CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN
-MORGAN-
The war room at Dunhaven, Carlisle’s keep, emptied the way rooms always do after men have made decisions: quickly, with the scrape of chair legs, the gathering of rolled maps, and the self-important bustle of soldiers who have finally been given something to do.
Carlisle left first. But that wasn’t surprising: he always left first.
That was his way: plant the flag, let others argue over the dirt beneath it, and be gone before the conversation turned complicated.
His men followed him out in pairs, their boots loud on the stone floor, and then there was only the smell of tallow, salt air, and the distant sound of the sea hammering Dunhaven’s foundation walls.
Hailey left after they did, but not without giving Vaelen and me a nod.
Vaelen remained at the table, just as I knew he would.
He stood with his hands braced against the edge of it, staring at the maps we’d spent three hours arguing over. The candlelight caught the planes of his face and made him look carved. He had that quality sometimes: of something very old wearing a patient expression.
I stayed because there was always a second conversation to be had.
He didn’t look up when he spoke to me. “What didn’t you say in front of the others?”
I considered the shape of a lie. I knew several that would have fit the moment cleanly: partial truths dressed in just enough detail to feel complete. I’d used them before with him, and when I had, I’d told myself it was protection. His, mostly. Mine more, if I was being honest.
The salt air moved through the arrow slit in the far wall and carried the smell of the sea with it, something that reminded me of Tidefall Keep, of home. Vaelen’s particular scent was beneath it: wood smoke and something darker, something that had always made it difficult to think clearly.
“I didn’t say that we currently face a threat that’s larger than Arthur,” I answered.
He looked up. “Go on.”
“It’s a threat that’s larger than the rebellion. Larger than anything we discussed in this room tonight.” I moved to the window and kept my back to him because his face, when he was paying attention, had always made honesty easier than I preferred.
“The veil?”
I nodded. “So, you actually were listening when you were buried to the hilt in me the other evening.”
He gave me a wide smile. “Half-listening.”
I gave him one raised eyebrow. “Yes, the veil.”
“Why is the veil under threat?”
“It’s weakening. Well, not merely weakening. Perhaps it’s better to say it’s... responding. I’m fairly certain that something on the other side has noticed the damage in the veil and that something is using that damage deliberately.”
“Something? What is—”
“—I can’t tell you what that something is because I don’t fully know what it is. But I know it’s older than Camelot. It’s older than Arthur. And it’s older than Merlin’s war with the crown.”
Silence. “How do you know this?”
This was the part I had to keep buried, had to keep to myself. Part of me wanted to tell him, but the other part knew I couldn’t. “I...”
“Can’t tell me,” he finished for me. “Or won’t.”
I gave him a pitying smile. “Suffice to say, I need you to trust me. Even when I can’t explain why.”
“That’s a significant ask.”
“I know.”
“You’re asking me to follow a direction you won’t name, toward a destination you won’t describe, against a threat you can’t define.”
“Yes.”
Another silence, this one longer.
“The next months will test every alliance we have,” I continued. “Some won’t survive it.”
He came around the table. Not quickly; Vaelen never moved quickly, but with that unhurried deliberateness that meant he’d already decided something and was simply closing the distance. He stopped beside me at the window and looked out at the dark water below.
“When you decide I can handle the full truth,” he said, “I’ll be here.”
The simplicity of the comment hit me somewhere I hadn’t expected. Somewhere I hadn’t allowed myself to access in a very long time. A place where I kept things I didn’t want to think about.
He let it sit for a moment. Then — “There’s another matter.”
I waited.
“Carlisle.” He said the name the way he said most things, in that flat and precise way of his.
But the word carried weight in its lack of inflection.
“Yesterday he was ready to ride on Camelot with every man he had. Tonight he agreed to the cautious approach without a single argument, even though his lieutenants argued against him.”
“Hmm,” I said, shrugging. “Sounds like a man who’s changed his mind.”
He shook his head. “That’s not a man who changed his mind. That’s a man who was moved to change his mind.”
I kept my eyes on the water. “He must have had... an epiphany, I should imagine.”
“An epiphany that goes by the name of Morgan.” He raised a single brow at me, and I returned the expression but didn’t say anything.
“Did you have anything to do with it?”
“I don’t assume I do.”
Vaelen’s frown said he didn’t believe me but had decided, again, not to push. He had a talent for that. For identifying the walls I built and choosing not to beat himself against them.
I closed the distance between us and reached up to put my hand against his jaw.
This wasn’t strategy. There was no thinking going on, no maneuvering on my part.
I simply wanted to feel the sensation of his rough stubble under my hand and the way he stilled instantly when I made contact with his body.
For a small amount of time, I allowed myself to wish I were a simpler person, that this was a simpler time.
And then I withdrew my hand.
“I need to sleep,” I said.
“You mean you need to work.”
“Yes.”
“I could help.” He said the words carefully. Not pressing, just offering. “My ability—”
“—No,” I interrupted before he could finish the thought. “Not tonight. Not on this.”
He didn’t ask why. He never asked why in the moments when I needed him not to, and it was something I’d always appreciated about him.
“Sleep well,” he said. Which was his way of saying he knew I wouldn’t.
-MORGAN-
The chamber that Carlisle had provided me was made of stone: stone walls, stone floor, and a wooden ceiling.
The bed was narrow, though it was lavishly appointed, and the only heat came from a candle that was lit on the sill of the window.
Creature comforts were certainly not something Carlisle bothered himself with, and I supposed that wasn’t surprising, given the fact that he was a soldier, through and through.
I lay down on the bed without undressing since this wasn’t going to be restful. It was dreamwalking, something altogether different from sleeping.
I started with breathing. Each breath made me travel farther away from my body and into another world, one where I left my body behind and became something else entirely, just an entity that could move freely like thoughts do, unencumbered by flesh.
I reached for Camelot and the hundreds of minds resting there, the hundreds of minds caught in the snare of slumber. They looked like tiny lights flickering in darkness, but with a special kind of incoherence.
I sifted carefully through them.
The first mind I found that could be of interest belonged to a guard.
He was dreaming of his patrol, replaying it the way tired men do when they’ve repeated the same route until it has grooved itself into the brain’s resting state.
I walked through his memory with him. The northern gate first.
The timing of the ward-pulse at the threshold, twelve heartbeats between, then a gap of three.
I noted it. The eastern corridor came next, especially the particular arc the torchlight made against the stones, and the guards who nodded to each other without speaking.
There was a shadow at the far end of the passage that the guard thought wasn’t quite right, but which no one had yet investigated because no one wanted to be the man who raised an alarm over a shadow.
I withdrew.
One of the scullery girls was next, and she was dreaming of her dead mother’s hands.
I was sorry to interrupt it. I moved through her memory of the castle’s interior quickly and without lingering: the servants’ passages, the angles of the inner ward, the section of the west corridor where the flagstones were uneven and caught the light differently,
which told me something about what lay beneath.
I withdrew.
Mordred.
He was there before I realized it was him.
His sleep mind was precisely what I imagined it would be: rational, luminous, and meticulously designed.
Even asleep, his dreams took the form of equations that magically figured themselves out only to branch off again as soon as they were solved.
His entire mental architecture while dreaming was like a lattice, and this lattice possessed something I instantly recognized.
A trap. The sort of trap made specifically for an intruder engaged in the kind of act I was presently carrying out. The type of trap that reveals its existence only once you’ve stepped into it and can’t get back out again.
I pulled myself back so quickly that I felt it physically in my body in the form of a sharp breath. My sleeping body’s fingers dug into the blanket. After letting my heart calm down a bit, I searched for someone else, for Guin.
I knew what I was looking for. Nimue’s bloodline had a signature I’d recognized since the first time I saw her.
This was water magic at its deepest register, not the surface flash of elemental power, but something far older underneath it, the particular frequency of water that’s existed since before the land had its current shape.
Guin’s magic signature was faint. Faint in the way that strangled things are faint.
It was wound around with something that made my jaw tighten: a binding.
I felt for that binding and sensed Mordred’s signature.
I knew its texture even secondhand. He hadn’t silenced her.
He’d caged her. Which in some ways was worse, because it meant she could still feel everything she could no longer reach.
The thread of her magic was still there beneath the binding. It was thin but still present. Still hers. And there was something beneath it, something that was raging, something that was fighting against the binding and livid to be caged.