CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
-MERLIN-
The book lay open across my knee; it was a treatise on celestial alignments I’d written myself three decades prior, but I hadn’t turned a page in the last hour because the words had stopped meaning anything.
They’d been replaced, as they always were in the quiet hours, by the image of her face.
My daughter.
I set the book aside, and seemingly in response, the fire popped as a log shifted, settling into ash.
I’d been tracking her through the water.
Not directly; that was impossible now, with Mordred’s fingers in everything.
But I could still feel the shape of her presence in the condensation that gathered on Caer Gwyll’s walls, in the rain that fell on its courtyard, and in the cold damp of the stone.
And in that presence, I could feel her; it didn’t matter where she was.
All I knew was that Guinevere was in Camelot, and she was alive. She wasn’t well, but she also wasn’t broken.
I wasn’t in fear for her life, for I knew Arthur would never kill her. It didn’t matter that she was his enemy. She was too important to him.
I stood and crossed to the window. Caer Gwyll spread below me: the old fortress I’d made my seat after the exile, its towers stubbed and weathered, its walls grown over with something that hadn’t been ordinary ivy for decades.
The valley beyond was dark, while the stars above were not quite right; they hadn’t been quite right in some time.
The veil was thinning.
I didn’t need Morgan to tell me in order to know it was true.
I’d felt it for a while now, like a seam coming loose in a garment you’d trusted for a very long time.
The boundary between what was and what should not be, between the world the living inhabited and the darkness that pressed with patient, ancient interest, was unraveling.
It had held since the beginning of time, but it wasn’t holding now.
I knew why.
The dragon.
Arthur’s cage was rotting from the inside, and the dragon’s essence was leaking out and upsetting the balance between this side and that.
There could be no other reason for it. Whatever iron will the man had used to contain it, and I’d watched him build that will, stone by stone, it was no longer sufficient.
The dragon was older than Arthur. Older than Camelot.
Older than the Pendragon line itself. It had slept a long time before Blodeuwyn had awakened it for Uther, and now it pressed against its vessel with a hunger that didn’t diminish, and every time it pressed, the veil thinned a little more.
I touched my thumb to the cold glass of the window.
In the last twenty years of my visions, I’d seen the same ending.
Not the same path: the paths had varied endlessly, branching and reconverging; some of them catastrophic, most of them insufficient.
But the ending was always the same. Always the same image at the center: Guinevere.
Always Guinevere, standing at the threshold of something I couldn’t fully see, and the dragon coiling toward her not like a predator but like a thing coming home.
I’d seen the vision before Guinevere ever drew her first breath, and I saw it still.
It always came without warning, as the important ones do: violent, clarifying, and completely unwelcome.
A girl with silver hair and violet eyes and a dragon that had burned for centuries, finally still. The veil sealed.
It had taken me twenty years to find her.
I took my thumb from the glass.
The trouble was simple and also impossible.
I needed to tell her what she was. Not who she was; she knew enough of that.
But what: that she was the vessel the visions had always named.
The only living person with the blood and the water-gift and the particular quality of resonance that the dragon would recognize as something other than a threat.
She didn’t know the truth: that she was the answer to housing the dragon, and in housing it, the answer to keeping the veil from splitting.
I’d kept the truth from her deliberately, early on, because she’d been young and terrified, and the last thing a terrified girl needed was to be told that her existence was load-bearing.
I’d planned to tell her before she went to Camelot, but the timing had been wrong, and then Arthur had imprisoned her, and the timing had become a different problem entirely.
The communication between us had grown silent, most likely because Arthur saw no reason for it, not when I knew both Guinevere and Corvin were his prisoners. What would be the use in pretending otherwise?
I crossed back to my chair and stood behind it, hands on the carved back.
What I needed to tell her was this: that the dragon inside Arthur was not a possession or a curse.
It was a fundamental force that had been incorrectly housed for too long.
That it was tearing at its container the way water tore at stone, not quickly but without cease.
I needed to tell her that the veil was the consequence, and that she was the only person alive whose nature was capable of receiving the dragon.
I didn’t want Arthur’s death. I wanted to be precise about that, at least in my own mind.
I’d spent considerable effort not wanting Arthur dead.
Wanting him reduced, removed, chastened, yes.
Would the dragon’s passage require his death?
I didn’t know, but I hoped not. What I did know was that it would require his surrender, which might be harder to arrange.
But I couldn’t tell her any of this, not with the current situation.
I pulled out the chair and sat.
The coals in the fireplace had gone almost entirely dark. A thin orange thread wound through the gray ash, barely visible. The room was cold enough now that I could see my breath, just faintly, each exhale a small ghost dissolving before it reached the ceiling.
I had trained her to read water, to hear what it carried, to follow a current back to its source. I had also trained her to sense a presence within a presence, a thing beneath the surface of another thing.
She was observant. She noticed human contradiction. She was skeptical of everyone, including me, especially me, which was the correct response to me, even if I’d never told her so.
But, yes, she’d now been near Arthur long enough that she would have felt the entity beneath the king, the dragon.
She would have felt the heat of it, the way it rose up in the king’s eyes.
She would have felt the otherness of a man who wasn’t just a man, but something so much more.
I could only hope she was aware of the dragon’s existence, because then it would be easier to make the case for it and why she was meant to take it unto herself.
She was half her mother’s child, which meant she was water-born, water-reading. And while the dragon was fire, they did not cancel one another out. Fire was only water’s opposite in the way that a key was a lock’s opposite. They answered each other.
She would have felt it, but whether she would have known what she was feeling was another question.
I picked up the book again, then set it down again.
The visions had never shown me the conversation where she agreed to house the dragon, to become its cage.
They showed me the outcome and nothing of the method, the way prophecy always cheated you: handing you the destination and leaving you to build the road for yourself.
That meant I did not know if she would choose this destiny.
And I did not know if she would refuse it.
I had hoped the visions would have shown me more; I’d been hoping as much for the last twenty-three years.
The last coal went dark, and I sat in the cold as I thought about my daughter, the way I always thought about her.
Not as a father, precisely, because it wasn’t natural for me to think as a father would.
But I thought about her more in the way a man thinks about a fire he lit a long time ago in a forest, as he watches the smoke rise from a distance, unable to tell if what he started is burning well or burning wrong.
When I looked at it, I realized the fire in the hearth was dead.
I hadn’t noticed it go. That happened sometimes, in the long nights, when the thinking became too consuming to leave room for anything as ordinary as tending a fire.
The cold had come in quietly and established itself while I wasn’t attending the logs, and now the room was dark and the ash in the grate was the same gray as everything else.
I should have gone to bed, but I did not move.
The calculation had been running beneath everything else for weeks, the way certain calculations did when I did not want to look at them directly.
Instead, I let them run in the peripheral dark of my mind and I called them something else: perhaps a contingency, or a consideration, or a path not yet necessary.
I built other structures around them, structures that were tall enough to block the view.
Every one of those structures had now come down.
I knew the shape of what remained. I had known the shape of it for some time. I had been calling it by softer names, the way a man calls a wound a bruise because bruises heal on their own, and wounds require attention, and attention requires admitting the wound is there in the first place.
No matter how I looked at it, the wound was there.
There was a place. Not far, as distances went in the world, though the world’s distances had meant less and less to me as I aged, and the other kind of distance, the kind measured in what a journey costs rather than how long it takes, had come to mean more.
There was a place in the Whispering Wilds where the trees grew wrong, the light came in sideways, and the silence was not the silence of emptiness.
It had been many years since I had stood in that silence.
Many years since I had walked that path and breathed that air, old stone and older magic and the particular cold that gathered in places where power had been held a very long time.
It was the type of cold that had nothing to do with temperature, but the type you felt in the teeth.
I’d had reasons not to go. Good ones at the time.
The exile had made travel dangerous, and then Caer Gwyll had required establishing, and then there had been the question of Guinevere, which had consumed the better part of a decade in various forms.