CHAPTER THREE
-CORVIN-
The same day Guin was arrested and placed in Arthur’s dungeon
Caer Gwyll didn’t announce itself.
Instead, the forest swallowed the path, leaving it a thing of memory.
The trees here were old enough to remember the days before humans, the roots knotted above the ground like arthritic fingers. There was no birdsong here, just as there was no wind. It was the type of place that made a man aware of his own heartbeat.
Even though this was now my home and had been for years, I’d never quite gotten used to it. I often wondered if Merlin felt the same way, that there was an undercurrent of foreignness to this place we’d all but been forced to call home.
Wraith picked his way through the gnarled roots and the thinning underbrush of the landscape of Annwyn without any encouragement from me.
He’d always had an unnatural ease in places like this, places where most horses would have balked, shied, and rolled the whites of their eyes.
But Wraith seemed to understand the magic that threaded the air and simply decided not to be troubled by it.
The stronghold of Caer Gwyll materialized slowly, the way a dream clarifies just before waking.
First, I spied the outer wall, the black stone that moved if you stared at it too long.
Then the towers came into focus: narrow, asymmetrical, and rising at angles that shouldn’t have held weight.
Moss covered everything, and vines threaded through the battlements like sutures through a wound.
A waterfall ran backward along the eastern face, climbing the stone and disappearing into a cleft above.
Caer Gwyll didn’t look like a stronghold. It looked like something the earth had spit out.
-CORVIN-
I found Merlin in his observatory at the top of the north tower, where he could usually be found.
When I walked in, I wasn’t sure if he heard me because he didn’t turn from where he stood with his back to the door, bent over a table that was scattered with star charts.
His white hair caught the blue light that was bleeding through the window: that permanent, sourceless dusk that clung to Caer Gwyll.
“Corvin.” He wasn’t surprised. He was never surprised.
My temper broke.
“This is your fault.” My voice came out quieter than I intended and was somehow worse for it.
He turned then, but his face gave nothing away. Of course, it never did. It just seemed to exist the way the moon exists in the sky: as an ancient face with pale eyes that had watched centuries accumulate the way other men watched the weather.
“Sit—”
“—I have no interest in sitting.” I took a breath. “Don’t attempt to manage me right now.”
At the raw, unfiltered edge of fury bleeding through every syllable I’d just spoken, Merlin went still. And it was the kind of stillness that suggested I’d just stepped over a line. It was one I’d never crossed before, not in all the years I’d known him and served as his closest advisor.
Well, fuck it.
I was angry.
“I ran protection for her since she arrived here.”
I didn’t have to say her name for him to know who I was talking about.
“For three years I’ve put myself between that girl and everything that might hurt her, between her and the men here who obviously coveted her beauty, between her and the nightmares that plagued her almost nightly.”
I let that sink in for a second, but when he made no motion to comment, I continued.
“I made decisions in the dark, Merlin. Calls I had no business making with the limited information you gave me.”
“I told you—”
“—all you ever told me was that she was your ward. Your most important ward, yes, but a ward, all the same.” I took a breath. “I had to find out the truth of her parentage from her. Shortly after she did.”
“I—”
“—I’m not finished.” There was an expression of surprise in his old eyes.
“I built my entire operational posture around protecting a ward.”
Never mind the fact that Guin had always been far more to me than my student.
But Merlin didn’t need to know my true feelings toward her.
“You never once told me the truth: that she was your fucking daughter! Instead, you let me believe she was nothing more to you than a valued asset. That she was a weapon.”
“This is old news, Corvin.”
That made me almost angrier because it was true.
I remembered the moment Guin had contacted Merlin to tell him she’d discovered the truth.
It was just a coincidence that I’d happened to be there.
If I hadn’t been? I imagined I still wouldn’t know the truth.
And even if Merlin was correct in his comment that this was something I’d learned weeks ago, it had taken me almost that long to process it.
And in processing it, the anger was now hitting me like a tornado.
“How could you send your only daughter, your blood, to Camelot, to the lion’s den? You knew the chances of her getting found out were beyond high! How could you not only have allowed it but orchestrated it?”
The echo of the question I’d asked myself a million times sounded beneath: how had I allowed it? Yes, I’d argued against the idea until I was blue in the face, but neither of them had listened to me. Now I couldn’t help but wonder if there was something more I could have done.
“I...” But his voice failed him. It was something I’d never experienced from the old wizard before. But rather than appearing regretful or ashamed, he wore the expression of a man who had never had to justify himself to anyone and was clearly uncomfortable being put into that position now.
“Did you ever even love her?”
“Of course I did... I do still.”
I looked at him.
“Then why?”
The shadows in the room moved. I felt them before I saw them: a slow darkening at the edges of the chamber, tendrils of black bleeding up the stone walls.
They were my shadows, a sign that my emotions were getting the best of me.
My magic, both older and stranger than I cared to admit, was responding to the emotion flowing through me, emotion I could no longer suppress.
Merlin watched the room dim around me, but he said nothing.
“You sent her into Camelot,” I continued, “without telling her who and what she was. Without telling me what she was.”
“Yes.”
That single word, with no apology threaded through it, nearly undid me. The shadows pooled deeper at the corners of the room as a candle across the table guttered and died.
“The secrecy was not cruelty,” Merlin continued carefully.
“If anyone had known Guinevere’s parentage: mine or her mother’s, she would have been hunted from birth. Not by Arthur alone, but by every faction with enough ambition and enough fear to want her destroyed before she came into her power.”
He paused. “And one cannot protect a secret one consciously carries. If she had known who and what she was, that truth would have come out eventually. Instead, she needed to believe herself ordinary. So did everyone around her.”
“Including me.”
“Especially you.” His voice wasn’t unkind. “You are many things, Corvin. But subtle is not one of them. Not where she is concerned.”
I let that land without answering it because he wasn’t wrong, and we both knew it. I just was... surprised he’d noticed that my feelings for Guin were as complicated as they were. But then I shouldn’t have been surprised because it seemed Merlin knew everything.
“Then tell me now,” I exhaled. “Tell me why it was so paramount to send her to Arthur’s court.” I took a breath. “And I don’t believe for a second that it was simply so she could act as your spy.”
“No. It was more than just that.”
Merlin was quiet for a long moment. So long that I wondered if he would tell me anything of substance or if he was searching for something else that might satiate me. But the only thing that would satiate me now was the truth. Anything else I’d consider a slap to my face.
“There is much I cannot say.” His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly. “I am bound.”
“By what?”
“Blodeuwyn’s magic.”
I frowned at him. “Blodeuwyn?”
He nodded. “Tell me, Corvin, what do you recall about the night Uther died?”
It was a night I had trouble recalling to memory, truth be told.
“I remember Uther was raving mad. And we—Lance and I—carried him through the Whispering Wilds to Blodeuwyn. You were with us. As was Arthur.”
Merlin nodded. “It was the dragon within Uther that had poisoned his mind. And it was the dragon that was killing him. He could no longer contain it.”
“Yes. And what more do you recall?”
I swallowed hard. “Arthur was meant to take Uther’s place. He was meant to be the vessel for the dragon. That was why we were there, why we were visiting the witch. She was meant to complete the spell.”
“And?”
“I admit I don’t recall much beyond that. For some reason, my mind is rather absent of the facts themselves.”
He nodded. “You and Lancelot were both spared from becoming full witnesses to the magic that ensued that night because you were not directly involved in the binding. What is more, you both lost consciousness. Thus your tongues did not need to be bound for you did not witness what I did.”
I frowned at him. “Are you saying you’re unable to...”
He nodded. “I cannot speak of it. The spell forbids me.”
“Forbids you from what exactly?”
“The binding prevents me from speaking directly of certain things. The nature of the b—” His tongue then pressed against the roof of his mouth, and his lips slammed shut.
I assumed he’d been about to say the words: ‘the beast,’ but even those two small words wouldn’t make it past his lips.
“I can speak only on the periphery, can tell you only the edge of it: those parts the binding permits.”
“Then tell me those parts.”
“Guinevere is meant to be the receptacle.”
The room went very still. Even the shadows I’d curled into the corners seemed to hold their breath, pressing flat against the stone as though they, too, felt the weight of what he’d just said. The candles on Merlin’s desk didn’t flicker, and the air didn’t move. Nothing moved.
I took a slow step toward him, then another, closing the distance between us until I could see every line carved into that ancient face, every secret he was still keeping behind those eyes.
My jaw was tight, and my hands remained at my sides, but only just.