CHAPTER TWO #2
Not on the surface: the trembling was deeper, something beneath the water that moved, in the same way earthquakes move before they arrive.
Vibrations traveled outward from the point where Nimue stood, and where the water met the shore, it pressed forward, then receded, then pressed again, like the lake was breathing.
I assumed it was her anger. Or perhaps her fear?
Her expression hadn’t changed, but something else had. The light beneath her skin moved faster now, and when she spoke, her voice had dropped to something quieter. It still had that layered quality and still possessed that resonance of depth, but the clarity had softened.
She stepped close enough to me that I could see the scales that shimmered along her collarbones when the gray light hit them.
Close enough that her drifting hair caught at the edge of my vision.
Close enough that the dragon stretched toward her like a hound toward a hearth, slow and yearning and not at all the creature I’d spent seven years keeping on a chain.
“Do not hurt her.”
It wasn’t a command. It carried more weight than a command.
“She’s my fucking prisoner to do whatever I damned well feel like to her.”
Nimue’s gaze was something terrifying: her eyes were almost steel, and with the way the water behind her was rippling, I was half afraid that some great and horrible water serpent was about to arise from the depths.
“Whatever you believe she has done to you, whatever the court demands, whatever your injured pride whispers to you...”
Her layered voice spread outward like the vibrations in the lake, filling the space around us without raising in volume.
“Do not harm her. You do not understand what she is.”
A pause. Long and measured. “You do not understand what harming her would cost.”
“What does that mean?”
“The sword chose her.” Nimue held my gaze, and looking directly into those inhuman eyes was the closest I’d ever come to understanding what smaller men meant when they talked about being in the presence of a god.
“The dragon responds to her. These things are connected. They are connected to each other, and they are connected to you, and severing that connection—”
“—what does that fucking mean?” I kept my voice flat. “What is she?”
Something moved across the Lady’s expression, something that hadn’t been there before.
“I do not entirely know.”
I recognized the uncertainty beneath her words, but I wasn’t sure what to do with it. How was she uncertain? How didn’t she know what her own daughter was?
“The visions I receive—” She stopped, took a breath, and began again.
“I cannot make complete sense of them. The shape of what I see is clear, though, even if the meaning beneath the shape is not.”
Her eyes dropped from mine, briefly, to the water.
Then back again. “But the one thing I know, the only thing I know without doubt, is that you cannot put her to death. If you do, something will be lost that cannot be recovered. And when I say something will be lost, I do not mean it will be lost for her, Arthur, but for you.”
The lake pressed at the shore again, and the vibrations ran up through the mud and into the soles of my boots. From there, I felt them travel upward through my legs, subtle as a held breath.
“I make no promises.”
Her expression didn’t change, but the lake trembled again.
“She came to my court to destroy me,” I continued, feeling as if I needed to explain myself. “But perhaps you already knew that.”
“I did not already know that.”
I held the Lady’s gaze without blinking because this was the king’s business, and the king didn’t look away from his business.
“She is Merlin’s weapon. If the sword responds to her, that makes her dangerous. And dangerous is something I can’t tolerate in my kingdom.”
I let that land before I continued. “If the dragon wants her, that’s reason enough to remove her.”
“You do not understand—”
“—if she comes to you for the purpose of claiming Excalibur,” I continued, getting to the whole point of why I’d come here, “under any circumstance. For any reason.”
I held nothing back: no mercy, no ambiguity, no performance.
Just the plain statement of the plain fact. “I will put her in the ground.”
Nimue was quiet for a long moment. The light beneath her skin had stilled, and all that remained was luminescence alone, cold and even, like moonlight on very still water.
“I will warn her not to come for Excalibur.”
Something almost like amusement moved through me at that. The dark kind. No, the darkest kind. The kind that has nothing to do with warmth.
“She’s in a cell beneath my castle,” I said, frowning at her. “Bound by Mordred’s wards. Sealed and contained. Your water can’t reach her there.”
Nimue looked at me as if I were a pompous young boy who knew nothing of the world.
“Arthur.” Her layered voice dropped to its lowest register.
“I am the water. Every river, every stream, every drop that falls from your sky and seeps into your stones. There is no cell in your castle that does not weep with moisture. There is no room your builders made that my reach cannot find.”
She paused then, something that was brief but absolute.
“You may cage her body, and you may bind her magic, but you cannot stop the water from knowing where its blood is. I may not be able to leave this lake, but I do not need to.”
She turned and walked back toward the center of the lake, and the water accepted her without ceremony, without resistance.
It closed behind her like a wound sealing itself shut, the surface smoothing over each footfall before the next one landed until there was no evidence that she’d ever stood before me at all.
She didn’t look back.
Between one step and the next, she was simply gone, and the lake was still again, and I stood on the bank with my hand locked around Caliburn’s hilt and the dragon screaming inside my mind.
Not in hunger. Not in want. With something rawer than either.
I turned and walked back through the trees.
Cabal stood where I’d left him, and I mounted without ceremony, putting the southern wood behind me. The path widened and the branches thinned as the sky opened up overhead. All the while, I rode with my jaw set, the dragon still howling, and the Lady’s words moving through me.
Camelot’s towers appeared through the treeline, and my jaw tightened even further.
Pendragons—my legacy—had built every stone of this fortress, along with every gate, every ward, and every lock. Yet the Lady of the Lake had just told me, without raising her voice, that none of it mattered.
I rode through the eastern gate as the first light broke.
The guard didn’t ask questions.
Smart man.
-GUIN-
The cell was seven paces long and four wide. I knew because I’d counted my footsteps to and fro, then I’d counted them again.
Two days.
Arthur had left me here for two fucking days. Of course, I understood why. He’d left me here to sit and rot in this dank darkness because he thought it would soften me. After all, isolation was a tool as reliable as iron.
Let her sit. Let her think. And in her loneliness, let her fear. Let the walls get smaller. When she’s small enough, she’ll bend and then she’ll break.
Arthur thought he knew how that worked, but he didn’t know that I’d been alone before. What was more, I’d already lost everything once, and I’d come back from it. I could come back from it again.
Then I thought about someone that, in general, I tried not to think about: Merlin, my father.
My father.
I sat with those words the way you sit with a stone in your boot: aware of it constantly, yet unable to decide whether to stop and deal with it or just keep walking.
Merlin had lied to me. Repeatedly. Perhaps not so much in his words, but omission was a lie all on its own.
And the scope of his lies still hurt because they weren’t small lies.
No, they were the comfortable omissions of a man who had been keeping secrets for his own good.