CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN #2
I followed it in.
What I found wasn’t a dream.
It was a room.
A room of stone walls. And the stone was the particular damp cold of Camelot’s interior.
She was no longer inside the dungeon but was inside a bed chamber.
Yet, I got the feeling she wasn’t alone.
There was a thin pallet on the floor. A basin of water, the kind that gets left in a room and never replaced, the kind that has been cold so long the cold is simply its nature now.
The smell reached me even through the dreaming: it was the smell of blood and beneath that, leather. The kind of leather that’s been oiled and worked until it’s supple. The kind used for belts, for reins, and for the braided tails of a scourge.
I stood in the middle of Guin’s sleeping mind and understood what the waking world had been doing to Merlin’s daughter.
The dream-body showed me everything the waking one had accumulated.
Welts across her back that weren’t from one session.
No, this wasn’t a punishment delivered once in anger and then regretted.
These welts were layered. Old ones and new ones, the old ones faded to silver-yellow, the new ones still raised and livid.
And her upper arms carried bruises in the specific oval shapes that fingers make, while her wrists bore marks that told me she’d been held still.
The walls of the dream room were hung with religious icons.
Small painted faces with gold leaf halos.
Candles burned at precise intervals, not haphazardly, and not for comfort, but placed by someone who believed the spacing mattered.
The kneeling stone beneath them was worn smooth in the center and only the center, which meant it had been used consistently, regularly, and for a very long time.
In the corner of the dream was a person.
A tall, looming shape that cast a shadow longer than its body and recited scripture in a voice that had no warmth, no humanity, only the flat certainty of a man who believed his gods were listening and that his particular reading of his gods’ requirements was the only correct one.
The walls wept, literally, with moisture streaming down their surface in slow-moving trails, all of which was Guin’s water power seeking an escape through Mordred’s containment spell from the other side.
I backed away.
The stone room of Dunhaven enclosed me again, slowly, in all its familiar ways, with its narrow bed, its freezing basin, and its lone flickering flame that danced beneath the door.
Trembling, I raised my hands. Then I pressed them flat against the blanket and looked at the ceiling and breathed through it. The shaking wasn’t from the effort of the dream-walk. My body was trained past that kind of weakness. This was something different. Something older than training.
This was rage. Old rage.
Something that had been stored away for so long that it becomes more solid than ire, something that feels as if it sits in your chest, like an immovable rock, making it hard to draw breath.
I’d felt this before: over the centuries.
It had worn many guises, gone by different names, and worn different faces, but the gist was always the same: a man with power.
A woman without it. And a holy text used as a weapon, the man wielding it absolutely certain that his gods approved.
I lay there and stared at the ceiling and thought about Merlin.
If he knew what Galahad was doing to his daughter, what I’d just seen in the architecture of her dreams, I wondered what he would do.
I hoped he’d move. Immediately. Without calculation.
I hoped he’d spend every resource he had and call in every debt and shatter every careful arrangement we’d built over the last months to get her out of that room.
That’s what I hoped he’d do because it was the right thing to do.
But whether or not he’d actually do it? I didn’t know.
Regardless, if he tried, he’d fail.
Because Camelot’s defenses weren’t what they had been a year ago.
Because Mordred had spent that year quietly reinforcing the wards in ways that even I hadn’t fully mapped yet.
What was more: a rushed rescue conducted by a grief-maddened sorcerer would be detected before it crossed the outer wall, and the failure would cost us Corvin, the network, and whatever slim chance Guin still had of surviving this long enough to matter.
And those were all the reasons why I didn’t tell Merlin what Galahad was doing to his daughter. On the hopes that he’d act like the father I hoped him to be, but knowing that if he did, it would doom us all.
I lay in the dark, made that decision, and held it.
A rescue couldn’t succeed, so I wouldn’t attempt a rescue.
Instead, what I planned would need more time, more information. It would require the patience to remain motionless while someone I cared about suffered.
I possessed that sort of patience; I’d spent years cultivating it through necessity and by discovering repeatedly that the world cared nothing for my urgency.
So, no, I wouldn’t plan a rescue attempt. What I would plan, though, was a reckoning.
When the time arrived, and all elements were in place: all the possible exits blocked, and all those men who had taken part in what I saw in Guin’s mind had no more room to maneuver, that reckoning would succeed.
I flattened my hand against the wall of stone by the bed.
The veil was close here. It was always close in Dunhaven: the fortress sat at the edge of an old boundary, one of the seams in the world where the fabric between what is and what lies beneath had always been thin.
Merlin knew about it. So did Vaelen. But neither of them had realized yet how thin it had become.
Under my hand, I could feel the weight of something huge and unmovable. Whatever that thing was, it felt the weight of my hand and it pushed back.
I didn’t pull away.
-VAELEN-
I didn’t sleep.
This wasn’t out of the ordinary. For years, I’d thought of sleeping as a thing one controlled, not a thing one indulged in. Sleep was a commodity, much like money, manpower, or trust. One did it because one needed to.
Tonight was an exception.
It wasn’t the alert, scanning wakefulness of a commander expecting an attack.
No, this was something quieter and more stubborn: it was the sort of restlessness that comes when a woman you’ve chosen, knowing exactly what she is, is lying in the next room doing something you can’t see, touch, or help with.
Morgan was dream-walking into Camelot.
I’d seen her do it a dozen times, but I never seemed to get used to it, even though I could do it myself.
It was just the particular stillness her body took that unnerved me.
Maybe, more specifically, it was the almost imperceptible shallowing of her breath, or the way her eyes moved behind their lids, tracking something in a place I didn’t have access to and never would.
In all the time I’d known Morgan, she hadn’t aged.
I was thirty-eight years old, and as such, I had gray at my temples and a wrinkle here and there.
Yet, she hadn’t aged since the first time I saw her, which had been many years ago.
Furthermore, I had no idea how old she truly was.
I’d never cared enough to ask. But I was fairly sure she’d continue not to age long after I was gone.
Strangely, the thought wasn’t painful. It was clarifying.
I’d known what she was—some type of goddess or witch—before I chose her.
And I’d chosen her anyway. I wasn’t a man who wasted time on regrets that served no operational purpose. So, no, this wasn’t about regretting.
What kept me awake had everything to do with what she hadn’t said.
I’d been tallying the things Morgan didn’t say the way I tallied intelligence reports: with the practical acknowledgment that everything she withheld was something she’d decided I couldn’t yet handle.
I supposed that decision was hers to make, even if it needled me.
Someday, the accumulated weight of withheld things would reach a point where it changed the integrity of what we had.
I wasn’t there yet, and I didn’t know if I ever would be.
But the veil.
She’d mentioned the veil thinning at multiple points across Logres.
Not just near the Standing Stones, but multiple points.
And she’d said the words the way she said things she’d been carrying alone for a long time.
But she’d only given me one corner of it, not the full shape, not the whole truth.
Only one corner. Yet, that was more than she’d given me before.
I sat up.
My mind wandered, as it occasionally did when sleep refused me, to the moment I’d noticed Morgan watching Hailey.
It had been brief. Morgan was too controlled to let anything linger visibly, but I’d spent enough time studying her face to know the difference between professional assessment and something else.
She’d watched Hailey the way she watched things that surprised her: with a stillness that was slightly too deliberate.
I’d found that interesting.
Hailey and I had a history, though history was perhaps too grand a word for what it had actually been.
It was short. And it was good while it lasted, and it had lasted exactly as long as Hailey had decided to let it, which wasn’t very long at all.
She’d taken one clear-eyed look at the full picture of who I was, concluded I was a bad bet, had her fun with me accordingly, and moved on without apparent damage to either of us.
She wasn’t wrong, and I hadn’t argued the point.
I’d respected her for it, actually. It took a particular kind of woman to make that assessment accurately and act on it without sentiment.
What remained was something I valued considerably: she was the best mind in my operation, and she was entirely loyal to the work rather than to me personally, which made her more useful than any operative who liked me too much to tell me when I was wrong.
Hailey told me when I was wrong on a fairly regular basis. And she was usually correct.
She also still had a magnificent arse, but that was neither here nor there.
The point was that Morgan had noticed her. And Morgan, who moved through centuries without appearing to notice most things that didn’t directly concern her, had found Hailey worth watching twice.