CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE #2
My ability didn’t lie. It never had. It found the crack in the wall, the rust beneath the polish, the rot in the beam that still looked sound.
It had found something between those two that didn’t belong there.
But knowing wasn’t proof. Knowing was just knowing. And it wasn’t something I could prove should it come to that. No, I needed more.
A torch guttered in its bracket above me. The flame bent sideways, steadied, then bent again.
Lance had built his entire life on being unimpeachable.
That was the makeup of the man: immaculate armor, immaculate record, immaculate loyalty, and underneath it all that hollow space he kept so carefully hidden.
I’d seen that too, the first time I’d ever laid eyes on him.
The emptiness behind the confidence. A man that hungry didn’t stay satisfied for long, no matter what oaths he’d sworn.
But hunger wasn’t evidence either.
What I needed was something Arthur couldn’t dismiss.
Something that couldn’t be explained away with a shrug, a denial, and that easy, practiced smile Lance wore like a second piece of armor.
Arthur trusted Lance the way men trust a weapon that has never misfired: completely and without scrutiny.
Breaking that trust required more than just my suspicions.
I pushed off the wall and started walking, not in any particular direction. My feet knew the corridors of Camelot well enough to carry me without thought.
There were ways to get proof. I was methodical by nature and patient by necessity: patience being the one virtue bitterness teaches without meaning to.
I’d spent all my life watching Arthur’s court from the edges of it, taking note of every crack and inconsistency, every alliance and appetite.
I knew how people behaved when they thought no one was watching them.
The servants talked. The knights drank. The walls of Camelot were thick but not impenetrable.
And she was still here.
That meant she was still near Lance, still close enough to act as his biggest temptation. When people were under pressure, they made mistakes. People who kept secrets found themselves revealing those secrets sooner or later, whether through a look or a misplaced word in a misplaced silence.
I would find the proof. Of that I was certain. It was just a matter now of where to look.
-PERCIVAL-
The three women stood at the edge of everything.
This wasn’t a place I had words for because it was a time before there was land, before there was sky, before there was even the concept of either. It was just a raw humming expanse that felt like the moment before a scream.
The first woman had created everything that now existed. The second was made of water and something ancient. The third stood between them, and she was the most human of the three.
The first woman reached sideways. Not toward the other two, but toward something else entirely. Something that had no color and no warmth, and yet it was full of its own energy. It was a dark energy, the energy of death. She reached into the place where things stopped existing.
And her hand came back changed.
I couldn’t describe what changed about it, though. The fingers looked the same. But everything around her recoiled from that hand, especially the light. The water woman took a step back. The most human woman went very still in the way animals go still when they smell fire.
Then there was a war between them. Between the one who had touched the ice of death and the other two who never had and never wanted to.
The images moved too fast to follow, the way real violence always does.
Light, shadow, and that third terrible energy colliding, reshaping, destroying.
A sword got forged somewhere in the middle of it.
I watched water rise off the ground and fire that burned blue and cold stitching together to form a blade that looked like frozen lightning.
Then the veil came down.
That was the only description for it. A veil, something that separated the dark from the light, death from life.
This veil slammed shut like a door in a storm, and on the other side of it, one of the three women.
The one who’d reached into death. She was now caught in between.
She wasn’t dead, but she also wasn’t living.
Instead, she stood in the in-between, just pressing her palms against something invisible, and she screamed without sound across centuries.
I jerked awake and then lay there panting.
The ceiling of my chamber stared back at me as I slowly realized where I was.
In my bed. In my chamber. Asleep... I’d been dreaming.
I turned my head and noticed the single candle had burned itself to a puddle of wax on the table beside the bed.
Outside the narrow window, the sky sat at that particular shade of gray that couldn’t decide whether it was late night or early morning.
My hands were shaking.
I pressed them flat against my chest and waited for the trembling to pass, waited for my heart rate to calm. The fear would pass. This I knew. Yet, it was taking longer than usual.
The visions had been coming for three weeks now.
They were always of the same women, the same war, the same sword.
Sometimes I got pieces I hadn’t seen before.
Tonight had been the worst of it, though.
The woman behind the veil, her face contorted, her hands bloody from pressing against something that wouldn’t give, wouldn’t leave my thoughts.
Her expression hadn’t been desperation, and perhaps that was the thing that bothered me most. No, it was patience.
The kind of patience that had learned to wear desperation as a costume.
I sat up and swung my legs over the edge of the bed.
The cold of the stone floor bit through my wool socks, and I stayed there, hands still pressed to my thighs, and tried to breathe the way Brother Antoine had taught me when I was nine years old and had accidentally absorbed a dying soldier’s last twenty minutes of agony.
Name what’s yours, he’d said. Release what isn’t.
The trembling was mine. The grief behind it wasn’t. So, I let it go.
But then the second vision hit before I’d even finished exhaling.
It was a woman with white hair. Though I couldn’t see her face, I knew who she was, as there was only one woman with white hair: Guinevere. She was holding a sword that was on fire.
She was standing somewhere I couldn’t place, but there was marble underfoot and blood spreading across it in lazy arcs. The sword she carried burned with light that was and wasn’t fire. It ate the darkness around it.
Then the dragon.
Not a small one. Not a heraldic decoration or a carved stone on a castle gate. This was a real beast, as black as the space between stars, and it rose from somewhere beneath everything. Somewhere it had been hibernating for a very long time. The dragon wasn’t angry. It was freed.
That was when the veil tore.
Not like cloth, more like the way ice cracks across a frozen lake: one line, then branching into many more lines, then a sound like the world cracking into millions of pieces.
Through the tear came the dead, shambling and horrifying, filling up spaces that had been empty.
They looked at the living with an expression I recognized because I’d felt it on my own face at every feast, every tournament, every Round Table gathering where the laughter came too easily and the wine flowed too freely.
I don’t belong here.
Everything was then interrupted by an old woman’s face.
A second later, though, the face was no longer old.
It became something else wearing the memory of an old woman’s face, the way a mask retains the shape of its previous owner long after it’s changed hands.
The old woman who was no longer old had no expression.
Soon the image shifted, and I found myself looking at two dragons spiraling together above a burning kingdom. One black, one white, circling around each other as if they were caught in a lovers’ embrace. Orbiting. Like they were two halves of one thing that had forgotten how to be separate.
Then it was Guinevere’s face I saw.
She stood at the edge of a cliff leading down to something I couldn’t see.
I also couldn’t make out the landscape around her.
There was just the edge, and her, and her arm extended behind her.
Not reaching forward. Reaching backward.
And from the darkness behind her, a hand appeared.
It cut through the curtain of black, reaching for her just as she reached for it.
I couldn’t see the face attached to it. Couldn’t see the body either. Just the hand, and the darkness it came from, and the feeling that rushed through me like ice water along my spine.
She trusted whoever this was.
Not cautiously. No, this was the kind of trust that didn’t question itself. The type of trust that was earned, not given.
The vision released me.
It was a few seconds before I became aware of my own breathing again and how fast it was. I slowed it deliberately, counting the exhales. The candle wax had solidified completely; it had been warm when I’d lain down. However long the visions had lasted, it was longer than it felt.
I stood and walked over to the window.
The training grounds lay empty below, the jousting lists reduced to dark shapes in the pre-dawn.
Only a few doors down, Guinevere was presumably sleeping under Galahad’s watchful, pious guardianship.
Depending on which other direction I chose not to think about, Corvin of Blackhollow sat in a dungeon cell and waited for whatever Arthur had decided his life was worth.
Three weeks of visions, and I’d said nothing to anyone.
The first one had been easy to dismiss. A strange dream that could have been attributed to too much wine at supper and too little sleep before it.
The second I’d chalked up to proximity to the prisoner: I sometimes absorbed residual emotion from people I’d spent significant time with, and I’d spent a good deal of time over the preceding weeks with Lioran.
It stood to reason that her anxiety about her situation had bled into my sleeping mind.
Except by the fifth vision, that excuse had worn thin.