CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
-PERCIVAL-
The vision forced me to the middle of the Hall of Lineages.
There was no warning, not even some type of slow approach I could brace against.
One moment I was standing between the stone columns with a lit taper in my hand, moving through the dark the way I sometimes did when sleep refused me.
The next moment the taper was gone, the floor came up, and I was on my knees with my palms flat against the cold stone, and the hall was burning.
Well, not quite burning. That was the wrong word for it.
The hall was becoming something. The walls remained the same, as did the columns, but the tombs were cracked.
Great fissures ran through the carved lids like something was pushing up and out from inside.
From each crack came light that was the color of old wounds: puce, greenish, and wrong.
As I watched, the former Pendragon kings, who were now long dead, began to rise. And as they rose, the sound of bone creaking against bone reverberated through the air. Soon, all the once-dead kings stood between the tombs, watching and waiting.
But waiting for what? I didn’t know.
The carved faces above the sarcophagi and the standing figures matched, feature for feature.
There was Uther, Aurelius, and Constans.
Further back existed skeletal bodies that represented names I only half-remembered from manuscripts.
None of them looked at me. Instead, they all looked upward at what had once been a ceiling of the crypt but now lay open as if it had been blown away by something.
Every one of them stood looking up, their necks craned, skull faces tipped toward the now-open ceiling.
I looked up, too, and what I saw there made very little sense.
Two dragons. One was the color of banked coals: dark red shading to black at the wingtips, scales that caught light like polished iron.
The other was the color of a winter sky just before the first snow, pale, luminous, and cold.
But beautiful. They circled each other in the dark above the tombs, and the air between them crackled as the columns trembled with each wingbeat.
Below them and between them, a woman appeared from nowhere and everywhere all at once.
It was as if the air had simply spat her out.
And as soon as it did so, she began to fall.
She was small against the scale of the dragons, her white-silver hair spread behind her like smoke.
Her arms were out, not reaching for anything, just open, as if she’d stopped fighting the fall or perhaps she’d chosen it.
She didn’t scream.
That was the part that stayed with me after the vision broke.
I came back to myself already gasping, hands still flat on the stone floor of the Hall of Lineages.
My hands were shaking. I pressed them against my thighs until they stopped shaking, or until they stopped enough that I could stand.
The taper candle was perhaps a foot or so away from me, and the flame had gone out, probably when I’d dropped it.
The visions had been accelerating for three weeks.
I’d kept count the way I kept count of everything: obsessively, in a small leather journal I carried tucked against my ribs where no one would see it.
There had been four visions in the first week, then seven in the second week, and now eleven in the third.
Tonight was the fifth vision in four days.
The trouble with my gift, with visions specifically, as opposed to the healing, which at least had a clear mechanism and a predictable cost, was that they didn’t announce themselves as past or future.
They just arrived, and I stood inside them, never understanding the picture they painted.
When they released me, I was left to sort out the wreckage, to decide what I’d seen and when I’d seen it.
The dead kings standing... That could be the past, I supposed. After all, history was full of dead kings doing improbable things in the old texts.
But the dragons? That could be present, I supposed, although I hadn’t heard of any dragons recently, so perhaps they too were a thing of the past? Or perhaps they had never been real to begin with? I didn’t trust that my visions always represented things that were true and real.
The woman falling with the white-silver hair?
That was the part I had no category for, because I’d seen her before.
Not in this vision, but in an earlier one, weeks ago, before I understood what I was looking at.
The woman standing at a precipice, stones crumbling beneath her feet, and from the darkness below, a hand reaching up.
Long fingers. Pale. Patient in the way that only things that had been waiting a very long time could afford to be patient.
And now the same woman, the same hair, falling between two dragons. The same hair color as Guinevere. Of course, it could only be her.
I picked up my taper from where it had rolled against a tomb base and relit it from the small oil lamp that was mounted by the door.
The flame threw shadows across Uther’s carved face, and he looked, as he had always looked, like a man who had made peace with the fact that nothing he’d built would survive him.
I stood there for a moment.
Then I went to find her.
It took longer than I expected. The castle after midnight had a specific geography: servants with reasons to be where they were, guards on rotations I’d learned over years of insomnia, and then a narrower category of people moving in ways that didn’t match the official map of the place.
I was one of them.
After the business with Galahad, she had been moved to the bedchamber beside the king’s.
An interesting arrangement, to be certain, but who was I to question such things?
No one, as it happened. When I reached her door, it was being manned by two of the King’s Guard.
I recognized one but not the other. Neither of them seemed to notice me, so I figured they wouldn’t question why I was there. I knocked on the door quietly.
There was no answer, so I knocked again.
She answered that time, and when she did, her expression lit with curiosity as she took in my countenance, which must have seemed spooked, I assumed, for I was rather unsettled.
“You look like you’ve seen something,” she said.
“I have,” I answered. “May I come in?”
She moved her legs slightly to make room, which was the closest thing to an invitation I was going to get at this hour.
Then she closed the door behind her without even pretending to notice the guards.
I supposed that was the way it was between them: them silently watching and her silently pretending they didn’t exist.
She sat on her bed and motioned to the chair beside it.
I took the seat and then set the taper between us. The flame steadied.
“Have you come to warn me to remain inside again?” she asked.
I shook my head. We both knew nothing had come of that warning. But I could still feel the truth in the air: that something was on the horizon. Something bad. I just didn’t know what that something was.
“I’m sure word will get back to Arthur that you came to visit, and then he’ll have a thousand and one questions for you,” she continued.
I nodded because she was correct. “I have nothing to hide.”
“Why have you come?”
Leave it to Guinevere to get to the bottom of things quickly. “I need to tell you about the visions I’ve been experiencing lately,” I answered. “All of them. From the beginning.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then: “All right.”
I started with the three women, who were ancient in the way that mountains were ancient, standing at the edge of something I didn’t recognize. All I did know was that it wasn’t the edge of the world, but it was the edge of something that existed before the world even had a name.
“One of them was weaving,” I said. “Not cloth, but something else. The threads were… they were time, I think. Or something like it. And the second one was watching, and the third was... unraveling.”
“Go on.”
I went on, and I explained the second vision: a sword in water.
Not Excalibur; I knew Excalibur, had seen it in the Hall, knew its shape the way everyone in Camelot knew it.
This was different because it was older.
The water was black, and the blade was dark iron, and something was attached to it, wrapped around the hilt in a way that made my stomach turn when I tried to look at it directly.
Like looking at a dead thing that had been in the water too long.
Then I told her about the most recent vision, in the Hall of Lineages, and the color drained from her face entirely.
“I’ve had the dream about the Hall of Lineages,” she said quietly.
“You had the dream tonight?”
She shook her head. “Not tonight, but weeks ago and many times. The tombs—”
“—were cracked open.”
Her breath caught. “Yes.”
“I saw the same in my vision whilst I was in the hall, not twenty minutes ago.”
The candle threw her shadow long against the wall as she pulled her knees tighter against her chest.
“Tell me your dream,” I said.
She told it straight, the way she always talked: without ornament, without the hedging people used when they weren’t sure they’d be believed.
She described the Hall of Lineages the way we both knew it and then explained the cracked tombs, the wrong light.
She’d thought it was a dream and not a vision because it had come to her in sleep, but the details were too specific.
She’d seen the murals on the walls before she’d ever stood in the actual hall.
“The dragon tattoo on Arthur’s chest,” she continued. “I saw it in the dream before I saw it in...” She stopped. “Before I knew it was real.”
“What else did you see in the dream?” I asked. “Did you see the woman falling, the one with white hair?”
“No, never,” Guin answered, and her voice was flat.
“I want to be clear,” I continued, not wanting to frighten her, “that I’m not certain these are future visions. Some of what I see was from the past. And some of it I assume could be happening now, though elsewhere. I can’t always tell which is which.”
I took a breath. “And some of it might be nothing at all, just strange ideas dreamed up by my subconscious.”
The candle guttered. We both watched it settle at the same moment that, somewhere distant, a door closed. Then the sound of a guard’s footsteps passed at the far end of the hall and faded.