CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
-MORGAN-
The servant’s mind shut behind me as I closed the door from where I’d been walking in her unknowing thoughts.
I came back into my body hard. The ceiling of my chamber swam above me, the candle I’d left burning guttering in a draft I hadn’t caused. There was blood on my lip that was coming from my nose. I could taste the copper and salt. I pressed the back of my wrist against my mouth and held it there.
My hands were shaking.
They hadn’t shaken for the better part of a decade, perhaps even two. I let them shake now, alone in the dark, because the alternative was pretending I hadn’t just felt something inside Camelot’s dreamspace that had shoved back.
I sat up slowly, the moonlight streaming through my open window. The candle steadied. Outside, the wind moved through the pines above Caer Gwyll in long, slow passes, the way it did before a cold front came in off the northern ranges. The sound it made was like the mournful singing of ghosts.
I considered the things I knew.
Mordred’s wards were intact. I’d felt their structure, felt their tightness, the way they were layered.
They had been meticulously crafted in the way everything Mordred built was meticulously crafted.
He’d warded every entrance, every window, every gate.
He’d warded the walls. He hadn’t warded the ground because no one ever thought to ward the ground.
The earth beneath a fortress was permanent, geological, older than any ward system.
No one warded bedrock because bedrock was bedrock.
Except the bedrock was where the veil was going.
I’d been tracking the thinning for weeks now.
In the borderlands, it showed up as discoloration in the water readings: a gray quality to the surface of still pools, like a film of ash sitting atop the water.
The birds had changed their behavior too because they were one of the first creatures to feel it when the veil wasn’t...
right. In the old tongue, there was a phrase for it: the sky listens too closely.
I’d heard similar words from a woman in Caer Gwyll’s lower market who hadn’t known she was speaking about anything magical, who’d only meant that the air felt strange.
And she was right. The air felt strange because the membrane between what was alive and what wasn’t was no longer categorically holding.
Three weeks ago, it had been a border problem.
Tonight this thinning was apparent inside Camelot.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed and found the floor with my bare feet. The stone was cold. Achingly so. I focused on that, on the specific, grounding coldness of it, and waited for my hands to stop shaking.
The other walker bothered me more than the veil did.
In centuries of dreamwalking, I’d felt resistance from sleeping minds.
I’d felt resistance from warded spaces. I’d felt the passive push of a mind too defended by trauma or too deeply submerged in nightmare to admit me entry.
I’d felt Vaelen in the dreamspace more times than I could count.
Thus, I knew his signature the way I knew his hands.
I recognized the specific quality of his power.
It always felt warm, lateral, and faintly reckless even when he was being careful.
But this had been none of those things.
This had been intention without signature. Agency without identity. Something moving through the collective unconscious of Arthur’s court like a hand moving through smoke, leaving no impression, and displacing nothing.
Which meant it was either very old, or it didn’t have a living source.
Both of those possibilities weren’t good.
I stood, crossed to the basin on the washstand, and poured water over my hands, then pressed a wet cloth to my upper lip.
The bleeding had already stopped, a small mercy.
Dreamwalking rarely left physical evidence unless something went wrong in the dream.
The broken vessel in my nose meant I’d pushed too hard when I withdrew. A mistake I didn’t usually make.
The fact that I’d made it now told me more about the encounter than any analysis ever could have. I was scared. And that was telling because I was never scared. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time fear and I had been bedfellows.
I dried my hands, pulled my robe tighter, and walked to the window. Caer Gwyll lay below me in the dark, its scattered lights small and yellow against the black. Somewhere in the distance, a bird called once, but then it didn’t call again.
Guin and Corvin were still prisoners in Camelot.
Guin was now being held by Galahad, from what my ravens had reported, and Corvin was still in the dungeon.
And he’d been tortured: also something my ravens had brought back to me.
But he was alive and that was the most important thing.
They were both still alive. And that meant they were secondary problems at the moment.
The primary, pressing problem was whatever was happening to the veil.
Three days ago, when the raven had arrived with the dead sparrow, I’d sat through a council meeting in which Carlisle had argued for an immediate strike and Merlin had argued back with the quiet ferocity of a man who knew he was right and also knew his being right wouldn’t matter.
I was convinced that Carlisle, being a soldier himself, simply wanted bloodshed.
He wanted a fight; that was his main intent.
And I was growing tired of him. Soon, I’d have to do something about him.
Merlin’s prediction of the Northern Rebellion attacking Camelot as “a death sentence” had been accurate.
Both Corvin and Guin were deep within its walls, and any aggressive measure taken to free them would activate Arthur’s safeguards, the result being that both would be dead by the time the first protective spell fell.
Merlin was right.
What was more, the crisis at this point wasn’t Guin and Corvin.
Guin and Corvin were captured and alive, which meant they were recoverable as long as Arthur hadn’t decided what to do with them yet, and Arthur’s indecision was one of the few constants in the known universe.
He’d take weeks, perhaps even months, to make a decision this significant.
He always did. Not to mention that he’d never murder Guinevere.
Not when he was completely obsessed with her.
Not until he’d fucked her (an interesting subject that was, as I would have placed money on the fact that he would have fucked her by now).
But that was beside the point. What wasn’t beside the point was the crisis of the veil.
Something was using the thinning. Or something was causing it.
Or, and this was the thought I didn’t want to have, standing barefoot on cold stone in the dark, but I was going to have it anyway because I hadn’t survived this long by refusing uncomfortable thoughts, something was the thinning.
Something with enough presence and intention to move inside a warded dreamspace, push back against a trained walker, and leave no signature behind.
I thought about the moths I’d spotted in the dungeon when I’d taken on my feline form. The skull-patterned ones. Skull moths didn’t come from anywhere natural. They came from the border between. And now something was inside the dreamspace that had no business being there.
I went back to the bed and sat on its edge. I didn’t lie down. Lying down would mean trying to sleep, and I wasn’t going to sleep. Not tonight. Not until I’d worked through what I knew, what I suspected, and what I was going to do about both.
The wind moved through the pines again, making the needles bristle against one another. It sounded like the world was crying.
Vaelen needed to know. Not because I trusted him or anything silly like that.
No, he needed to know because he was a dreamwalker, and he maintained routes through the dreamspace I didn’t have access to.
What was more, he’d probably felt the same thing I had: that something was strange, something was off.
If he’d felt this same presence and hadn’t mentioned it, that was one kind of problem.
If he hadn’t felt it at all, that was another kind.
Either way, I needed to know which one I was up against.
I pressed the thumb of my left hand into the silvery scar running down my right collarbone.
Doing so was now just habit; the mark held no power, having been used up long ago.
And yet the action brought back a memory, of a certain night, of a certain price I’d paid, of something I’d done that hadn’t killed me. But that was a story for another day.
For now, the veil was thinning through the bedrock of Camelot, and something without a signature was walking inside its dreams. Merlin’s daughter was locked in the middle of all of it, with her power bound, and no idea what was coming through the floor.
I sat in the dark and let the full weight of that land.
Then I got up and started getting dressed.
He looked at me for a long moment. Then, with a weary nod, he followed.
-MORGAN-
The time had come to do something about Carlisle.
But he didn’t know that. He was too busy being useful with his cock buried deep inside me.
I rode him slowly, one hand braced against his scarred chest, watching his jaw go tight with the effort of holding still.
His hands gripped my hips hard enough to bruise, and I let him.
There was something about a battle-hardened man that I’d always found difficult to dismiss.
The way the body became a record of every war it had survived.
Carlisle’s body was practically a manuscript: scars mapped his shoulders, his ribs, the thick column of his throat.
He’d earned all of them, which was more than could be said for most of the men I’d met in comfortable rooms making comfortable decisions.
This wasn’t about pleasure. I mean, it was, incidentally.
But that wasn’t the point. The point was the fine silver thread I was spinning between us, breath by breath, subtle as perfume.
Not a compulsion, nothing so crude as that.
Just a softening. A loosening of the particular knot of pride and stubbornness that made Carlisle difficult to manage in a room full of people with competing agendas.
I felt the magic leave my fingers when I pressed my palm flat to his sternum. He didn’t notice. Men rarely do when they think they’re winning something.
I rolled my hips against his engorged cock and found the angle I wanted.