CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE #3
I could hear the spark of a flint, over and over, but nothing was taking.
I pressed my back against the wall and breathed in the dark, felt it filling my body, giving me the strength of night that I’d been missing for so long.
But the darkness here was different from Mordred’s ward-light absence.
This wasn’t merely the absence of flame, of light; this was something other that was moving through the corridor.
It was something with weight to it, and I recognized it the way you recognize a smell from childhood: distant but certain.
It was the veil, the line between here and there.
I could feel it straining as the darkness roared through my cell and filled me with a strength that wasn’t entirely shadow.
In fact, the shadow magic within me answered to it immediately.
It felt as if the void that had been within me was now filling up in overtime.
Whatever shadows had just passed through the cell, I’d felt them, felt them bonding with me, filling up my reserves.
Something was happening to the boundary between here and there.
I’d felt fragments of it over the past week: in whispers through the stone, Morgan’s cat bringing me scraps of information that didn’t quite add up, but this was no fragment. This was a rupture.
Which meant the wards on my cell were down too. All of them.
I stood quickly and moved to the cell door. As I pressed my palm flat against the iron, there was no resistance and no buzz of enchantment pushing back against my skin. There was only the darkness pressed in from every direction, and I let it press.
That was the only way I could describe what I did with shadows.
I didn’t command them, and I didn’t wield them like a weapon.
It was more like I was simply opening a door that had been kept closed for too long.
Well, now that door was wide open, and I intended to step through it.
The darkness recognized me, just as it always had.
Since Blackhollow. Since before Merlin had named it what it was: shadow magic.
I breathed out and let the shadows bond with the bones of my hands first, then my arms, then the length of me, until I was no longer flesh and blood but shadow.
And in becoming shadow, the dislocated shoulder, all the evidence of Arthur’s torture were taken from me, replaced with the weightlessness of darkness.
I reached forward into the lock that held the cell door closed, and my shadows easily manipulated it, causing the cell door to swing inward without a sound.
The guards were still arguing at the far end of the corridor. One of them had gone for help, and now only two more remained. I moved out of the cell that had kept me prisoner for too long, and they never turned their heads.
I stopped in front of Lance’s cell, which was right next to mine. His eyes were wide in the darkness as he, no doubt, figured out just what was going on: something monumental.
His breathing was controlled and deliberate.
It was the breathing of a man who’d been a soldier long enough to sleep light and wake clean.
But he wasn’t sleeping now. I could hear him jumping to his feet before I reached the door.
When I did, I leaned close to the iron and allowed my shadows to penetrate the lock the same way they had mine.
Soon, the cell door was opening, and then there was nothing separating us but the cold of the air.
Yet, Lance made no move to exit his cell.
Instead, he just stood there, looking at my shadows as if he wasn’t sure whether to trust that they were even real.
When I spoke, I kept my voice below a whisper. “Are you coming or not?”
There was a pause of two seconds, maybe three.
It was long enough that I wondered if pride was going to be the thing that kept him here.
But pride over what? A king that was most likely going to send him to the executioner?
He must have made the same decision because he made a single quiet exhale that said everything.
Then he nodded into the darkness and stepped out of his confines and into the corridor beside me.
He was broader than I remembered, or maybe the dark just made him seem larger.
I gave him a nod, then we started up the corridor.
Before we could reach the guards, I wrapped Lance in my shadows, and he didn’t fight me.
Then we simply blended in with the darkness, which was already ever-present, and we slipped past the two guards, who didn’t even realize anything was amiss.
I took the left passageway, and Lance didn’t question it. We moved silently, hugging the wall, the darkness wrapping around both of us. It was thicker now, more accommodating. The veil’s disturbance fed the darkness in ways that should have scared me, but instead, it felt like an answered prayer.
Two guards were near the bottom of the stairs, and they were desperately trying to light their lanterns.
I held up a hand, and Lance stopped behind me.
Then I walked us around them through a darkness so complete the guards were looking straight through us, turning their heads and seeing nothing. Their hands were shaking.
We reached the top of the stairs, and when I opened the door that led to the open night air, the cold air immediately hit my face. It was the smell of the woods, with woodsmoke in it, and somewhere distant, horses.
Lance was one step behind me, but I didn’t look back. Instead, the shadows carried us out to certain freedom.