CHAPTER NINE
-CORVIN-
The Same Night As The Conversation With Morgan
I left Caer Gwyll that night.
No sleep and no deliberation.
Wraith moved beneath me like he also understood the urgency.
His long strides ate the road, his breath steaming in the cold darkness.
Three of Morgan’s ravens kept pace above me, their black shapes cutting through the iron-grey sky like tears in cloth.
They didn’t cry out or wheel unpredictably the way wild birds did.
Instead, they flew with clear purpose, steady and deliberate, angling south-southwest in a loose formation that Wraith seemed to track without any guidance from me.
I’d been riding for three hours when the pull started.
It wasn’t pain exactly, more like pressure behind my ribs, like a tightening that had nothing to do with the cold air or the intense pace.
I’d felt this pull before: once, years ago, when Merlin had pressed two fingers to my chest and said something in the old tongue that I hadn’t understood.
He’d called it a compass, a gift from him.
And he’d said it would only wake for something important.
It had been sleeping for a very long time.
But now that internal compass pulled even further southwest, steady and insistent as a hook through my skin. Morgan’s ravens cawed overhead, still leading the way, and Wraith continued to follow them.
What Morgan had told me earlier about Guin and Lance was information I hated, but I was glad for it because she’d been right: it was information I needed to know.
Yes, it turned my stomach whenever I thought about it, but it refused to leave my mind, all the same.
As I rode in silence with nothing but my thoughts for company, of course I continuously turned the information over.
I didn’t blame Guin for Lance bedding her.
I didn’t blame her because I knew her as well as I did.
And even though she might have been a formidable warrior, she was an innocent when it came to anything else.
She’d been a maiden when she’d left Caer Gwyll for Camelot, and a maiden knows little about the appetites of men.
I was more than certain that Lance had somehow figured out that beneath the guise of Lioran existed the most beautiful woman in the realm, and as soon as he’d laid eyes on her, he’d coveted her. Yes, this was entirely on Lance; it wasn’t on Guin.
He’d no doubt warmed her into his bed with that way he had with all women he fucked.
I’d witnessed it many times when I’d been among Arthur’s closest knights.
Lancelot had always had a reputation with women.
And I was kicking myself for not warning Guin about him when I’d had the chance.
Looking back on it now, I didn’t know why I hadn’t.
Perhaps I simply assumed that she’d never end up in his bed?
Or perhaps the idea was so unsavory that I’d chosen not to imagine it as a possibility at all? Whatever the reason, I didn’t know.
Regardless, if Lance had harmed her in any way, he’d suffer for it.
Lance’s way with women was to take what they had to give until he grew bored, and then he’d send them on their less-than-merry way.
If he’d done the same to Guin: used her for her body and then thrown her away, he’d pay for it.
And if he’d taken her maidenhead against her will?
If somehow Morgan had gotten it wrong and Guin hadn’t wanted it? If he’d abused his power over her...
I’d kill him.
-CORVIN-
I’d been traveling through the night. The journey between Caer Gwyll and Camelot wasn’t a short one, and I hadn’t taken a moment’s rest aside from a quick stop at a tavern, just long enough to eat something hot and forgettable.
Wraith had had a drink at the trough and he’d rested his legs for half an hour before we pushed on.
Wraith, a horse bred in Annwyn, didn’t tire the way ordinary horses did.
The shadows fed him the same way they fed me, the way sunlight feeds other living things.
It was a deep, quiet magic that was threaded into his blood from birth, the same way mine was threaded into me.
Where the road darkened under tree cover or the light dropped toward dusk, Wraith’s stride actually lengthened, grew easier, and he tossed his head like he was pleased with the world.
It was in the late afternoon that Wraith crested a low hill and Camelot appeared on the horizon, the towers catching the dying light of day.
I’d looked at those walls a hundred times from a hundred different angles.
And I’d done so in every season, in rain, snow, and scorching sunshine.
I’d ridden through those gates as a knight, as a confidant, and as a brother.
And then I’d ridden through them as a spy. As The Fox.
My chest tightened at the thought that I was returning but now in a different guise altogether: this time as a would-be rescuer.
I brought the hood of my riding cloak up and urged Wraith to a faster pace.
The road curved down through a stand of ash trees, and Wraith followed it.
Morgan’s ravens had accompanied us the entire journey, cutting against the sky as they called to each other in that hoarse, particular language she’d trained into them.
I’d stopped noticing them somewhere around late last night.
They’d simply become part of the sound of moving, like Wraith’s hooves, the wind, and my own breathing.
Perhaps it was no surprise that the subject of Lance and Guin had continued to plague me. But, after a while, I’d put it in a box. And I’d shut the lid. Then I’d set the box aside somewhere dark, never to be reopened.
I was good at boxes. I’d first built them when I was young, out of necessity.
I had a box for the night my father fell.
A box for the morning I walked away from Camelot with Arthur’s voice still ringing in my ears.
I had a box for every village I’d passed through on Merlin’s business, burning or broken or both.
And now I had a new box, one titled: Lance and Guin.
And this box would hold. It had to hold because it wasn’t the present problem.
Guin was that problem. Or, to be more exact: it was the fact that she was sitting in a cell.
That was the problem: her location, her condition, and how in the fuck I was going to free her.
No, the problem wasn’t him, and so I focused on my plan, focused on the map of Camelot that sat memorized in my mind.
The outer walls ran a thousand feet east to west.
I knew that because I’d paced them myself.
The King’s Guard rotated in pairs every four hours at the main gates, every six along the curtain wall where the watch posts were spaced far enough apart that a man who knew the gap could move through it like smoke.
The dungeons sat beneath the east tower.
They were old construction: older than Arthur, older even than Uther before him.
The stone down there sweated in summer and wept in winter, and the guards hated the posting, which meant they were complacent.
And that meant they talked too much, moved too little, and spent the small hours of the morning half-asleep with their chins on their chests. I’d seen as much firsthand.
As to Camelot, I knew which corridors turned and which ran straight.
I knew the door with the iron bar that dropped when you lifted the handle rather than when you lowered it.
I knew there was a drainage channel on the north face of the east tower that ran beneath the foundation wall and came out near the stables, and I knew it was wide enough to fit a slight figure if they didn’t mind the cold and the dark.
She would mind neither. I was certain of that.
I let the variables run through my mind: the Guard rotation, the drainage channel, the ward structure, the entry point, the exit window.
Every piece had a place. Every problem had a solution, as long as you built the map carefully enough, as long as you didn’t let anything else in while you were building it.
The walls of Camelot grew taller as Wraith closed the distance between them and us, white stone bleeding gold where the last of the sun caught the parapets and towers.
From this distance, the castle looked almost soft, like something from a story told to children: all elegant angles, fluttering banners, and light reflecting off polished surfaces.
Beautiful but untouchable, like a lie wrapped in marble.
The time to attempt to free Guin wasn’t right just yet.
The sky still held onto its pale blue, bruising darker toward purple overhead, but the stars hadn’t fully emerged yet.
Torches were being lit along the walls, tiny flames sparking to life one by one, stringing the perimeter with points of gold.
The gates would stay open for at least another hour, maybe two, letting in the last stragglers and merchants who had timed their approach poorly.
And that meant I would need to wait.
I pulled Wraith off the main road where it curved toward the city gates, guiding him down a narrow track that split off into the trees.
They were old-growth oak and ash that pressed close on both sides, their branches forming a canopy thick enough to swallow most of the remaining light.
They were enough to hide us for the time being.
Morgan’s ravens descended from somewhere above and arranged themselves along the lowest branch of the nearest oak, their black eyes glossy and unreadable as polished jet.
They settled without a sound, folding their wings back into themselves, and simply watched me with the particular quality of patience that belonged to things that weren’t entirely what they appeared to be.
Even though the night hadn’t fully arrived yet, I could already feel it gathering in my blood like a tide pulling itself toward shore.
This feeling always came before the dark did.
My pulse thickened, and my vision sharpened, the shadows between the trees gaining depth and definition that someone else standing here wouldn’t be able to see.
Wraith felt it too. His ears swiveled back toward me, and his skin shivered once along his flank in a ripple of acknowledgment.
He shifted his weight beneath me with the quiet patience of a creature who had stood with me many times before.
The compass pulled again, sharp as a knife point, connecting me with her.
“I’m coming, Guin,” I breathed.