CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR #2
“With any of these visions, do you see how they end?” She asked.
“No.”
She nodded, like that was the answer she’d expected.
“What do you need from me?” she asked.
“I need you to tell me everything you see. Every dream, every moment of... wrongness, for lack of a better word. Whatever feels like it doesn’t belong to you. I’ve been keeping a record.”
I pulled out the leather journal and held it in the candlelight so she could see how full it already was.
“I think we have the same puzzle. We’re just holding different pieces.”
She looked at the journal for a long moment.
“You’ve been keeping an eye on me,” she said. Not accusing, merely observing.
“I see through pretense,” I answered with a shrug. “It’s not a gift I can turn off. I knew something was different about you before I understood what that meant... when you were still Lioran.” I hesitated. “I didn’t tell anyone.”
“Why not?”
I considered lying, considered giving her the diplomatic version, but then decided she’d see through it anyway.
“Because whatever you are or whatever you are not,” I said, “you’re not what Arthur is afraid of. And I’ve spent enough years absorbing other people’s wounds to know the difference between a weapon and someone who’s been handed one.”
The silence after that was different from the ones before. Less defended, maybe.
She looked down at her hands in her lap.
I told her the rest of the vision with the dead kings, the two dragons, and the falling woman. I didn’t soften any of it, and she listened without interrupting. She had always been a good listener, as Lioran and... not.
When I finished, she was quiet for a moment.
Then she asked, “What does the dark dragon look like?”
“Dark red,” I answered. “Shading to black.”
She pressed her lips together and looked at the opposite wall. “And the pale one?”
“The white before the snow breaks. Beautiful, but cold and... luminous.”
She was quiet again, and then she just nodded.
We sat in the dark after the taper went out, and neither of us moved to relight it. The room was warmer than it had any right to be with no fire, but it was still cold enough that I could see my breath and hers rising in the same sluggish rhythm.
“I am worried for you,” I said.
She nodded. “I am worried for all of us.”
-ARTHUR-
The fire had burned low by the time Mordred finished. I didn’t move to add wood because the chill suited the conversation.
He stood at the edge of the hearthlight with his hands clasped behind his back, one blue eye catching the glow, the black one swallowing it entirely.
The pendant at his throat pulsed once, faintly, and then went still.
He’d laid out his findings the way a surgeon laid out instruments: each piece placed with care, nothing extraneous and nothing soft.
Three weeks. He’d been sitting on this for three weeks.
“You’re certain it isn’t Merlin?”
“Though I’m not entirely certain of anything.” He paused. “I can say I’m certain it isn’t Merlin.”
I stood from my chair and walked over to the window.
The northern courtyard was empty below, and the training grounds beyond it were dark shapes, the fence posts and practice dummies reduced to silhouette.
Beyond the castle wall, the treeline of the Whispering Wilds was a solid black mass against a sky that offered very little moon.
I thought of the witch who lived in those woods and was met with a shudder that passed right through me.
Three weeks of ward anomalies, and they had been clustering toward the east; the Whispering Wilds were also in the east of Camelot.
“The rebellion doesn’t have anyone capable of this?”
“No,” Mordred said. “The rebellion is capable of delaying or doing away with our shipments that help to reinforce the wards, but that is all.”
“Then is that what this is? Are the wards affected simply because the last convoy they took had all the items you needed in it?”
“I would like to say that such is the answer, but it isn’t. I still had enough items to work the ward repairs, and we have been doing exactly that. But this... this is something foreign. Something strange.”
“Well, if it wasn’t Merlin and it isn’t the rebellion, then who is responsible?”
He didn’t answer immediately, and that itself was an answer. In general, Mordred didn’t pause because he was uncertain; no, he paused because he was choosing his words like a man defusing something.
“The signature in the ward readings doesn’t correspond to any living practitioner in my reference,” he said finally. “It doesn’t correspond to any dead one either, for that matter.”
“How is that possible?”
He shrugged. “Well, the closest analogue I can find, and I want to be clear this is analogue, not a match, is the residue left in sites of significant pre-Uther magical activity.”
“Pre-Uther magical activity?”
He nodded. “Ritual sites. Places where the veil between what is and what was has worn thin from repeated use over generations.”
Pre-Uther.
My father had torn down every pre-Uther ritual site he’d found because he hadn’t trusted old magic, and neither did I.
Hence, I’d continued the work. It had seemed like prudent policy at the time: old magic left old wounds in the land, old channels that other practitioners could exploit. Better to close them.
“How old?” I asked.
Mordred was quiet for a moment. The pendant pulsed again. He watched it, or appeared to.
“Older than the kingdom. Possibly older than the current structure of the veil.”
“How is that possible?”
“I don’t know.”
The fire popped as a log shifted and sent up a brief column of sparks that died before they reached the chimney mouth.
I turned that over in my mind.
Older than the veil’s current structure meant older than the last time the veil had been remade, which the old texts placed at the founding of the first kingdom of Logres, which predated Uther by generations.
Which meant we were talking about something that had been operating, or had operated, in the age when magic and the physical world were not yet fully separated, when things moved freely between states.
I turned from the window.
Mordred was watching me with that particular expression of his, something that wasn’t quite neutral, not quite waiting, but evaluating. He always looked like a man running calculations behind his expression.
“You said it intensifies when the wind comes from the east.”
“Yes.”
“Active or passive.”
“Passive.” He was certain of that one, as there was no hesitation when he responded.
“There is no direction to it. No intention that I can detect. It radiates outward the way heat radiates. For that reason, I don’t believe it’s trying to reach the wards. The wards are simply close enough to be affected by it.”
Something in the Whispering Wilds was generating a field it didn’t know it was generating. Or didn’t care.
Neither option was comforting.
“What’s your hypothesis then?” I asked flatly.
He inhaled. “I believe, my king, that something old has become active in the Wilds. Not recently active... I believe it has been there for some time, dormant or diminished. What has changed is the degree of activity. It is intensifying.
The rate of intensification over the three weeks I have been tracking suggests...”
He stopped. Started again. “It’s not accelerating linearly.”
Exponential, then. Or close enough.
“Blodeuwyn?”
He shook his head. “I do not believe she is capable of such a thing.”
“Hmm,” I answered. “Then that leaves us nowhere and with nothing we can use.”
“Yes.”
I looked at him. “And you waited three weeks to bring this to me.”
“I needed sufficient data to distinguish this from routine ward degradation.” There was no apology in his voice because clearly he didn’t think he owed one. “I also needed to eliminate every alternative explanation before I brought you a conclusion that would require significant decisions.”
He meant he hadn’t wanted to walk into my solar and tell me there was something ancient and nameless waking up in the magical forest until he was sure enough that I couldn’t dismiss it. He knew me well enough for that.
I pulled my gaze back to the window. The treeline hadn’t moved. Obviously, it hadn’t moved. But it looked different now than it had ten minutes ago. The dark had a different quality to it. Or I was assigning quality to darkness because Mordred had just handed me a problem with no clean edges.
“Can you contain it?”
This time it was a longer pause than any that had come before it.
“I don’t know what it is,” he said. “And thus, I cannot answer that question yet.”
Which was the most honest thing Mordred had said all evening, and therefore the most alarming.
I said nothing. He said nothing. The coals in the grate ticked and settled.
Outside, somewhere beyond the wall, the Whispering Wilds stood in the dark and did whatever they were doing.
They had always been a place unto themselves, answering different laws and rules of nature and magic.
They were patient, and they were indifferent.
Older than my kingdom and everything it was built on.
“Find out what it is,” I said.
Mordred inclined his head. “Yes, sire.”
“Quickly.”
“Yes, sire.”
I stayed at the window a long time after his footsteps faded down the corridor.
The treeline didn’t move.
-KAY-
The dungeon smelled the way it always smelled: wet stone, old iron, and something organic underneath that no amount of lime could fully kill. I’d walked these corridors often enough that my boots knew the footing without a torch.
Lance’s cell was third from the end, just beside Corvin’s. When I walked past, Corvin didn’t look up, which was just as well, as I wasn’t here to visit him.
Instead, I faced Lance’s cell and noticed the narrow window that let in actual light. Arthur hadn’t stripped him of everything, just most things.
I stopped outside the bars.
He was standing. I’d expected that. Lance didn’t sit when he could stand, didn’t lie down when he could sit.
Some men carried their dignity in their face or their title.