CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN #2
Carlisle was the first to go, striding away with the self-assurance of a man who knew what his plans were and was unaffected by others’ opinions.
Vaelen remained behind to fold the maps.
Hailey helped him fold them, working from her end of the table in the way of someone who’d done it many times before.
She and Vaelen didn’t speak while they worked.
They didn’t need to. There was a fluency between them that had nothing to do with what they said to each other and everything to do with how long they’d operated in the same orbit.
I watched it for a moment longer than I needed to.
He didn’t raise his head as I donned my cloak.
I walked out through the side door and onto the parapet, and the mountain air hit me like cold water.
Below, the treeline was a black irregular edge against the dark sky.
Above, the stars were the particular hard brightness you only got at altitude: there was no haze, no warmth, just light that had traveled too far.
I stood there and let myself feel it. I didn’t know what to make of the fact that Arthur was possessed by the spirit of a dragon.
Dragons didn’t exist and hadn’t for as long as time itself had existed.
The last dragons… were dead. Gone. So, what did it mean that the spirit of one now resided within the king of Logres? I didn’t know.
The veil pulsed once beneath my awareness, slow and wrong, like a heartbeat with an arrhythmia. Distant but unmistakable.
I thought about Nimue and about the fact that I’d already made the decision to seek her out. It was a decision that might have been made but it hadn’t been acted upon. Why? Because I was a coward.
The truth was that for as much as I wanted to see her, I didn’t want to face her. I didn’t want to see the look in her eyes when she saw me. I was afraid.
But there was no way around it. As Nimue sat at the bottom of her lake, she knew the truth of what was happening because the veil and the water were the same language, and Nimue was fluent in both.
Whatever was happening was happening to her too, in whatever way things happened to an entity that was partially water and partially something older than water.
And somewhere Nymera was taking a chisel to the wall between the living and the dead and I was fairly sure that chisel had poked a hole through that wall.
The shape of it was almost visible.
Three points. Three women. The lake, the castle, the forest. Each one tied to the others. The problem was I could only see it from one angle at a time.
The wind came up and cut through my cloak. I heard the door behind me open and close, but I didn’t turn around.
“Carrow is two fucking days’ ride from the nearest reported anomaly,” Hailey said.
“I know.”
She came to stand beside me at the parapet wall, not close, but close enough that I was aware of the warmth of her in the cold air. She looked at the treeline the way she’d looked at the map: reading it.
“You think it’s connected,” she said. “Not just the veil but something more… specific.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what?”
“Not yet.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then: “You’ll tell Vaelen when you do.”
It wasn’t a question. It was a thing she was deciding, right now, in front of me.
“Yes,” I said.
She nodded once, looked at the treeline a moment longer, and then went back inside without another word.
I stayed where I was and thought about a woman with an old grudge and the particular patience required to chisel through reality one hairline crack at a time.
Whatever Nymera was building, she’d been building it for a long time.
And we had only now just noticed.
-VAELEN-
Morgan left the next day.
She didn’t announce it. That was the first thing.
She told me she was going to walk the eastern border where the veil had been thinning.
She’d mentioned it before, and it wasn’t implausible, but when I woke the next morning, her rooms were empty, her ravens were gone, and the cat had disappeared from whatever corner it had occupied.
I stood in the doorway of her room for longer than was dignified.
It still smelled of her. Something dark and green, like rain on old stone. The small collection of objects she kept on the table beside her bed: a shard of blue glass, a bundle of dried herbs, two rings she never wore, were all gone.
She’d taken everything that mattered.
That told me she wasn’t coming back anytime soon. And the fact that she hadn’t said where she was actually going told me she knew I’d try to stop her.
I didn’t know what she’d found in her dreamwalking.
She’d been walking more frequently over the past two weeks; I could tell by the hollows beneath her eyes, and the particular exhaustion she wore in the mornings that was different from ordinary tiredness.
She’d been somewhere important, repeatedly. And she’d seen something.
She hadn’t told me what.
We’d always operated on the understanding that we didn’t owe each other anything. Those had been the terms from the beginning: unspoken, but clear. Morgan wasn’t mine. She never had been, not fully, not in the way that word implies ownership. And I wasn’t hers.
But there was something that had lived between us for years that was built on, if not trust, then at least a particular kind of honesty. The kind where you don’t say everything, but what you do say is true.
She’d stopped giving me even that.
I sat at the edge of her bed, which wasn’t a thing I’d done before, and which I was aware was strange, and I looked at the empty space on the table where her objects had been.
She’d gone to Camelot.
I didn’t know how I knew. I just did. The way you know things you can’t afford to know.
-VAELEN-
The owl form came easier in the dark.
I didn’t do it often at Caer Gwyll: too many people who knew me, too many pairs of eyes, but that night I walked to the far end of the north courtyard where the wall met the old storage sheds, and I let myself change.
It was never comfortable. It was a translation more than a transformation: my consciousness reorienting itself, the world reshaping from vertical to horizontal, sound sharpening at the high end, sight going from ordinary to something almost unbearably precise.
I lifted. The cold took me.
From above, Caer Gwyll looked small. The fires in the yard, the sentries walking their routes, the horses turning slow circles in the paddock: all of it small, precise, and comprehensible in a way it never quite was from the inside.
I flew east until the lights disappeared and there was only the forest beneath me, and then the moors beyond, gray-silver under cloud cover.
I wasn’t going to Camelot. I knew my limits.
But I flew anyway, for a time, letting the cold work through what the fire hadn’t.
All the while, I thought about Morgan, about Camelot, and about the fact that I was the head of a rebellion that was running faster than I could steer it.
Then I thought about Guinevere, a woman I’d never even spoken to, not in waking, not properly.
I was still trying to determine whether she was a weapon or something else entirely.
I turned back when the cold became serious.
Below me, a single light moved along the road: a rider, heading south. One of ours, or one of theirs. Impossible to tell from here.
That was the thing no one talked about in war councils and at dinner tables surrounded by lords and their careful eyes: the impossibility of knowing.
The fact that at some point you stopped having information and started having inference, and the distance between those two things was exactly the width of everything that could go wrong.
Carlisle wasn’t wrong that we had more men than we’d ever had. He also wasn’t wrong that Arthur was weaker than he looked. And he wasn’t wrong that hesitation had a cost.
But Guinevere was still in there. And Morgan was moving toward her, quietly, without telling me what she’d learned. And something at the back of my mind, the part I’d trained for years to listen to, kept saying, Wait.
Wait.
She’s not ready yet. And neither are you.
I landed back in the courtyard and stood for a moment in the dark before I let myself return to my human shape. A single moth drifted past in the torchlight. It was small, brown-winged, and unremarkable.
I watched it go.
Then I went inside to face what the morning would bring.