CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO #3
It was my turn to slightly smile in an amused-irritated sort of way. “—why are you training me?”
“Would you prefer to stay enclosed in Galahad’s chamber all day?”
“No.”
“Then perhaps it’s best not to ask.”
We went on like that for a while. He pushed, I gave ground.
He’d correct something, and I’d implement half of it because I didn’t want to give him too much.
He was good at swordsmanship. Actually, he was better than good.
There was an economy to the way he moved that I recognized from Merlin’s training yard, where the masters didn’t waste motion because they’d been hit often enough to stop being sentimental about it.
After the third pass, he stepped back and lowered his blade.
“Corvin trained you well.”
It seemed like it cost him something to say Corvin’s name.
“Yes,” I answered.
Then he asked about Annwyn. Not sharply, but more conversationally, the way you ask someone to describe a city they’ve visited. There was curiosity in his tone as well as mild interest.
“What do you want to know about it?”
He shrugged. “What’s the terrain like?”
I told him the truth because the truth seemed harmless.
“It’s always eternal dusk, and the sky always sits in purples and deep blues, never quite tipping into full dark. The trees grow to impossible heights; their canopies can get so thick that you forget there’s a sky at all.”
He nodded as I took a deep breath. “Is Corvin still alive?”
Arthur looked at me, and it took him another second to realize what I was doing. “This isn’t a quid pro quo.”
“It should be.”
He thought about it and then nodded. “Yes, Corvin is still alive.”
“Are you planning on keeping him that way?”
He shook his head and made a tsking sort of sound. “Your turn first.” A pause. “Tell me about Merlin’s fortress.”
I described the outer walls of Caer Gwyll and the black stone that absorbed light rather than reflecting it.
Then I described the courtyard, the towers, and the way Merlin’s observatory sat at the highest point of the eastern face, its glass dome catching whatever starlight filtered through the perpetual cloud cover.
“Yes, I’m planning on keeping Corvin alive,” Arthur answered. “For as long as you’re willing to give me what I want.”
I felt my eyes narrow. “What is it you want?”
“For now? Information.” He came at me with his sword then, but I defended myself. “Tell me about the waterfall on the eastern face,” Arthur said. “The one that runs backward if that story is true.”
“How do you know any of the things you do about Annwyn?”
“I used to have an informant who told me,” he answered, but the way he said the words hinted at the fact that there was more to this story than he was letting on.
“The waterfall is real,” I answered. “It runs up the rock face in defiance of everything natural, fed by some working Merlin has never bothered to explain. It’s not visible from the main approach. You have to walk the eastern perimeter of Caer Gwyll, past the secondary gate, to see it at all.”
There was no reason Arthur would know about it. Unless someone had told him, someone who had walked that perimeter and knew Caer Gwyll well enough to notice.
Neither of us said anything for a moment.
The yard felt smaller than it had. I ran back through everything I’d already told him. None of it was classified, and all of it was true.
“Are you going to keep Corvin in the dungeon?” I asked.
He nodded. “For now.” Then a pause. “Tell me about The Standing Stones.”
“What do you want to know about them?”
“Will they still kill anyone who crosses them?”
“Yes, unless—” I stopped.
“Unless what?”
“Unless you have the right... token.”
That wasn’t quite a lie, but it also wasn’t quite the truth. The truth was blood, Merlin’s blood, the stones woven from it and keyed to it. But the word ‘token’ was vague enough to swallow.
He let that sit.
“Mm.” He turned and walked toward the weapons rack, and I watched him set the practice sword down with care. “What’s the approach look like? From the stones to the main gates of Caer Gwyll?”
I didn’t tell him that there weren’t any main gates, that the sheerness of the obsidian mountain was sufficient to deter unwelcome intruders. “Open ground,” I answered. “Mostly. Some tree cover on the northern side.”
“How much tree cover?”
“Enough tree cover.” Now these questions were taking the shape of something I didn’t like because it felt like we could have been discussing an ambush or a scouting party or the like.
The point was, there was no way I was handing the King of Logres the approach vectors to the only place I’d ever felt safe.
Arthur still stood with his back to the weapons rack, his arms loose at his sides, and he was looking at me with something that wasn’t satisfaction but also wasn’t surprise.
“You’re good at this,” he said. “Or you were good at it until just now.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes, you do.” He tilted his head slightly. “You stopped. That’s interesting. Most people don’t notice themselves stopping.”
The cold in the air had settled into my collar, and then down the back of my neck.
I held the practice sword at my side and said nothing because everything I could say at this point either confirmed I’d been giving him real intelligence or confirmed I knew what he was doing, and neither of those things served me.
He crossed the yard toward me and then stopped just outside arm’s reach.
“The gap,” he said quietly, “is more useful than anything you’ve said.”
He took the practice sword from my hand with the unhurried ease of someone who’d never once doubted his right to take things.
Then he walked away and he didn’t look back. Just summoned the guard by flicking his fingers, and soon the guard was headed toward me, and that was just as well because the yard was already filling with the knights, and I didn’t want to face any of them.
Not when I stood in this cold yard with the smell of sawdust and iron around me and understood, with the delayed clarity of someone who had just watched themselves be outmaneuvered, that I’d given Arthur something today.
Not the stones. Not the blood. Not the real key to anything, that was true. But I’d shown him where the door was.
And what was more, I’d shown him that I knew where it was.
-LANCE-
The yard was loud with it: the ring of steel on steel, orders barked across the practice ground, boots on packed dirt. I had no reason to be standing at the far edge of the colonnade with my back against the stone and my eyes on the wrong part of the yard entirely.
I told myself I was watching the drill.