CHAPTER ONE
-GUIN-
Merlin had warned me the day would come when he’d call in the favor I owed him.
Today was that day.
I stared into the scrying pool. My reflection rippled, but it wasn’t the surface that made me uneasy. My white hair still fell in soft waves around my shoulders. My violet eyes remained unchanged. But the woman staring back had become a stranger.
Three years in Annwyn had changed me—sharpened me. The scared girl who had fled Logres had become something colder. Stronger. A weapon.
"You're distracted," Merlin said.
His voice always cut like a blade.
He stood on the opposite side of the massive oak table, his imposing figure draped in flowing robes of vermilion.
The fabric seemed alive with movement—constellations embroidered across the material twinkled and shifted like real stars.
Occasionally, a silver thread would trace the path of a comet across his chest, or a cluster of tiny crystals woven into the sleeves would blink with soft light.
The sight never failed to remind me that I was in the presence of the most powerful sorcerer in the realm.
His long fingers traced the lines of Camelot’s map like he might rearrange the city by sheer will.
"I'm focused," I lied.
He raised one eyebrow. “Your thoughts cling to the past, girl. That’s dangerous.”
I bit back a retort. The Twilight Sovereign had an infuriating habit of always knowing everything. "No. I’m just... thinking about my disguise."
He narrowed his eyes. "Your illusion is flawless. No one will see past Sir Lioran unless you allow it."
Sir Lioran was my disguise—my assumed persona—the masculine warrior whose name and face I would be adopting in order to compete in Arthur's Shadow Trials.
My fingers brushed the edge of the scrying pool, disturbing my reflection. The truth was more complicated than Merlin wanted to acknowledge.
My water magic naturally wanted to reveal rather than conceal.
Unlike shadow or illusion magic that thrived on deception, water existed to reveal—to reflect truth, cleanse impurities, expose what lurked beneath surfaces.
Every stream showed an honest mirror. Every puddle held reality without filter.
The essence of water was clarity, purity, truth itself.
Which meant my own magic would work against me where this disguise was concerned.
Each day I maintained it, my power would press against the deception like fingers testing a locked door.
The danger wasn't that the illusion would fail—it was that my magic would try to fix it.
It would try to fix me. Because water seeks truth, if I wore Lioran's face too long without shedding it, my power would eventually decide the disguise was meant to be real.
It would begin reshaping my actual features to match the masculine jaw, the broader shoulders, the heavier build. Slowly. Permanently.
So, I had to return to myself each night, or risk losing Guinevere forever.
"It’s not the magic that concerns me."
"Then what does concern you?"
I walked over to the table and, reaching over it, traced a route across the castle’s inner ring with my eyes. "It's one thing to look like a male knight. It's another to act like him, move like him, think like him, and another thing entirely to convince other men I'm the same as them."
"Identity is a blade." His tone remained completely unconcerned as he continued tracing patterns across the map's surface, leaving glittering magical dust in his wake.
"Sometimes it serves as a shield. Other times, it becomes a scalpel—precise, cutting.
The key is knowing which tool the moment requires and wielding it with absolute conviction. "
I lifted my eyes from the map to meet his penetrating gaze directly, feeling the familiar weight of his scrutiny.
"Easy counsel for someone who has never had to walk into the heart of enemy territory and pretend to be something he fundamentally is not.
" My voice carried more edge than I'd intended.
Merlin frowned, but the heat within me wouldn't be so easily dispelled.
His storm-gray eyes darkened, and for a moment, I caught a glimpse of something ancient and weary flickering beneath their surface. When he spoke, his voice carried the weight of centuries.
"You think I haven't worn masks, girl? You believe deception is foreign to me?"
Something flickered in his expression then—beyond the irritation that I was arguing with him again. Pain? Regret? Whatever it was, it vanished as quickly as it came.
"I've done what was necessary to survive—and to ensure you do the same."
If he wanted my gratitude, he wasn't going to get it. I fully understood what I was to him—a tool. Nothing more. Nothing less.
It just so happened that this mission serendipitously aligned with my own deeply rooted desires for vengeance and justice against Camelot and its king. Otherwise, there would have been no amount of persuasion or prompting that would have led me to agree to it.
"Your thoughts are unraveling again." Merlin cleared his throat. "Focus, Guinevere. Arthur’s court is not a place for uncertainty."
I straightened and held back another pointed remark. I hated it when he lectured me, and he knew it. But he didn't care.
"Do you understand your mission?" he continued.
"I do."
Even in the face of Merlin's frustration, my thoughts returned to Logres, the homeland I would soon be returning to. It was now a land devoid of magic, thanks to the king.
"You seem troubled. Where are your thoughts now?"
I looked up at him and figured there was no use in lying. I'd learned that lesson a long time ago—Merlin could see through everything. "I was thinking of… home." Of Eldenvale. Of my parents. The farm. The people who’d once loved me.
Merlin’s voice softened. "You know you can’t return."
I nodded. “I know.”
He studied me with those all-knowing eyes. “They are gone, Guinevere. They have been for over three years. Now they should be nothing more than a distant memory."
Another nod escaped me, tighter this time. That familiar ache settled in my chest—that hollow space where memories of my parents' laughter once lived, where the warmth of our small kitchen on winter mornings used to reside.
Merlin, for all his boundless knowledge and mystical prowess, didn't understand love or human connection.
As far as I knew, he'd never truly experienced either emotion in any significant capacity.
So, of course, he couldn't comprehend the bitterness that curled in my gut as I lay awake at night, consumed by thoughts of nothing but the burning desire for revenge against the king who had obliterated everything I once cherished, everything that had given my life meaning.
While it was true that Merlin, too, craved vengeance against Arthur, there was a stark contrast between his motivations and mine.
Merlin's revenge seemed rooted in a desire for power, a strategic play for control, whereas my own was fueled by a deep-seated personal anguish, a longing for justice that sprang from the ashes of my past.
To Merlin, it was a game of wits and manipulation; to me, it was a matter of justice for everything the king had taken from me.
"The farm was never truly your home," he offered, and I wondered if he actually believed such a comment would soothe me.
Maybe I couldn't fault Merlin entirely for his complete lack of empathy—how can you blame someone for failing to comprehend emotions they've never experienced?
The man had lived for seemingly ever, accumulating knowledge and power like a dragon hoards gold, but somewhere along the way, he'd lost touch with the simple reality of human connection.
He could manipulate the fabric of time, command the elements themselves, and peer into the threads of destiny, yet the basic concept of love—of belonging, of home—remained as foreign to him as magic once was to me.
Regardless, it didn't make his casual dismissal any easier to bear.
"Logres was never where you belonged."
I frowned. “You’ve said that before, though you’ve never explained it.”
He turned away, hands drifting to a floating star chart that appeared directly in front of him.
The constellations shimmered, repositioning under his touch.
In the glow of the chart, I saw the deep lines carved into his face.
Even power couldn’t erase time. As to how old Merlin truly was?
No one knew. He could have been eighty or as old as the earth, for all I knew, but he looked like he wasn't a day over two hundred.
"Some truths must remain locked away."
I frowned at him. “Translation: you’re avoiding explaining yourself just like you always do." I sighed at him. "Honestly, Merlin, you're so predictable.”
His frown was pronounced. The stars in his cloak dimmed, shimmered, then stilled. It was his tell—that he was irritated with me. Something that happened frequently. Sometimes I wondered if he was sending me on this particular mission just to get rid of me.
He hesitated, then turned to face me. "You are the only one who speaks to me in such a manner."
That was true. Everyone else in Annwyn was always too busy kissing his ass.
"And I think you respect me more because of it."
A smile lit one half of his mouth before he remembered himself and schooled his expression. "Do you?"
Or maybe he thought I was an extreme pain in his ass. I didn't know, and I didn't care.
But there was one thing about which I was curious. I took a step closer to him and narrowed my eyes. "Why did you choose me for this mission?"
I wasn’t the most powerful warrior in Annwyn. Not by a long shot. I also wasn't the smartest. There were plenty of other trainees who had committed all the arcane texts to memory. I might have committed one.
Half of one if I was being totally honest.