me with one eye. In its feet, curled around the object like a fist, was a sparrow. Already dead.
I stood up, crossed the room, and opened the window. The raven immediately flew inside, and when I held my palm out, it dutifully dropped the sparrow into my hand before taking its perch on my shoulder.
“What have you brought me, my beautiful girl?”
It cawed, and both of us lowered our eyes to look at the sparrow which was tiny and insignificant-looking; nothing special in the least. It was the sort of creature that spent its entire existence moving between the lower branches of the trees without ever calling attention to itself.
But it wasn’t the little bird itself that arrested my attention. It was the fact that there wasn’t any blood, just as there wasn’t any wound. There wasn’t anything to show it had even been killed, and that was the part that struck me.
I turned the little creature over in my palm, noting how it weighed almost nothing, something that always surprised me: how little weight life added to a thing.
The death of this particular sparrow could have been considered a trivial thing if taken on its own. Birds died constantly: taken by larger birds, crushed by carts, caught by cats, struck by stones thrown by bored children. The world was full of small deaths that went unnoticed.
But this was the sixth.
The sixth small bird in the last week, all brought to me by my ravens, all dead without mark or injury. All found within a day’s ride of Camelot.
The first had been a wren. Then a finch. After that a thrush and two swallows. Now this sparrow. Each one dead the same way, its life simply snuffed out mid-breath, as though something had reached inside and pulled the spark free.
My raven shifted on my shoulder, claws pricking through the silk of my gown.
“I know,” I murmured.
This wasn’t natural death. This was something more, something decidedly unnatural. This was magic, and from the feel of it, old magic: the kind that leaves no signature because it predates the need for such things. It was the kind of magic that made the scars along my collarbones burn.
I carried the sparrow to the fireplace and dropped it into the coals.
Then I watched. Just as with all the others, this one didn’t burn.
That was the first wrong thing, because feathers catch.
Feathers always catch: they curl, blacken, and stink in a way that stays in your nose for hours.
This one didn’t. The heat took the body, and the body went soft, almost liquid, the way wax softens before it runs.
The little bird melted down into the coals like water into sand.
No smoke. No smell. Just there one second and gone the next.
I sat with that for a long moment because I was worried about what it meant.
When the pressure on the other side of the veil spiked, when something pressed against the boundary between here and there, the small things closest to the seam simply stopped, like a candle snuffed between two fingers.
I stared at the place where the sparrow had been, and the coals glowed orange and red but said nothing useful.
-MORGAN-
I heard Carlisle’s voice from the corridor.
The walls of Caer Gwyll were two feet thick in places, yet his voice still carried through them. His was the kind of voice that didn’t need volume because it never stopped.
Inside, someone’s fist hit the table.
I opened the door and walked inside, without bothering to greet anyone. I was late, and I knew it. But that shouldn’t have been much of a surprise; I was always late.
I paused by the door and took my time with my cloak, unclasping it, then folding it over my arm before hanging it on the iron peg beside the latch with the care of a woman who had nowhere urgent to be.
The room was warm, dim, and smelled of frustration and old arguments. Three torches burned in their sconces along each wall while the war table ran down the center, and around it stood Carlisle, two of his northern captains whose names I’d taken care not to learn, Vaelen, and Merlin.
And Hailey.
She was standing at Vaelen’s shoulder rather than sitting, which told me something about how she occupied rooms: not planted in them but positioned, like someone who hadn’t yet decided whether she was staying.
As she regaled the men with a story about something, she used her hands as she spoke.
Her bright eyes found me the moment I walked through the door, the same way they had at the last meeting: quick, assessing, and entirely unimpressed by my entrance, which I found both irritating and refreshing in equal measure.
Soon, my gaze moved to Merlin, who wasn’t looking at anyone. Instead, his eyes were fixed on a point somewhere below the table’s surface, the way a man looks when he’s performing stillness.
Vaelen looked up when I entered. His gaze landed on me and stayed there, and I felt the weight of it: something specific and complicated.
No doubt he was wondering why I hadn’t allowed him to come to me the evening prior.
I let him wonder, as the answer wouldn’t have satisfied him even if I’d given it.
I took the chair at the end of the table farthest from Merlin and sat down.
No one acknowledged me directly. That was fine. I hadn’t come for acknowledgment.
“—forty-eight hours,” Carlisle was saying.
He was on his feet, one hand braced on the table, the other gesturing like a man who’d delivered this particular argument enough times that he’d stripped the fat from it.
“Forty-eight hours, and Corvin hasn’t returned. What’s more, there’s been no word from him. Either he was caught, or he’s dead. Neither of those outcomes changes the fact that the mission is burned.”
“The mission,” Vaelen said, from across the table where he pulled a chair out, then sat in it, plopping his legs up on the table and crossing them at the ankles, “hasn’t failed.”
Carlisle looked at Vaelen, and his eyes nearly bugged out of his head. “What would you call it?! The mission took for granted that our best operative would still be operating!” Carlisle’s eyes were sharp above the gray of his beard.
Vaelen sighed out his obvious exasperation. He had the look of someone who’d explained himself seven times and was determining whether an eighth would produce different results. “The mission has just... changed direction.”
“Changed direction?!” Carlisle looked like he was about to have an apoplexy. “We don’t even know if Corvin is dead!”
Beside Vaelen, Hailey pressed her lips together in the manner of someone who was physically restraining a comment.
She caught me watching her do it and gave the smallest shrug and an expression I interpreted as: I have opinions about this man’s volume but have decided this particular moment isn’t the time to comment, but fuck, is he loud.
“Corvin isn’t dead,” Merlin said finally. I nodded.
Even so, Carlisle didn’t appear fazed. “You don’t know that for certain.”
“I do know that for certain,” I answered, giving him a slow smile when he turned his attention toward me.
Carlisle wasn’t an unattractive man, but he was just too blustery for my liking.
Regardless, I could imagine that in his day, he would have been the type of man to keep my bed warm.
“I have been tracking him through my ravens,” I finished.
“And he is very much alive, for now... though he is Arthur’s prisoner.”
While Corvin hadn’t returned, his horse, Wraith, had. The creature had simply returned to Caer Gwyll a day or so earlier, and everyone had immediately assumed the worst.
Carlisle frowned at me. “Even if Corvin is still alive, we don’t know where in the castle he’s being held.” I started to argue that point as well, but Carlisle held up his hand as his bushy eyebrows met in the center of his face. “My point is, we can no longer rely on him.”
“And my point is that walking our men into Camelot blind isn’t a rescue operation. It’s a memorial,” Vaelen said.
“Standing down isn’t strategy,” Carlisle muttered as he turned to face Vaelen, who was currently looking at me. “It’s surrender.”
“It’s patience—”
The room went quiet in that specific way it does when two men have spoken their own truths and neither one is ready to look at the other directly.
“It’s also,” Hailey said in the tone of someone who had waited long enough to be certain the silence was genuinely finished, “the only option that doesn’t end with us eulogizing our own men before Arthur has to lift a fucking finger.”
She said the words without heat, without apology, and without looking at either of them specifically, her eyes on the map instead. “Just to name the third thing.”
Carlisle turned to look at her. His expression had the particular quality of a man recalibrating. “I know we’ve already been introduced,” he started.
She nodded. “Yes, we have. And if you’ll recall, I’m Vaelen’s right hand,” she interrupted, but did so pleasantly. “Which means when he’s busy being reasonable with you, I’m the one who’s doing the arithmetic on the backend.”
“And the arithmetic doesn’t add up,” I added as she looked at me and nodded.
“A rescue attempt without intelligence,” Merlin said as he turned to face the room, “is a death warrant.” He took a breath. “What is more, there is no rush.”
“No rush?!” Carlisle looked like his heart might give out on him right there.
“Arthur has exactly what he wants,” Merlin continued. “Two of our most important people. If he kills either of them, he loses. Thus, he will not. He will keep them alive merely because he knows they are important to us.”
His voice was steady, but it was always steady. I’d watched him be steady for years in the face of things that should have cracked him open, and I’d never decided whether it was strength or cowardice. Looking at the particular set of his mouth now, though, I thought it was neither.