CHAPTER EIGHT #3
The door opened, and Lord Mordred Vesperian entered with a leather satchel over one shoulder and a basin of hammered silver under his arm.
The first thing he noticed was the water all over the floor, but he didn’t comment.
Instead, he nodded to Arthur and turned around, starting for the door once more.
Arthur gripped the nape of my neck and forced me forward, the two of us following Mordred.
When the guard outside his room turned, Arthur instructed him to call one of the maids to dry the water in his bedchamber. Then we both followed Mordred down the long hallway and into the tower where the knights slept.
There was no one in the halls, thank the gods. And when we arrived in front of what used to be my bedchamber, Lioran’s bedchamber, I couldn’t say I was surprised. Mordred unlocked the door and pushed it open, allowing both of us entry. Arthur pushed me through.
I said nothing as I turned to watch Mordred, who approached my bedside table and set the basin on top of it.
Then he began to work without preamble, arranging things from the satchel in some sort of order.
Finishing that task, he uncorked a small vial of something dark, tipping three drops into the basin.
His mismatched eyes then moved over the room without settling on me any longer than on anything else.
He didn’t treat me differently. Not a flicker. I wasn’t sure what to make of that.
Arthur stepped back into the shadows near the fireplace. I couldn’t see his face, just the shape of him. His arms were still crossed, and his eyes were still nailed to mine. As Mordred fussed with his items, Arthur instructed me on what I was to say when I reached Merlin through the water.
Once Arthur finished speaking, I watched Mordred as he poured water into the basin from a stone pitcher, and the surface went flat and then began to glow faintly at the edges, like something waking.
I wasn’t certain why he didn’t just use the basin that was already on the table: the same one I’d used every time I’d reached out to Merlin, but I wasn’t interested enough to question it.
“When you’re ready,” Mordred said. To me. To the room. To whoever was listening.
I moved to the basin.
Mordred stood at the far end of the table with his hands clasped behind him and his black eye fixed on me. He didn’t speak, but he also didn’t need to. His entire body was the sentence: I’m monitoring you; don’t think otherwise.
I pressed my fingertips to the surface of the water. The cold came first: always the cold. It was the sensation of reaching through the water and beyond it into the dark space that connected me to Annwyn. I said the proper words, and a moment later...
Merlin.
His presence arrived like a tide, something vast, patient, and so familiar that my chest cracked open around it. Merlin’s image shimmered into the basin.
“Guinevere.”
There was nothing in his voice, but that was to be expected. Merlin always waited for me to set the tone, so his reaction would never give anything away. And to see him now, he had no idea I’d been found out. And that was the biggest shame.
He looked older than I remembered, which was impossible given that it had only been weeks since we’d last spoken.
There was just something in his face that I didn’t remember seeing there before, even if his eyes were the same.
Looking into them, I wanted to say: I need help.
Arthur knows the truth, and now he’s keeping me as his spy.
I let my eyes go to the middle distance: the practiced vacancy of Guinevere simply delivering another report. My mouth opened, and Arthur’s words came out in my voice.
“I’ve been discovered.” My voice was flat and even, just like Arthur had instructed it to be.
“Everyone here knows I’m a woman.” There was no response from Merlin that I could see.
“But I believe my alibi was a strong one. I told them I only wanted to serve the king with my magic, and that as a woman, the laws disallowed me to do so.”
Merlin’s expression didn’t shift. He was watching me the way he watched all things: without giving anything away.
“Arthur knows nothing else,” I continued. “Only that I broke the law by entering the Shadow Trials as a man. I expect there will be a trial to decide whether or not I should be punished for doing so.” I took a breath that was even and controlled. “I’ve been treated fairly so far.”
When Arthur had instructed me on what I was to say to Merlin, I hadn’t expected it would be this, because it made very little sense to me.
As far as Merlin was concerned, he didn’t know I’d been caught.
No one in Annwyn did. So, why bother to tell him something that was somewhat close to the truth? I’d said as much to Arthur.
And he’d looked at me the way he looked at things he found irritating in general and said, “A lie wrapped around something real is the only lie worth telling.”
But back to Merlin: there was still no reaction from him, and by this point, I did find that strange. Hmm, maybe he could tell there was more than what I was telling him?
“There’s something else.” I let the smallest pause in, just enough to seem reluctant. “I believe Arthur might actually... fancy me. I’m considering whether that interest could be worked to my advantage.”
Merlin’s image was perfectly still in the water, his eyes unreadable, and I watched him watch me.
I hoped he’d picked up on the fact that I’d never used the word fancy in my life, and nor would I.
It was the kind of word that belonged to court ladies with nothing sharper to say.
I always had something sharper to say. And Merlin knew that.
He’d spent three years listening to me speak, and that meant he knew every word I would and wouldn’t choose.
It was the only signal I could give him, the only thread I could dangle across the distance between us: that one wrong word, dropped precisely, in the hope that he was paying close enough attention to feel the wrongness of it.
My eyes held his across the water, and I poured everything I couldn’t say into them: the dungeon, the lies, being found out, the weight of belonging to someone. I pushed it against the surface of my expression and watched Merlin’s face for any sign that he was receiving it.
Mordred shifted his weight, and I pulled back, afraid I might have overplayed my hand.
“I don’t know what to expect now,” I finished.
“Very good,” Merlin responded, and the water went dark.
Mordred reached forward and collected the basin without comment. Then he dried it, stoppered the vial, and gathered his things with the same economy he brought to everything. Then he bowed once to Arthur and left the room without looking at me again.
The door clicked shut behind him as Arthur stepped out of the shadows. He stood across the table from me with his arms crossed, and he looked at me the way he’d looked at me from the beginning: like I was a puzzle he was solving.
“Why did you come to Camelot?”
“Because Merlin asked me to. And because I thought Logres was worth saving.”
The silence lasted two seconds. Maybe three.
Something moved across Arthur’s face, something that flinched.