CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
-LANCE-
The dream featured the training yard.
That should have told me something, because I almost never dreamed of pleasant things.
The yard was empty, which was wrong, but dream-wrong: the kind of wrong you accept because the light is good, the air smells like summer, and there’s no particular reason to question it.
There was dry sand under my feet. There were practice figures in their rows.
I’d started doing a blade drill I’d learned when I was fifteen, something that since then I’d repeated tens of thousands of times: mechanically, mindlessly, and gladly.
Then the light changed. Perhaps it would have been more fitting to say it flattened, the way afternoon light flattens before a storm, when the color drains out of everything and the shadows go wrong.
The sound went with it, along with the wind, the distant voices, and the birds.
So all that was left was just a certain kind of silence that wasn’t peaceful because it’s a silence that means something has stopped.
I lowered the blade.
She was standing at the edge of the yard.
I recognized her immediately even though I hadn’t seen her for over a decade.
Morgan.
I knew her the way you know things in dreams: without reason, without process, the knowledge simply just there.
She hadn’t changed: she was still just as devastatingly beautiful.
The midnight black hair, the emerald eyes with their trapped-light quality, and the gold flecks within them that never quite stayed still.
She wore something dark; perhaps it was just a gown made of shadow, and she was looking at me the way a physician looks at a patient who hasn’t yet understood his own diagnosis.
“Lance,” she said.
Not a greeting. A summons.
“You’re dead,” I answered because I’d heard she was dead. Three different people had told me she was dead. And because I hadn’t seen her in over a decade, I’d always assumed it was true.
She didn’t answer. Instead, she walked toward me with the unhurried certainty of someone who knew I wasn’t going anywhere. The dream-space rippled, the practice dummies blurring, the walls of the yard softening like they were made of wet clay. She stopped a few feet away and studied my face.
“You need to see something,” she said. “Something I must show you.”
“This is a dream.”
“Yes.”
“So whatever you show me—”
“—is real regardless.” She said the words the way she used to say things at court, back when she’d still been at court: with that absolute, almost bored certainty, like she was confirming the color of the sky. “Stop talking and simply watch.”
I tried to take a step back, but my feet didn’t move.
The yard dissolved.
What replaced it wasn’t a room I recognized...
not at first. The walls were made of stone, and there was a narrow window in one of them.
The light coming from inside the room was pale, thin, and fell across the floor in a single stripe.
A cell, I thought, but then I understood it wasn’t a cell at all.
It was a room in one of the tower keeps, one of the knight’s rooms.
Then I saw the icons. Galahad’s bed chamber.
All of a sudden, as if the ether had simply spit her out, Guinevere was there.
She looked at me and frowned, then she turned around, her back now facing me.
She stood with her arms crossed over herself, and even in the dream I registered the wrongness of her posture: it was the stillness of someone who had learned that moving too quickly brought consequences.
She was looking at something on the wall and not moving.
Then Galahad came into the frame in the same way Guinevere had. One moment he wasn’t there, and the next he was. He stood there looking at Guinevere, and his expression was just as stern as it usually was.
A moment later, a scourge appeared in one of his hands. The weapon was short-handled and practical. It was the type of tool used for penitential discipline, the kind I’d seen monks use on themselves in the cold hours before dawn.
He tore the tunic away from her, and along her back, I could see the welts, bruises, and scars.
Then he held the scourge above his head and brought it down against her naked and already marred skin.
She didn’t make a sound; that was the thing that struck me the most.
Even as he raised his hand and brought the scourge down for a second time, and the blade-tipped ends sunk into her flesh, causing streams of red to run down her back, she didn’t make a sound.
My dreaming mind tried to reshape him, tried to give him a reason, a context, something that would make the sequence of events make sense in the way that preserved what I knew of him.
It failed. Morgan held the image steady with both hands, and I could almost feel the pressure of her holding it in place.
My sleeping mind had a dozen defenses ready: Galahad wouldn’t, Galahad is holy, Galahad would never, there must be something I’m not understanding... and it deployed all of them.
“Galahad is not the man you believe him to be, Lance,” Morgan said.
It happened another two times while I stood there, unable to look away and unable to move, Morgan’s hand somewhere behind my chest keeping me fixed in place.
Guinevere continued to make no sound at all.
“Now you know,” Morgan said, and the room was already beginning to break apart, the light going wrong again, the stripe of pale window-light widening, then warping and taking everything with it.
“Wait—” I started.
But she was already gone.
I was upright before I was even fully awake.
Both hands gripping the edge of the bed frame, my knuckles white, the wood creaked under the pressure of my grip.
My heart was slamming against my ribs with the rhythm of a man in a fight: full sprint, full alarm.
There was sweat beading across my forehead and my palms were clammy.
The cold air of my chamber suddenly felt as if it was hitting me everywhere at once.
I sat there just breathing.
The room was dark except for the banked coals in the hearth, which had gone mostly gray. It was the middle of the night, then. I’d been asleep for maybe two hours. The candle on the table had burned down to a stub.
I opened my hands and looked at them. The indentations from the bed frame were still red across my palms.
A dream. That’s all it was. Just a dream. It wasn’t real.
I set my feet on the floor and pressed them flat against the stone, the cold of it grounding. Then I breathed out slowly: in through the nose, out through the mouth, the way I’d taught young knights to breathe when panic was coming.
A dream. It was only a fucking dream.
Morgan wasn’t even in Camelot. Fuck, she was rumored to be dead!
No one had seen her in years. The last time she’d been at court she’d still been Arthur’s intended, and even then she’d been...
the kind of woman who treated every room like a battle she’d already won.
She’d lasted at court about as long as a candle in a storm.
Arthur’s advisors had arranged the betrothal, and Morgan had refused it.
That was the version I’d heard, anyway: that she’d refused it and walked away, though some said she was removed by force, and others said she’d simply vanished one night and left a room full of frost behind her.
The point was: she’d been gone for a very long time. Long enough that she could have been dead. The other point was that whatever my mind had just cooked up, all I knew for certain was that it was a dream. It could have been nothing more.
And if not, then the point became that even if Morgan had dream-walked into my sleeping mind, she was a sorceress with her own agenda and always had been.
There was no version of this where Morgan Le Fay acted out of charity.
So, if she had, in fact, appeared to my unknowing mind, then she was showing me this for a reason that only benefited her. Because that was what she did.
I had no way to know if any of it was real. My dreaming mind could have constructed all of it from suspicion, suggestion, and the particular guilt I still carried about the woman in Galahad’s chambers. Dreams did that: they borrowed faces and turned them monstrous.
It meant nothing.
Right. It meant nothing.
Nothing at all.
Galahad was a man of the gods. A man of purity; he was painfully, deliberately, rigorously pure. He’d taken vows I’d never been capable of. He’d built himself into something incorruptible through sheer sustained will alone. I’d watched him for years. I knew who and what he was.
I told myself this another two times, maybe even three.
Then I lay back down, and I stared at the ceiling.
The sound the scourge made hadn’t been loud. And I couldn’t seem to get beyond that visual.
My hands were still clenched at my sides, but I didn’t uncurl them. The room was very cold, and I didn’t sleep again.
It was all a dream, I told myself for the nth time.
None of it was real.
-CORVIN-
It had been nineteen days that I’d been imprisoned.
I knew it because I’d counted every hour by sound, including the guard duty change and the fires starting up in the kitchens at dawn, which I judged by the sound of that distinctive thump as the grate was pulled open.
Or sometimes it would be someone shouting through the courtyard where I couldn’t see them.
There were also the chapel bells three floors above and halfway across the castle.
Mostly, however, it was the quiet: the kind of quiet that comes from that particular time in the day when a fortress this large stops moving, almost as if it can finally breathe.
Nineteen days, and I’d had maybe two hours of consecutive sleep.
And that had everything to do with the light-runes.
They were the hardest to bear. Even worse than the pain in my shoulders, courtesy of Arthur.
I was fairly sure they were dislocated. I’d tried to put them back into the socket, and I’d succeeded with one (possibly), but the other wouldn’t give.
There was one thing that kept me from falling into complete and total despair, and that was the crack.
It wasn’t large, but it also wasn’t something I could exploit yet.
Instead, it was a hairline fissure in the stone above the door frame where one ward-rune sat slightly canted, the seal imperfect, the glow a fraction dimmer at that one point than everywhere else.
Mordred was thorough, but he wasn’t flawless.
And in my experience—many years as a spy and my entire life as a man who made it his business to survive—the gap between thorough and flawless was where opportunity lived.
I knew Guin was with Galahad from Kay’s visit when he’d made it a point to tell me.
Not only that, but I’d heard the rumblings from the guards.
Interesting how castle gossip eventually made its way down here, to the deepest depths of Camelot.
Granted, it took longer to arrive, but it landed all the same.
I thought about Galahad. I’d sat at the Round Table when he was young: barely twenty.
Young and burning-eyed, precise in the way of someone who has organized the world into clean categories and intends to keep it that way.
He’d looked at magical practitioners the way certain men look at plague rats, even though he, himself, possessed incredible magic.
But his abilities, he believed, were divinely sent.
And he imagined himself to be a different type of person than the rest of us.
The way he regarded the magic of others, who weren’t devout, wasn’t just with fear, and it wasn’t just with contempt.
It was with a combination of both that, in my experience, became violence when handed authority and sufficient justification.
Arthur had given him both.
I wasn’t given much time to further ponder it because the cat came through the gap near the base of the door again, simply stepping out of the shadows of the empty cell across the way from me.
It had used that same gap every night this past week.
The space it originated from was barely two fingers wide, but it was enough darkness, apparently.
It was always the same cat: Morgan’s cat.
Whether it was just a familiar sent to gather intel about whether or not I was still alive, or it was Morgan taking a feline shape, I wasn’t exactly certain.
It wasn’t as though the cat could speak to me either, so I figured that particular mystery would remain exactly that.
The stunning black creature wound itself around the bars with that specific Morgan energy that was both elegant and yet put-upon, and faintly theatrical as it looked at me.
“Tell me she’s safe,” I whispered.
I said the same words every time the cat visited. And I said them the way a person recites a prayer, not because the answer comes back the way you want it to, but because not saying it is worse somehow.
The cat’s ears moved. They went back, though they didn’t lay flat all the way. It was a reluctance to respond, the body language of a creature that’s been asked something it doesn’t want to answer.
And that wasn’t good.
I closed my eyes.
The blue-white light pressed against my eyelids and turned everything red.
“How long has she been in trouble?” I asked, even though doing so was a waste of time, because the cat couldn’t answer.
The question was too complex for a borrowed body.
I knew that, yet I asked it anyway, maybe on the hopes that the cat could somehow figure out how to respond?
I didn’t know. Maybe I was just a desperate man in a desperate situation.
What the cat did instead was push one paw through the gap in the bars and extended it toward me.
Even though it hurt my shoulder, I leaned forward and let the soft fur press against my fingers.
We stayed like that for a moment as I realized this was Morgan’s way of comforting me. I wasn’t sure if it worked.
All I could think about was the fact that I’d made things worse for Guin.
That was the realization I kept returning to, the way a tongue finds a split lip.
I’d come here to rescue her, but I’d gotten her caught instead, and because of that she was in that room with Galahad, and I was twenty feet below it, and the distance was the whole problem.
She’d had some kind of position before. Some kind of leverage or negotiating ground or at least the relative safety of Arthur’s attention, which was terrible but comprehensible.
What she had now was Galahad, and I was starting to wonder which was worse.
She’d survive Galahad; I believed that to be absolutely true.
She’d survived the Standing Stones, and the Shadow Trials, and whatever Merlin and I had put her through in Annwyn to make her what she now was.
She had an iron spine, incredible water magic, and a mind that kept moving when everything else went still.
She was surviving this; there was no doubt in my mind.
But none of that was the point. The point was that I was stuck down here when I needed to be there, where I could protect her against anyone who intended to do her harm. Faith in her survival wasn’t a plan.
I pulled my hand back from the cat’s paw, and I sat up, pain lancing through my right side as I did so. Morgan’s cat disappeared back into the shadows from whence it had come, and I was alone again.