CHAPTER FORTY #4
He hadn’t arrived yet, which meant I was standing in the cold with nothing to look at but my own feet and the frost on the fence posts, which meant I’d had nothing to do but listen.
Gawain and Gareth had been near the west wall, sparring with one another and their voices hadn’t been soft when they discussed the garrison at Aldenmere and how the rebellion had hit it.
Gareth had said something about the road being impassable now, and then Gawain had mentioned how Mordred was missing half his warding kit and that he was in a foul mood about it.
I’d kept my eyes on the frost. Kept my face arranged into nothing, but now I wondered if this conversation was an explanation for the faint crack I’d felt in the binding of my own magic.
I lay on Galahad’s cold floor and thought about that.
The binding Mordred had placed on me wasn’t a simple lock.
It was a maintained system. I’d understood that even while he was building it, even through my panic and the way my magic had screamed when he’d pressed it flat.
The point was that systems required maintenance and upkeep.
If Mordred was missing the tools to sustain the wards on Camelot’s walls, it wasn’t a stretch to think the wards on me might be feeling the same strain.
They weren’t broken by any stretch, but they were breathing.
Above me, one of the skull moths seemed to appear from nowhere as if I’d called it just in bringing it to mind. It landed on the ceiling beam. Just one. It opened and closed its wings in the dark like a slow pulse, the skull pattern on its back catching the faint light from the window.
I looked at it for a long time and was happy to see it. Happy mostly because I knew Galahad would be the opposite.
Then I closed my eyes and thought about water. Not summoning it. Not shaping it. Just remembering what it felt like, remembering the weight of it, the cold certainty.
Be patient, I told myself. Yes. Be patient.
The moth was still there when Galahad finally woke and told me the canonical hours were now upon us.
-ARTHUR-
Tristan came at the hour I’d specified: no earlier, no later.
That alone told me something. Most men, when summoned by a king, arrived breathless and ahead of schedule. It was a form of submission dressed as eagerness. Tristan walked in at precisely the right moment, unhurried, and stood in the center of the room without looking around to take stock of it.
I was at my writing table, and I didn’t look up immediately.
“Close the door,” I said.
He did.
I set down the letter I’d been reading, something about a supply complaint from the northern garrison. It was tedious, exactly the kind of thing I used as cover when I wanted to appear occupied, and I leaned back in my chair.
He was watching me with those dark eyes, patient and not nervous.
“Tell me what you have,” I said.
He nodded. “I’ve noticed the prisoner watches the training yard during her free moments.” He kept his voice even. The accent softened certain consonants, sharpened others. “Not the sparring, but the rotations.”
I said nothing.
“She’s mapping them, if I had to guess,” he said. “She also watches the guard changes and which posts turn earliest, as well as which men walk the same path twice.”
I kept my face still. I’d noticed her doing the same eleven or so days ago. She’d been careful about it, but not careful enough.
“And Merlin?” I asked. “Any news of him or Annwyn?”
Tristan’s expression didn’t shift. “None.”
“Does she speak of either at all?” I asked.
“Not that I can recall.”
I looked at him.
He held his expression.
The fire in the grate popped once. Neither of us reacted.
There was something he wasn’t giving me. I could feel the shape of it: something that was present between us and specific, yet just out of reach. He’d constructed his answers because he’d known he’d have to give me something. I respected it, mildly.
“One question,” I said.
He waited.
“When she watches the rotations, is she counting, or is she looking for something specific?”
He took a breath, then he let it out slowly. “A gap,” he said. “She’s looking for a gap.”
Not an exit, a gap.
“That’s all,” I said, and looked back down at the letter.
He left without being told twice, and the door closed quietly behind him as I wondered if he’d just made up everything he’d told me. It was all specific information, yet it was also completely useless.
I sat with it. The fire threw orange light across my hands, across the scar that ran from my wrist to my elbow, the skin there still paler than the rest even after all these years.
She was looking for a gap. And that had to mean she wasn’t ready yet for whatever she was planning, if she was planning anything at all. Perhaps she was waiting for something specific? A moment?
Or perhaps there was nothing to Tristan’s report at all, and I was making a story where no story existed.
I picked up my quill.
If the report was true, then what I hadn’t decided yet was what to do about the gap she was looking for: whether to close it or whether to leave it open and see what she did with it.