CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
-GUIN-
The chair was wooden and straight-backed, with no cushion. A reminder, in case I’d forgotten my place in Camelot.
Arthur sat across from me with his hands flat on the table. There was no wine on offer, and no food. Just water, but it was water I wanted badly, and even though I didn’t want to accept it, I did because I had to. Because my parched throat practically demanded it.
The room was small and stone-cold, lit by two iron sconces that threw orange light in uneven patches across Arthur’s face.
He said nothing at first, just looked at me the way a man looks at a map before a campaign.
It was the same thing he’d done when he’d walked into my cell earlier, and we’d just stared at one another for a few seconds.
“The Wardens,” he said finally. “Are they genuinely bound to Annwyn, or is that just a story Merlin tells?”
The sharpness of the question hit me before the words even finished emptying from his mouth.
I had half a second to figure out how I wanted to respond.
The problem was that I knew the answer with the kind of specificity that made fabrication dangerous.
I’d watched a Warden die when he’d tried to cross the Standing Stones, and the memory lived in my body, not my mind, as did the sound he’d made when the binding of the land took hold of him.
The sound had been something low and wet, a cry that didn’t sound like a man at all.
Then I remembered the way he’d folded and the gray that had come into his face.
They’d carried him back to Caer Gwyll, and he was gone inside the hour.
I could say I didn’t know, but Arthur would see right through that, and he’d push for the truth. That meant I’d have to build an alternative response with the same texture as the truth, and I’d already decided he was too good at this to miss a construction.
So I didn’t say anything.
His eyes moved across my face with the same patience he applied to everything else. I watched him read me, and in reading me, I watched him reach his conclusion before I’d offered him a single word.
“They’re bound,” he said.
I took a deep breath, but I didn’t argue.
He nodded once and filed it. There was no satisfaction and no triumph in his expression, just the flat acknowledgment of a man adding a column of numbers and arriving at the figure he’d already expected.
With that, he leaned back into his chair and let each of his arms rest against the armrests as he eyed me, and the back of my jaw tightened.
I wasn’t comfortable with the fact that I’d spent half a second deciding whether to lie, but he’d been half a second ahead of me.
And now he’d confirmed a military position he might or might not have arrived at by other means, but I’d handed it to him purely by the expression on my face.
I needed to be more careful.
“Merlin’s communication network,” Arthur said, moving forward and resting his elbows on the tabletop. “How do messages move? And through whom?”
This one I could work with. I took a breath, then described the structure as more centralized than it actually was, drawing the picture of a system that funneled through two named contacts.
While these people were real, Arthur would have difficulty locating them, given how thoroughly they’d buried themselves.
One quite literally: he was dead and had been for over a year, but I was betting that Arthur didn’t know as much.
The second was a man Arthur wouldn’t have heard of because he was a peasant who had lived in the North before crossing into Annwyn and becoming one of Merlin’s citizens.
When I described them both, I was sure to make them sound important and highly capable.
The idea was to paint a picture of Merlin’s forces that would intimidate Arthur, if he was capable of intimidation.
“Mages,” Arthur continued. “Those who are combat-capable. How many?”
I built this one slowly, focusing on the distinction between mages who could hold a ward under pressure and those who could actually fight. When I responded, I layered in hesitation, correction, and approximation: the kind that makes a number feel arrived at rather than invented.
Even though Merlin only had forty-five mages, I told Arthur he had one hundred three, a number that was comfortably larger than the truth, but not wildly inflated.
Why lie at all? Because I didn’t want Arthur to know that Merlin’s numbers were much smaller than his own.
Granted, Arthur really only had the Knights of the Round Table in his magical elite (well, and Mordred, of course), but Arthur still benefited from numbers in general. And that was no small thing.
I watched his face while I said the lie. Nothing changed. I wasn’t sure what to make of that: I had no idea whether he believed me or not, but I figured it was better to assume skepticism and plan around it.
“Soldiers,” he continued. “Outside of the mages. How many men does Merlin have at his disposal?”
Technically none. Merlin had never really built the kind of standing army that required feeding, housing, and managing.
The only other men and women he could call on if the need arose were the people of Annwyn who had deserted Logres.
But they were little more than farmers and tradesmen. But I wasn’t going to give Arthur that.
“Hundreds,” I said with a shrug.
“Do they possess magic?”
“Some do. Some don’t.” I paused and decided to end this response with a well-placed barb. “But they’re all unified in their dislike of you.”
I watched his jaw set in a slow, deliberate tightening that moved through the whole line of his face, and there was something deeply gratifying about that.
He said nothing for a moment.
“Caer Gwyll’s ward system,” he said finally. “How is it maintained?”
We were back on solid ground, it appeared.
“A rotating council of three senior mages holds the active structure,” I lied.
The warding system of Caer Gwyll was completely operated by Merlin himself.
“They work in overlapping cycles so there’s never a full handover gap. And the anchoring stones are built into the outer wall, so the castle is basically incapable of being infiltrated.”
That was partially true. There were anchoring stones in the outer wall, but the structural anchors were interior and buried in the foundations where an invading force would never hit them in the opening push of a siege.
But, again, not something Arthur needed to know.
I had no idea, though, if Arthur fully believed me or believed me at all. Instead, he kept his expression schooled into something that revealed nothing. He paused a moment before asking me his next question.
“Does Merlin want me dead or removed?”
On this one, I didn’t mind being honest.
“If he wanted you dead, you’d be dead.” I knew this to be true, but it also happened to serve me because Merlin framed as a political actor rather than an assassin made Arthur’s total-war posture look like overreach.
Further, it made him look like the aggressor in a conflict that didn’t require blood.
Arthur’s eyes didn’t move. “What does ‘removed’ mean to him?”
“Probably what it means to you: that you’re no longer sitting on the throne.”
“And who would be sitting on the throne then? Merlin?”
I shook my head. “No, Merlin has no interest in ruling.”
“You?” he asked, nearly interrupting me, and his eyes narrowed as he asked the question.
I looked at him, and he looked back at me for a long moment. Then I shook my head. “As I’ve told you countless times before, I have no interest in your throne or your crown.”
He didn’t respond to that.
“The rebellion in the north,” he continued. “Are they working with Merlin?”
“I don’t know.”
The flat disbelief in his expression was immediate. “You were his operative.”
“As you well know, Merlin is nothing if not secretive.” I held his gaze. “He tells people exactly what he thinks they need to know, and nothing beyond it.” I paused. “You know that’s true. You knew him better than I did once.”
Something moved across his face at that.
It was something quick: the kind of thing that would have been invisible to anyone who hadn’t been watching him carefully.
His throat moved as he swallowed, and his eyes cut sideways, just for a moment, to something in the middle distance that wasn’t in this room.
It was the expression of pain, and it was pain that was cut from an old wound but was still very real.
He looked back at me before I could do anything with it.
“You’ve been careful about what you’ve given me,” he said, his lips tight and the comment delivered with the same equanimity he applied to everything else.
“You’ve been careful about what you’ve asked me,” I replied with another shrug.
He didn’t say anything to that, but stood. The movement made the decision for both of us: the conversation was finished because he’d decided it was finished, and the sequence of his body made that fact unmistakable.
He looked at me once more with that expression of inventory again, those blue eyes moving over me like he was categorizing something he’d need to find later.
“You told me at least one lie.”
He didn’t say which one, and I found that part interesting. I wasn’t sure why. Regardless, the silence stretched between us. All the while, I held his gaze and kept my hands still in my lap but said nothing at all.
He nodded once, then walked to the door and opened it. The guard stepped in as Arthur stepped out, and he didn’t look back.
-ARTHUR-
I walked the long corridor from the dungeon stairs to my solar, two guards falling into step behind me at the appropriate distance.
The whole way there, I turned over the conversation with her from the day before.
What was more, I couldn’t stop returning to the fact that during the whole interrogation, during that entire hour, there hadn’t been a whisper from the thing in my chest.
Not a flicker of heat beneath my tattoo, nothing.
It was quiet when she was afraid. It was quiet when she lied. It was quiet when she looked at me with those fucking eyes and calculated, visibly calculated, what to give me.
I didn’t know what to do with that, so I did nothing with it.