CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR
-GUIN-
The air changed the second we stepped out of the castle; it was now drier, colder, and carried the smell of sawdust and iron. It was the scent of the training yard. When we rounded the last arch, the morning light hit me full in the face.
Arthur was already there.
He stood in the center of the yard with his back to me, one hand resting on the pommel of a practice sword.
He wore no armor, just a dark linen shirt, rolled to the elbows, and riding braies tucked into boots that had seen actual use.
He was watching two of his men spar in the far corner.
They stopped when the guard brought me through the gate, and Arthur immediately released them.
Clearly, he wanted this time between us without spectators.
I was wearing the drab prisoner’s gray gown, which was more like a tunic that was too large at the shoulders and too short at the ankles.
My hair was down because no one had given me anything to tie it with.
I was aware of how I looked, and that irritated me because I shouldn’t have given a damn about how I looked.
Arthur turned, and he looked at me the way a man looks at a map he doesn’t entirely trust. He assessed me, but his expression gave nothing away except the effort it took to give nothing away.
“Leave us,” he said to the guard.
The man didn’t hesitate but immediately nodded, and with a slight bow, he turned on his toes and walked away. The two sparring knights who had been there only moments before had now drifted toward the far gate.
The yard was empty, save for Arthur and me.
He said nothing as he crossed to the weapons rack along the eastern wall of the yard.
He gave me a quick and appraising look before selecting a practice sword.
It was made of wood, weighted at the blade, and the grip was worn smooth from use. He held it out to me.
I crossed the yard and took the sword, relishing the feel of it against my palm. Arthur drew his own practice sword and rolled his neck once. Then he looked at me across the eight feet of packed earth that separated us.
“Show me what you can do.”
I came at him from the left because he expected me to come from the right. He caught it. Of course, he caught it. But he had to move his feet to do so, and that was something.
I didn’t fight now the way I used to fight: all explosive magic, kinetic force, and ice-threaded speed.
The reasons I didn’t fight the same way were numerous.
But first and foremost, I simply couldn’t.
The binding sat against my chest, and every time I reached for anything beneath it, I found only the weight of emptiness, of Mordred’s power working against mine.
Not only that, but after being starved by Galahad for weeks, I didn’t have the necessary energy to really go after Arthur.
All I had now was what little energy I could summon from my body, which wasn’t really much. All the while, the memory of every drill Corvin had put me through came back to me.
Step left. Close the distance before he can use his reach. Don’t telegraph with your shoulder.
He came at my right side hard enough that I had to drop back two steps to absorb it.
“Is Merlin capable of entering Camelot without being detected?”
Of course, these training sessions were just a pretense for Arthur’s true reason for calling me here: to interrogate me. I caught his blade on a cross-block and shoved it wide. My arms burned with the effort.
“Yes,” I said.
A pause while I circled right. The morning was still cool, but my tunic was already damp at the spine.
“Then why hasn’t he come for you?”
There it was. The real question. He’d been building toward it ever since he’d stepped onto the yard; I was certain. Every question about Annwyn’s geography, about Merlin’s habits, about the structure of the wardens... all of it had been leading here.
I bought myself half a second by pressing forward, making him defend instead of advance. He did it easily, turned my blade, and stepped aside with the ease of a man who’d been fighting all his life. But I got my half second.
“The mission comes before the operative,” I said. “That was made clear to me before I ever crossed the border.”
It wasn’t a lie. That was the thing about it. Merlin had said as much. Well, not in those words exactly. His version had been softer, wrapped in the language of necessity and the greater work and “you were made for this, Guinevere.” But the meaning had been identical.
Arthur lowered his practice sword by an inch. Just an inch.
“And you accept that?”
“I understood it going in.”
He studied me the way he’d been studying me. Not the way Galahad watched me, as if I were a problem to be excised. No, this was more as if I were a text Arthur was reading in a language he mostly knew.
I let him look. I held my sword at a neutral guard and kept my breathing even and tried very hard not to let the silence do what it was doing.
The thing was, and this was the part I kept pressing down, pressing flat, folding over and over again so it took up less room, saying that truth out loud was different.
In Annwyn, it had made sense. Everything in Annwyn made a particular kind of sense, the way things make sense when you’re standing inside them.
Merlin’s logic was the air you breathed there.
The mission was sacred. The operative was a vessel.
I was a vessel, and I’d been honored to be one because the work was larger than any single person and Arthur’s reign was a slow wound on the land, and someone had to be willing to...
But I was standing in a training yard in Camelot, after learning I was Merlin’s flesh and blood, and Galahad had done what he’d done, and Corvin was somewhere in the dark below me, and Merlin hadn’t come. For either of us.
I’d told myself a dozen different reasons why he hadn’t come: the wards that protected Camelot, his numbers against Arthur’s, the timing, the strategy of it: that showing his hand too early would cost him more than it cost me.
All of it was probably true; Merlin wasn’t a careless man. He didn’t move without a reason.
But standing in the morning light with Arthur’s eyes on my face, the space between he hasn’t come yet and he is never going to come felt narrower than it had before.
Arthur held my gaze for a moment. Then he raised his sword again, and the question was done, filed away somewhere behind those blue eyes where everything I told him went. His expression hadn’t changed, but it rarely did.
We went back to the drill.
But the answer sat in my chest differently now, occupying the same hollow space where my magic used to live. I’d always been told the mission came first, and I’d believed it. I still believed it, probably.
Arthur pressed forward. He was testing me, not fighting yet, just feeling me out. I could tell by the economy of his effort, the way he let me find a rhythm before disrupting it. He was watching my feet as well as my grip and the lag between decision and execution.
I didn’t give him a clean read. I’d been trained by someone who knew exactly what Arthur’s knights looked for because not only had he been one, but he’d trained most of them.
So, I slipped angles, and I used my smaller frame as a feature instead of a liability.
I was thin now, genuinely thin, and it made me faster in small ways even as it cost me in endurance.
“Who are the rebellion’s allies among the noble houses?”
I dropped back a step and let my blade come down to neutral, not to buy time but because I genuinely didn’t know. The not-knowing had a different texture than deflection.
“I don’t know.”
Arthur’s eyes moved across my face as he studied my expression for the lie he believed was there, no doubt looking for the slight tension at the corners of my mouth when I was shaping a half-truth, or the way my breath changed when I was deciding how much to give him.
I met that searching gaze, held still, and let him look.
Whatever he found satisfied him, or came close enough. He raised his sword again.
“Where does the rebellion get its funding? Its weapons?”
This one I answered faster because the answer was the same, and it cost me less to give it. “I don’t know.”
His eyes sharpened by a fraction at the difference in how I’d delivered the response: the slight ease, the absence of the careful stillness I’d held for the first question. He pressed forward in a slow advance that pushed me back toward the center of the yard.
Twice I got inside his guard. The second time I got close enough I heard something change in his breathing.
Then he took me apart, completely and totally.
It wasn’t cruel, and that was almost worse.
He read the overextension in my third feint, redirected my blade with one clean rotation of his wrist, and stepped behind me.
His forearm came across my chest, and the practice sword fell out of my hand, clattering against the stones six feet away.
His arm didn’t move. And neither did I.
Three heartbeats of both of us breathing hard.
Still, his forearm was a bar of iron across my chest, pushing against my breasts.
I could feel the heat of him through the thin prisoner’s gown, through whatever careful distance he’d maintained between us, through all the architecture of a king and his prisoner.
His breath was at my temple.
I didn’t move. Couldn’t or wouldn’t? The difference between those two things had blurred considerably. Then something happened that I wasn’t expecting and didn’t know what to do with.
It started at my chest, right where the binding sat the heaviest, and it moved outward like a tide that hadn’t been given permission to move.
It wasn’t my magic; no, this was different.
This was something pressing against me from inside, reaching toward him, toward whatever lived beneath Arthur’s skin, the beast.
I’d seen the dragon before. It existed in that primal place behind his eyes, and what I was feeling now didn’t make any sense because the feelings flowing through me were recognition. Like two flames leaning toward each other through a draft.
“You feel it too,” I whispered, without even realizing I’d spoken.