CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
-MORGAN-
I came to Caer Gwyll by nightfall and proceeded straightway to the Great Hall.
Vaelen was at the far end of the long table, with a map laid out before him, anchored down with stones gathered from the yard.
He looked up as I walked in, giving me neither acknowledgment nor recognition beyond an almost imperceptible nod.
We’d agreed, years ago, not to perform our history in front of the others.
Hailey was standing at the far left of the table, one hand braced on the edge of it, her eyes already on the map.
She didn’t look up when I entered, but I’d learned by now that this wasn’t inattention.
It was quite the opposite. She was the kind of person who registered everything and responded to very little of it.
There was a smudge of something dark across the back of her tattooed forearm that looked like it might be ash, or might be ink, and I found myself noticing it the way I’d been noticing things about her lately: without entirely meaning to.
Carlisle was already there, and looked like he’d been awake for a very long time.
Merlin sat at Vaelen’s left-hand side. It had been weeks since I’d last seen Merlin and he somehow looked older, like there was more weight settling on his shoulders. I sat down opposite him, placed my cloak behind me, and waited.
Hailey straightened when Vaelen began to speak, folding her arms across her chest, and I watched her eyes move across the map with the particular quality of focus she had: not scanning it, exactly, but reading. Like the map was saying something and she was waiting to hear the rest of it.
Vaelen began to explain the reports that had come in from seven provinces up north.
Recruitment in the days since the reveal of Arthur’s beast had far surpassed any recruitment effort that the rebels had put together for eight months prior.
There were now farmers, tradesmen, even two minor lords who’d been on the fence for years...
they’d apparently decided the fence was no longer a safe place to be.
Then there were thirty soldiers who had abandoned Arthur’s forces at Penric rather than swear a new oath that included language explicitly protecting the beast within the king.
Vaelen didn’t editorialize. He laid the numbers out flat, like they were stones.
“The Rebellion is no longer fringe,” he said.
Carlisle smiled, but it was humorless. “We were never fringe; we were merely insufficiently funded.”
“The thirty from Penric,” Hailey said, without looking up from the map. “How many of them are actually fucking useful?”
Vaelen glanced at her. “Eighteen.”
“And the other twelve?”
“Frightened men who didn’t want to swear an oath to a dragon.” He paused. “Useful enough for supply lines. Not for anything that requires them to hold.”
Hailey nodded once, like she’d already suspected as much and was simply confirming it. She didn’t push further. That was one of the things I’d noticed about her: she asked exactly the question she needed answered and no more.
The dragon’s unveiling was something that months of meticulous planning couldn’t accomplish.
In his very own castle, Arthur had allowed an ancient beast that was older than his kingdom to sear its way through his flesh while those under his rule bore witness to the event.
News spread quickly when it was frightening, and this story had spread like wildfire, regardless of how he’d tried to cage it.
The people of Logres now feared the king.
“He’s established himself as everything we’ve accused him of being,” Vaelen said, pointing at the map and following the route that led out of Camelot into the wild lands beyond.
“Every moderate who insisted that he was only strict, only traditional, only overly cautious... they have nothing left to stand on. The ideological battle lines have shifted.”
“That’s our edge then,” Carlisle said, “we move before Arthur can change the story.”
“He’ll try to do just that,” Vaelen said. “His scribes will have crafted their own story about what happened at Camelot and they’ll pose the dragon as something other than what it really is. They’ll say the king offered himself up, bearing the burden so Logres doesn’t have to.”
“He already has,” Hailey said. She reached into her cloak and produced a folded piece of parchment, which she set on the table and smoothed flat with two fingers.
“This went out from Camelot two days ago. It’s in at least four of the larger market towns al-fucking-ready.”
She tapped the parchment once. “Divine inheritance. Old as the kingship. He’s framing the dragon as a mark of legitimacy, not a liability.”
The room was quiet for a moment as the nearest people leaned in to read it.
“How did you get this?” Carlisle asked.
“I have people in places,” she said, which wasn’t entirely an answer, but she delivered it in a tone that made it clear she wasn’t going to provide a better one.
“But will that definition hold?” Carlisle asked.
I cocked my head to the side as I considered it. “Some of it. With some people. But that doesn’t matter. The image exists, and it can’t be undisseminated.”
Carlisle nodded slowly, like I’d said something he’d already decided. “Then we strike.”
Vaelen lifted his hand in order to stop the momentum. “We position,” he said.
“I’m tired of waiting,” Carlisle responded. “We need to act.”
“You’ll be more tired of a failed offensive that hands Arthur a propaganda victory and costs us the moderate support we just spent weeks gaining,” Vaelen responded.
“He’s not wrong,” Hailey said, and the flatness of the comment landed the way her observations tended to: not as a rebuke, just as a fact she’d identified and saw no reason to decorate.
“The lords who just came over to us came over because Arthur fucking frightened the shit out of them. They haven’t committed to us yet though. We push too soon and we find out which side of that line they actually stand on.”
Carlisle’s jaw was clenched as it occurred to me that Merlin hadn’t said a word, but this didn’t surprise me because Merlin seldom spoke at such meetings.
Time passed, and when the discussion of logistics was exhausted including the issues of supply, timing, which noble houses could be won over, along with the endless dispute of whether to appeal to the Church or keep away from it, I spoke up.
“There’s something else,” I said.
The room shifted.
I’d found, over time, that how you presented information dictated whether people were actually listening or simply waiting until you stopped talking so they could argue.
Vaelen would listen to me regardless. Carlisle would listen to me if I provided him with an incentive to do so.
Merlin? Well, I was quite sure that Merlin already knew what I was going to say before I even said it.
I didn’t know yet where Hailey fell on that map. But I noticed she’d gone very still in the way she did when something had caught her full attention.
“The veil is thinning,” I said. Of course, I’d already said as much to Vaelen, but now I felt it was time to draw everyone’s attention to this problem.
“The boundary between the living world and what lies beyond it is starting to unravel.” I tried to keep an even tone. “It’s deteriorating. It’s been a gradual process over months, but the pace has been quickening most recently. It’s now a problem.”
“What do you mean by deteriorating?” asked Carlisle.
“Anomalies: the reports keep coming in.”
“What sort of anomalies?” Carlisle asked.
“Most recently? Three villages in the western reaches had identical events within the same week: candles extinguishing for no reason, temperature drops with no weather cause, visions of ghosts and spirits, the howling of wolves where previously no wolves existed. The list goes on,” I answered.
Hailey’s eyes came up from the map. “The village of Carrow reported something similar three weeks ago,” she said, looking at Vaelen. “I noted it in the field report you still haven’t fucking read.”
“What was in the report?” I asked.
“What you said,” she answered with a shrug. “Temperature changes that made no fucking sense. I thought it was just a cold snap.”
“It wasn’t,” I answered.
She looked at me. “No,” she said, slowly. “I’m starting to see that.”
Carlisle’s expression was the careful blankness of a man recalibrating. “What are you trying to tell us?”
“I’m telling you the wall that separates the dead from the living is cracking. And what comes through when it breaks isn’t limited to the dead.” I looked at my hands for a moment, then back up again.
“Natural deterioration?” Merlin asked, finally speaking up. Everyone turned to look at him as if they’d just been reminded he was still in the room.
“No.”
“Then caused?” Carlisle asked.
“Yes.”
Merlin leaned back into his chair. The fire popped and threw a brief orange light across the room. “By whom?”
“I don’t know.”
“What does this mean for our campaign?” Carlisle asked.
“It means,” I said, “that we may be fighting two wars.”
“The rebellion cannot split its resources—”
“—I know that.”
“Then we prioritize Arthur. He’s the immediate—”
“If the veil breaks entirely, there will be no Camelot left to overthrow and no Logres left to liberate.” I let that sit. “The veil is the existential threat. Arthur is the political one.”
Hailey said nothing during this exchange, but I watched her turn back to the map with a different quality of attention than she’d had before.
She was looking at it like it had just become a different map than the one she’d been reading for the last hour.
Her finger moved, almost unconsciously, to the western reaches, to the area where Carrow sat.
What came after that was an argument of the sort that wouldn’t be settled but would just run its course. Carlisle needed a clear direction; Vaelen needed to know more before making any decision. Merlin said only that the veil had fluctuated before and he would look into it.
The conference broke up in the manner that conferences tended to do, without resolution but rather with the common understanding that the discussion was over until the next day.