CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO #2
When they let me down enough that my feet found the floor again, my legs nearly didn’t catch me. I straightened as I looked at him and wondered if both of my shoulders were dislocated or perhaps it was just one.
He asked again about the contacts, and more specifically, for names.
The silence was the same as the first time he’d asked me.
He took a deep breath as if my silence was frustrating him, but no one hoisted me up by my already busted shoulders.
That was a small mercy but I knew it was one that wouldn’t last.
“Merlin and the Northern Rebellion,” he started. “Is he leading the rebellion? Directing it from a distance? Something else?”
I held my expression and still didn’t say a word.
“You realize you’re making your choice at this very moment?” Arthur asked. “Every silence is a choice, and every choice has a consequence attached to it.”
I still didn’t say anything.
He rolled up one sleeve slowly, crossed to the table, and lifted the candle from the shallow iron dish.
Then he looked at me.
The guard’s grip caught my arm before I’d finished the breath I was drawing.
The burn was brief and precise: inside of the forearm, held still, just long enough.
My jaw locked so hard my back teeth ached.
I breathed through my nose, four counts in, four counts out, but I gave him nothing, just the silence, the sound of my breathing, and nothing else.
He set the candle down and rolled his sleeve further back.
“What is Merlin doing with his magic as it pertains to the veil?”
“I have... no fucking idea... what you’re talking... about.”
“The veil,” he continued. “Is he thinning it deliberately? What’s he doing that’s causing the veil to crumble? And why would he want to do so?”
I was more than sure there was nothing but genuine blankness on my face because the question didn’t land the way questions land when you know the answer but are choosing to withhold it. It landed the way a question lands when you don’t have any understanding of what’s being asked.
“I don’t... know what you’re... talking about.”
Something was happening to the boundary between Annwyn and the mortal world; I knew that much but only because Merlin had spoken of it in fragments, though never completing the picture.
But him acting as the agent, someone who was deliberately thinning it, or working against it, those were two very different things, and I had no information that supported either one.
Whatever crossed my face in that moment was real, and I knew Arthur could see that it was real.
Because he went quiet.
-ARTHUR-
Was it possible that Corvin didn’t know the veil was thinning? I doubted that very much.
“Soldiers at the eastern watch posted a report six days ago,” I explained.
“They saw the ghostly outline of a woman at the tree line. ‘Luminous’ I believe was the word they used to describe her. She was standing there, then gone before anyone could reach her.”
I watched Corvin’s face for the lie, but I still didn’t see one.
“Then there was another report that the river at Caer Vann reversed course for half a morning. Three men witnessed it. One of them drowned trying to cross what he thought was shallow water moving in the wrong direction.”
I cleared my throat. “Another report mentioned a strange fog that settled over a patrol camp near the old mill road. When it lifted, one man couldn’t recall his own name. He recovered after two days. Mostly.” I paused. “Shall I go on?”
Corvin said nothing, but he also didn’t need to. His jaw had tightened at the mention of the second report, and by the third, his eyes had moved off me and toward the middle distance where men go when something they’ve half-suspected becomes solid enough to hold.
That wasn’t the face of guilt. It was the face of a man who knew the shape of the room he’d just been locked inside.
Before I could open my mouth and ask another question, the image dropped into my mind’s eye without any warning. It was a memory of Guinevere bent over in front of Corvin. His hands were on her hips and his cock was inside her. She was moaning, and her eyes were closed.
My grip closed on the edge of the table, and somehow I managed not to look down at my knuckles, but I knew they were white.
Destroy him! The dragon blared through my mind, filling me with the glee I’d experienced earlier when the guards had hoisted Corvin into the air by his arms, and his shoulders had made a popping sound.
Tear him apart!
“Tell me what Merlin knows about these incidents,” I insisted.
Corvin met my eyes for the first time in several seconds. “Merlin has nothing... to do with any of... that.”
I gestured to the guard closest to me with two fingers.
The rope went taut, and Corvin’s breath left him in a hard exhale as his arms took his full weight once more.
His shoulders pulled wrong immediately; there was already damage there from the previous session, and the body remembers what it’s been through even when the mind decides to be brave about it.
His face contracted and his jaw locked as his eyes fixed on something above my head.
The dragon flooded me with warmth.
The image came again. Slower this time.
Corvin’s mouth on hers, his fingers in her hair, the sound of her moan as he thrust inside her...
I watched his face contort and thought: good.
The word arrived before I could intercept it, so I let it stand.
I also let him hang longer than the question required.
When the guards lowered him, his breathing had gone ragged and uneven, the kind that means the body is deciding what to prioritize. His shoulders sat at the wrong angle, but I didn’t fucking care.
I waited and noticed how the room was quiet except for the torches and the sound of him trying to reassemble himself. The dragon purred against my ribs like a sated cat.
When Corvin’s eyes cleared, I leaned down and whispered into his ear, so no one would hear me. “Is Merlin trying to free the dragon from within me? Is he the reason it’s been growing stronger?”
The silence before Corvin’s answer was different from the silences before his others. It wasn’t a protective silence, but neither was it strategic.
“Leave,” I told the guards, and they dutifully nodded and then retreated. Only then did Corvin speak.
“Merlin... doesn’t want the dragon... to overcome you,” he said. His voice was wrecked but direct. “If the dragon... defeats you, that... means ruin for all of us. Not... just you.” He paused. “Not to mention... he can’t even... speak of it. He’s oath-bound to Blodeuwyn.”
I was very still.
The room held the same temperature it had held before, and even though I rebelled against the idea, I felt that on this subject, Corvin was telling the truth. That, or Merlin simply hadn’t enlightened him on whether or not he intended to free the dragon from me.
But I didn’t like the math there. Because if Merlin wasn’t attempting to strengthen the dragon, and Merlin couldn’t intervene where the dragon was concerned, then that meant there was no hand on the wheel.
And the dragon growing stronger was simply happening because I wasn’t powerful enough to contain it.
The dragon was quiet. Even it understood that this answer belonged to me alone. It didn’t offer commentary. It simply waited, patient and warm, the way it always waited, and I had the sudden sharp awareness of how completely I’d become its house.
I took a breath as Corvin looked at me. There was one last question for which I wanted a true and real answer.
“Are you the Fox?”
There was a beat of silence at that, and it wasn’t the reflex of a man protecting himself. This was something more considered: the pause of a man making a final, private decision about the kind of thing he was willing to be.
“Yes.”
It was a simple and direct answer, and there was no apology in it. Just the word, set down like something he’d been carrying for a long time and had decided to put on the floor for me to pick up.
I felt something in my expression close.
Not loudly. There were no raised voices. No speeches. No reaching for the rhetorical gravity of the moment. The last of the administrative distance simply collapsed, and what replaced it had nothing to do with kingship or intelligence or the long strategic interests of the crown.
This was personal.
The dragon threw another image at me again.
But this time it was different: slower and more detailed.
I let it come. And when it showed me how Corvin had thrust himself all the way inside her and the joy of release passed over his face, I was already rolling up my sleeves.
Both of them. Past the elbow. The fury and the dragon had become, in this particular moment, impossible to distinguish from each other, and I no longer cared to distinguish them.
I was also aware that this was no longer an interrogation. Corvin had nothing left that I needed. What happened now served no strategic purpose, would yield no information. I knew that. I knew it the way I knew my own name.
But I proceeded anyway.
Because I wanted to.
-GUIN-
I’d been brought to a training yard just after dawn, which in Camelot meant cold air that hadn’t decided yet whether it wanted to be fog or frost.
A guard had knocked on the door, informed Galahad that I was to meet the king in the training yard, and then he’d walked me across the inner courtyard to a smaller practice yard that was tucked behind the armory.
Arthur was already there. He had his back to me, and he was working through a form with a wooden practice sword.
He heard us coming, but he didn’t turn.
“You’re late,” he said.
“I was escorted,” I answered. “Complain to the escort.”
He turned then, and something shifted in his face, something that became the expression of mild amusement. Or maybe it was mild irritation: it was difficult to tell. He held out a practice sword, hilt first.
I took it.
He didn’t come at me immediately. Instead, he watched me hold it.
“Show me your guard,” he said.
I showed him, and he corrected my grip without comment. His hand closed over mine and adjusted the angle by maybe two degrees. Then he stepped back.
“Again.”
“Can I ask—”
“—No, but you will anyway.”