CHAPTER TWENTY-SEVEN #3
I didn’t know what to do with that observation yet, so I filed it in the same place I filed everything I didn’t have a frame for and moved on.
But, I did have to admit that Morgan’s noticing her pleased me.
Though I couldn’t say quite why: perhaps because that slight sense of jealousy meant she cared about me?
Hmm, I didn’t know if Morgan was truly capable of caring for another person, but I liked the idea of finding out.
The leather dispatch case lived under the bed.
I pulled it out, lit the candle on the floor beside me, and opened it on the stone floor.
There were thirty-two active cells across the northern territories.
Most of what came through was operational: guard movements, supply lines, purge activity, magic users who needed extraction before Arthur’s men reached them.
I read those reports, acted on what I could, filed what I couldn’t, and moved on.
But over the last six weeks, I’d been noting a second category: things that didn’t fit the operational frame. There were seven reports that fit this category so far. I spread them on the floor in the candlelight.
Cell three: the border station at Caer Nanthi where every flame in the village burned blue and gave no heat for half a day.
Candles, hearths, forge-fires: all of them.
The miller reported it. My contact confirmed it personally before filing the report.
No explanation was ever offered because no explanation existed.
Cell eleven: the village of Ash Crossing.
There, the cattle had stopped giving milk for three days.
On the fourth day, every animal gave at once, in twice the normal volume, simultaneously, as though something had been held and then released all at once.
The farmer’s wife said the milk tasted wrong.
She’d said it was much too sweet. She’d thrown it out, and the cattle hadn’t behaved strangely since.
Cell nineteen: the eastern border near Thornwood.
Soldiers on night patrol had reported seeing figures in the tree line.
Not rebellion fighters; my contacts would have described those differently, with the clipped, specific language of men who know the difference between an enemy combatant and something else.
These figures were described as pale and translucent.
Like ghosts moving slowly. They’d be present for a moment and then gone as soon as someone started to investigate.
Three separate patrols, seven men total, all reporting the same thing on the same night.
Cell twenty-four: a fishing village on the northern coast.
There, they’d experienced three weeks of empty nets.
Then, like the case with the cattle, two days of the largest haul anyone could remember, including fish species no one in the village recognized, pulled up from depths they had no business inhabiting.
The village elder said the fish had no eyes.
Cell twenty-seven: the moors above Dunhaven.
Shepherds reported their dogs refusing to work at dusk.
They explained that their dogs weren’t skittish; they simply refused to work, instead sitting at their masters’ feet regardless of command, their ears flat, their bodies low.
The shepherds said the moors smelled different after dark.
Like something cold that wasn’t weather.
Two more reports existed of similar quality. Different locations, different phenomena, but the same texture underneath, a texture that was abnormal, wrong. Wrong in the specific, uncanny way that had nothing to do with ordinary wrongness.
I’d been sitting on these reports for six weeks because I had no frame for them, and thus, I didn’t know what to do with them. But there was something of interest I’d noticed about them.
I kept a map folded in the leather case.
It was a working copy, not the clean version I used for meetings.
This one had notations in three different inks and a dozen marks I’d added with a penknife when I had nothing to write with.
I unfolded it on the floor beside the reports and weighted the corners with my boot, the candle base, the dispatch case, and my fist.
Cell three was Caer Nanthi. I found it on the map and pressed my thumb against it.
Cell eleven was Ash Crossing. I found that too.
I worked through all seven reports, placing my finger on each location, holding it, and then moving to the next.
When I had all seven fixed in my mind, I stopped and looked at the whole picture.
They weren’t random. I looked again, because the first look felt too clean. Too convenient. I was a man who distrusted clean patterns the same way I distrusted easy agreements. Clean patterns meant either truth or someone wanted you to think you’d found truth. Both required verification.
But the second look held the same answer.
All seven anomalies sat in the northern and eastern territories.
That much I’d known. What I hadn’t done was trace a line through them.
There was a geographic lean, a drift. The incidents began in the far northeast at Thornwood, dropped through the moors above Dunhaven, curved through the inland territories at Caer Nanthi and Ash Crossing, and continued pressing southwest through the fishing coast and toward the borderlands.
Southwest.
Toward Camelot.
I sat back on my heels and stared at the map.
It could be coincidence. I knew how to say that word without flinching because I’d built my entire operation on the discipline of not letting pattern recognition become prophecy.
The human mind was built to find shapes.
It was a survival mechanism that also, reliably, got people killed when they trusted it too much.
A man who saw a formation in clouds and called it strategy was a man who died surprised.
But I kept looking at the map.
The arc was too consistent. Not a perfect line: I wouldn’t have trusted a perfect line.
This was organic. It curved the way a river curved, following something beneath the surface I couldn’t see directly.
And the dates on the reports didn’t contradict the arc.
They supported it. The earliest incidents were in the northeast.
The most recent were the farthest southwest, which meant whatever was causing this wasn’t static. It was moving. Slowly, but moving.
Toward Camelot.
The candle guttered. I didn’t look up.
If this was the veil thinning and Morgan had said the veil was thinning at multiple points, then the thinning wasn’t uniform.
It wasn’t degrading evenly across the whole of Logres the way old warding magic eventually did, spreading thin.
It was directional. Something was pulling it.
Or something was pushing through it, and the pressure was building as it moved.
I folded the map along its creases and put it back in the case. Then I blew out the candle and sat in the dark for a while.
Coincidence was possible, true, but I didn’t believe it.
I thought about bringing the information to Merlin but decided against it.
Merlin had enough operational concerns and a documented tendency to absorb information without sharing his conclusions.
He was a man who kept his own counsel even when counsel might have changed something, which meant he was useless to me.
I thought about showing them to Morgan and found myself not doing it, the same way I found myself not doing many things having to do with her. There was a cost to being seen clearly. I understood that better than most. I’d been extending her the courtesy I would’ve wanted extended to me.
But she’d given me a corner of it tonight. And that changed the calculation.
I thought briefly about showing the reports to Hailey instead, in the morning, before anyone else.
She had a talent for finding the thing I’d missed, and she had no stake in protecting anyone’s feelings about what the answer turned out to be.
If the pattern meant what I thought it meant, I wanted someone else’s eyes on it before I decided what to do.
Someone who would tell me if I was seeing shapes in clouds.
Hailey would tell me. She always did.
I looked at the seven reports spread across the stone floor. The candle threw unsteady light across them, and the shadows pooled at the edges of the pages the way they’d started pooling in certain corners of this fortress that I hadn’t mentioned to anyone.
This was what Morgan had been carrying. The veil thinning wasn’t a single event near a single border.
It was a pattern. It was documented, verifiable, spread across thirty miles of northern territory, showing up in the reports of farmers, millers, and soldiers who had no common language for what they were seeing but were all seeing the same thing.
I filed the seven reports into a separate case and set them beside the bed where I would find them in the morning.
After Hailey reviewed them, I would show Morgan. Tomorrow, I’d put the reports in front of her, and I’d watch her face, and I’d learn something from what she did and didn’t say. And then I’d make another decision about how much I knew and what I intended to do with it.
I blew out the candle.
In the dark, Morgan’s breathing was steady from the next room.
It was that particular still quality it had when she was somewhere else entirely, her body running on its own while the rest of her moved through walls, wards, and sleeping minds two days’ ride away.
I’d watched that breathing for years, and the watching had never become ordinary.
She was a woman who measured time in centuries, and yet she’d chosen to warm my bed. At least, for now. Maybe for the foreseeable future. Hopefully for the foreseeable future.