CHAPTER SEVEN #3
“Even knowing her mission, she chose to give her body to him, someone she should have hated.”
“Hate is a very abstract word.”
He gave me a face. “That tells me something about her.”
“It tells you she’s human, which you apparently need reminding of.”
There was something sharp in his expression now. “Why tell me all this?”
I smoothed a non-existent wrinkle from my sleeve. “Because now it gives you the excuse you always needed.”
He frowned. “What excuse?”
“You always held yourself back where she was concerned, for whatever reason you gave yourself. Now you no longer have those reasons. So, when you free her, which you inevitably will since you’re The Ghost of Blackhollow, you shouldn’t wait.”
“Shouldn’t wait for what?”
I smiled. “The second you have her alone, you should bury your cock as deeply inside her tight little cunt as you can and claim her in a way that perhaps Lance never did or never could.”
He looked at me then. “You are the strangest woman I’ve ever met.”
“I take that as a compliment.”
His mouth curved just slightly. The dimple in his chin appeared and vanished in the same breath. “You should.”
“And... it’s worth telling you I don’t hold grudges.”
“Against?”
I smiled. “Men who turn me down. If you should decide you’d like to fuck me after all, I shall be staying in Caer Gwyll’s southern tower this evening, though you might have to contend with Vaelen for the privilege.”
He laughed. It was a short, quiet thing, but it was real, and it moved through the dark courtyard like a small warm light.
Then it faded, and he was looking toward the castle walls again, toward whatever direction his mind placed Camelot, and the humor fell away from his face, leaving something I recognized.
Resolve. The particular, devastating resolve of a person who’s decided to love someone at a cost they’ve already calculated and accepted anyway.
I’d worn that expression once, a long time ago, before I’d learned what it earned you.
“Go get her out,” I said quietly.
He nodded once.
“And Corvin.” He glanced back. “When you find her...” I paused. “Don’t make her explain herself. She doesn’t owe you that either.”
The night held very still around us.
“I’ve always seen something in you, Morgan,” he said, his voice low and unhurried, the kind of voice a man uses when he’s decided to be honest and sees no point in dressing it up.
“Every knight in every court has been warned against you at one point or another. Advisors, priests, men who know better than to trust a beautiful mouth.”
A beat. “Yet, I never wanted to listen to any of them.”
“That’s not insight on your part.” I kept my voice light, almost idle, the way one discusses the weather. “It’s simply the shadows in you recognizing the shadows in me.”
He didn’t nod, but he didn’t look away either.
He just looked at me the way men rarely do: not at the beauty of my face or the cut of my gown but at whatever lived further back than both.
“Or perhaps it’s something far deeper than shadows.”
The pause that followed had weight to it.
“Whatever stories have been told about you, and I’ve heard a great many, I don’t believe them.”
“Perhaps you should.”
He shook his head, slow and certain. “Yes, you’re out for yourself; I won’t pretend otherwise. And you’re without question the most dangerous seductress I’ve ever encountered.”
The faintest smile crossed his mouth. “But beneath all of that, beneath the games, the glamour, and the knives you keep at every throat... you’re a good woman.”
The words landed somewhere unexpected. I let them sit there for a moment in the dark between us because I couldn’t ever remember a time when anyone had referred to me as good. It was strange and didn’t quite sit right.
“I hope,” I said quietly, “you don’t live long enough to regret saying that.”
He looked at me like he knew more than he let on.
Then he just stood there in the moonlight with all of that careful iron discipline drawn tight across his face.
And beneath it, in the obsidian, a single flare of shadow bloomed outward from his feet, sharp and violent as a crack through ice, then pulled back.
He breathed once through his nose, then he turned toward the courtyard entrance, and his eyes went somewhere else entirely. Somewhere with walls, towers, and a woman in a cell who didn’t know the half of what moved in the blood Nimue had given her.
“The east passage,” he said. Clipped. Precise. “The ward rotates at the second hour.”
“It does.”
“And the guard at the lower postern. Does he still drink?”
“Heavily.”
He nodded, the way a man nods when he’s moved on and won’t be moved back. Whatever I’d told him, whatever had shifted behind his eyes, it was packed down now. Sealed. He’d carry it the way he carried everything: without visible weight, without visible wound.
Perhaps in another life, in another time, the two of us could have been something.
“Will Kay be a problem?”
“Kay,” I answered, “is always a problem.”
He nodded.
“He’s had his confrontations with her, and he wants his revenge,” I continued. “As far as I know, he hasn’t acted on it... yet. I believe he’s waiting for something he can use as leverage. As long as we move before he finds that leverage, he won’t be your obstacle.”
Corvin pulled his gloves from his belt and drew them on. “And Lance?”
I hesitated one beat too long, and his eyes cut to mine.
“Lance will be the obstacle.”
Something moved through his jaw, something barely visible that was gone a second or so later.
“Then I’ll go before the second rotation. Before Lance is on the morning watch.” He paused, and then he faced me. “And I’ll welcome your ravens.”
He turned away from me then and walked toward the far arch where the shadows gathered deepest and the moonlight gave up and went elsewhere.
He didn’t look back. Men like Corvin never looked back when they’d made up their minds.
It was one of the things I’d always found both admirable and deeply exhausting about him.
I watched him reach the edge of the dark and pause, just long enough for the shadows to recognize him, to open themselves around him the way shadows did when they knew who was asking.
And then he was gone.
I stood alone in the courtyard with the obsidian cooling beneath my feet, the night pressing in from every angle and the distant sound of the forest breathing below the walls.
Corvin was good. Certainly the best Merlin had. And the only one Arthur had never managed to fully predict because Arthur had loved him once, and love makes a man assume he knows another’s limits.
But Camelot’s walls would be thicker than they ever were before.
Now, with the realization that Guin was Merlin’s, Arthur’s paranoia would have calcified into procedure, into a particular brand of cruelty disguised as order.
And Lance wasn’t on our side. What was more, he might possibly feel Corvin coming if Corvin wasn’t careful enough.
Yes, Lance might feel him coming the way he felt everything coming, seconds before it arrived, with that terrible instinct of his.
I pulled my wrap tighter around my shoulders and looked at the place where Corvin had disappeared. He’d either get her out or he wouldn’t. And I found, to my considerable irritation, that I cared about the outcome.