CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE
-LANCE-
Ice crusted the stone in the corridor and Galahad’s bedchamber sheets, and the air bit at exposed skin.
But it was the expression on Guinevere’s face that gutted me, even if I wished it hadn’t, because she wasn’t the one who was bleeding, and Galahad hadn’t caused the ice that was raging around us. It was fairly obvious that she’d attacked him.
But, why? I thought the question to myself. And why now, after all this time?
Tears ran down her face and froze on her jaw, but she didn’t seem to even notice they were there. Instead, her eyes were blazing open and aimed at nothing.
I wanted to go to her. Fuck, it took everything in me to remain standing in the doorway when every protective instinct I had told me to shield her, to protect her.
No. She’s the enemy. And she might have very nearly killed Galahad.
That voice in my head that was trying to remain logical was the only reason I stayed in the doorway, as did all the others, including the king.
I remained here not just because of the ice, though a shard had already taken a chunk out of the wall six inches from Arthur’s shoulder.
Strangely, he hadn’t even flinched, which told me he was either braver than I’d given him credit for or too furious to have noticed it.
I stayed because going to her now, in front of all of them, would cost more than it helped.
That was the rational argument anyway. Rational or not, I kept turning it over in my mind like a coin I was repeatedly flipping, hoping it would change.
It didn’t change anything.
Then Tristan arrived and walked right in as if he had a written invitation, and I watched Arthur’s jaw tighten at the breach of it. But Arthur said nothing.
He stopped an arm’s length from her, but he was still close enough that a shard of ice grazed the air beside his ear. He didn’t even seem to notice it.
“You don’t have to carry this alone,” he said.
He didn’t touch her; he just stood there. And he was completely still in the middle of a room that was still tearing itself apart, with ice crashing into the walls and water roaring in circles around them both. Yet he just stood there as though this was somewhere he was perfectly comfortable being.
The spiraling slowed. I watched it happen and couldn’t explain it because his magic was death magic.
It had nothing to do with water. And yet, the columns of water were clearly losing their urgency, and the ice shards now hung suspended instead of launching.
Guinevere’s breathing, which had been ragged enough to hear from the doorway, started to calm.
I’d faced many things in my life and hadn’t flinched at most of them. And yet, as I stood in that doorway and watched them, watched him reaching out to her, and watched her eyes land on him, I felt something pull tight in my chest. It wasn’t something good.
He extended his hand, palm up.
Something moved across her face then. The blaze in her eyes dimmed, not all at once, but like a fire running low on fuel. Her hand came up, and it was shaking. Her knuckles were scraped raw, and I found myself wondering why.
Are you mad? I railed at myself. She just very nearly murdered Galahad, and you’re concerned about her fingers?
She reached for Tristan’s hand, and their fingers met. Almost instantly, the maelstrom stopped.
It wasn’t a gradual dying down or winding down the way a storm does either.
It literally just stopped the moment her skin touched his.
Every shard of suspended ice dropped at once and hit the floor at the same time that every column of water fell flat.
The temperature bottomed out for one sharp moment and then began to climb back toward something livable.
Guinevere stood in a flooded, destroyed, half-frozen room holding Tristan’s hand, and the only sounds were dripping water, her breathing, and the distant pop of ice contracting against stone.
Then her legs gave out from under her, and I felt myself start to move forward, moving against the idea of her falling against the stone floor.
But I was too late. Tristan’s arms came under hers, and he held her up, as she pressed her face against his chest and shook.
She wasn’t crying. No, she was just shaking, as if her body was settling a debt it had been running on borrowed time to pay.
He held her there, and neither of them said anything. And all of us just stood where we were and watched them. I glanced over at Arthur and found him conversing with Mordred, and then his gaze moved back to Guinevere, and his eyes narrowed. I had no idea what he was thinking.
I looked away, and not because anyone was watching me. I looked away because I had to, because I was afraid that if I continued to watch them standing there in the middle of the room and if I continued to see the way she was looking at him, my body would simply cave in on itself.
I’d known jealousy before. I’d felt envy over titles, honors that weren’t bestowed on me, envy of the kind of easy certainty other men seemed to carry that I’d spent twenty years trying to manufacture in myself.
But this jealousy wasn’t that. This was the particular agony of watching another man hold a woman your heart had already, without permission, claimed.
It was the pain of watching another man doing the thing you should have done even as you reminded yourself why you hadn’t.
I could have gone to her. I’d arrived here before Tristan had. I’d pushed through the throng of onlookers until I was first in the doorway. I could have entered that room and taken her in my arms and calmed the tempest. But I hadn’t.
Instead, I’d stayed in the doorway and I’d made the rational argument to myself that I couldn’t go to her. And now I couldn’t even seem to remember the reasons I’d given myself. All that remained was the fact that I hadn’t acted, but he had.
Behind me, I heard Arthur exhale slowly through his nose. It was the sound a man makes when he’s deciding something. As to what he’d just decided, who knew?
The dripping water counted out the seconds, and I stood there in the cold and felt the exact shape of the thing I’d been telling myself I didn’t feel, outlined now in perfect clarity, the way frost outlines what it touches.
It wasn’t a comfortable thing to finally see clearly. No, it wasn’t fucking comfortable at all.
I looked back at them once more, and a tremor of something tore through me. She was still shaking, and his arms were still around her. The room was destroyed: still flooded and freezing, and she was clinging to him like he was the only solid thing in a world that had just become entirely liquid.
That was the part that would stay with me.
Not the magic. Not the ice. Not Galahad bleeding against the wall with that bewildered expression.
No, it was the way she was clinging to Tristan.
-CORVIN-
The ice came first.
It started as geometric formations that bloomed across the cell bars in patterns that were too precise for frost and spread too fast for any temperature change to explain.
I was off the pallet and against the far wall before the vibration reached me.
And when it did, it was deep and concussive, the kind of shudder that travels through stone the way a distant explosion travels through your back teeth.
I felt it rather than heard it. It was a wave moving outward from somewhere above me and to the east.
The light-runes flickered.
I’d been in this cell long enough to understand what that meant because Mordred’s runes didn’t flicker. They were engineered against fluctuation, calibrated to hold against the specific magical signatures he’d accounted for.
But they were flickering now.
The blue-white light pulsed in an ebb and flow pattern I’d never witnessed before. It didn’t fade slowly, as in a ward under constant stress, but rather in a sharp way, almost as if a pulse were being sent through the entire system at once.
I knew what it was before the shouting started and before I heard the sounds of running footsteps.
I knew what it was before the guard passed my cell door at a dead sprint without slowing, without the half-second hesitation they usually gave my cell just to confirm I was still in it.
I knew because I knew what her magic felt like because I’d known that feeling for three years straight.
I’d been there when she first came to Annwyn, when her power went haywire.
It was late autumn, and we’d been training at the lake behind Merlin’s tower.
The lake had been still, but then suddenly it wasn’t still at all, and ice began climbing the reeds in spiraling formations.
I remembered how she’d stood there: with her hands pressed to her mouth and her eyes wide with shock.
It was at that moment that I’d picked up the signature of her magic and now I knew it the way I knew her voice.
And what had just moved through the stones of Camelot was, without a doubt, her magic. Not only that, but it had been fully unbound and operating without constraint.
It was her magic, yes, but the detonation of it hadn’t been her choice. I could feel as much in the wave that accosted my cell. It didn’t possess the quality of control it usually did: that elegant application I’d watched her develop over years of careful work. This was an eruption.
I pressed myself to the cell door and listened, trying to ignore the pain in my shoulder which had only gotten worse as the days ambled on.
The corridor was bedlam, and the sound of guards walking in opposite directions and talking to one another reached my ears.
There was a shout for Mordred, another for the king.
I parsed the sounds as I’d been taught, finding what mattered and trying to make sense of the fragmented pieces: Galahad’s quarters.
Third floor east. Magic user... the witch.
Maelstrom. Uncontrolled. Guards won’t go in.
Ice. They kept describing ice. I heard that word repeated at least six times in the first three minutes.
Galahad is bleeding.
One of the knights walked into the room, but the maelstrom didn’t touch him.
Tristan.
The king is there.