-MORGAN-
The servant’s mind shut behind me as I closed the door from where I’d been walking in her unknowing thoughts.
I came back into my body hard. The ceiling of my chamber swam above me, the candle I’d left burning guttering in a draft I hadn’t caused. There was blood on my lip that was coming from my nose. I could taste the copper and salt. I pressed the back of my wrist against my mouth and held it there.
My hands were shaking.
They hadn’t shaken for the better part of a decade, perhaps even two. I let them shake now, alone in the dark, because the alternative was pretending I hadn’t just felt something inside Camelot’s dreamspace that had shoved back.
I sat up slowly, the moonlight streaming through my open window. The candle steadied. Outside, the wind moved through the pines above Caer Gwyll in long, slow passes, the way it did before a cold front came in off the northern ranges. The sound it made was like the mournful singing of ghosts.
I considered the things I knew.
Mordred’s wards were intact. I’d felt their structure, felt their tightness, the way they were layered. They had been meticulously crafted in the way everything Mordred builtwas meticulously crafted. He’d warded every entrance, every window, every gate. He’d warded the walls. He hadn’t warded the ground because no one ever thought to ward the ground. The earth beneath a fortress was permanent, geological, older than any ward system. No one warded bedrock because bedrock was bedrock.
Except the bedrock was where the veil was going.
I’d been tracking the thinning for weeks now. In the borderlands, it showed up as discoloration in the water readings: a gray quality to the surface of still pools, like a film of ash sitting atop the water. The birds had changed their behavior too because they were one of the first creatures to feel it when the veil wasn’t... right. In the old tongue, there was a phrase for it:the sky listens too closely.
I’d heard similar words from a woman in Caer Gwyll’s lower market who hadn’t known she was speaking about anything magical, who’d only meant that the air felt strange. And she was right. The air felt strange because the membrane between what was alive and what wasn’t was no longer categorically holding.
Three weeks ago, it had been a border problem.
Tonight this thinning was apparent inside Camelot.
I swung my legs over the side of the bed and found the floor with my bare feet. The stone was cold. Achingly so. I focused on that, on the specific, grounding coldness of it, and waited for my hands to stop shaking.
The other walker bothered me more than the veil did.
In centuries of dreamwalking, I’d felt resistance from sleeping minds. I’d felt resistance from warded spaces. I’d felt the passive push of a mind too defended by trauma or too deeply submerged in nightmare to admit me entry. I’d felt Vaelen in the dreamspace more times than I could count. Thus, I knew his signature the way I knew his hands. I recognized the specificquality of his power. It always felt warm, lateral, and faintly reckless even when he was being careful.
But this had been none of those things.
This had been intention without signature. Agency without identity. Something moving through the collective unconscious of Arthur’s court like a hand moving through smoke, leaving no impression, and displacing nothing.
Which meant it was either very old, or it didn’t have a living source.
Both of those possibilities weren’t good.
I stood, crossed to the basin on the washstand, and poured water over my hands, then pressed a wet cloth to my upper lip. The bleeding had already stopped, a small mercy. Dreamwalking rarely left physical evidence unless something went wrong in the dream. The broken vessel in my nose meant I’d pushed too hard when I withdrew. A mistake I didn’t usually make.
The fact that I’d made it now told me more about the encounter than any analysis ever could have. I was scared. And that was telling because I was never scared. In fact, I couldn’t remember the last time fear and I had been bedfellows.
I dried my hands, pulled my robe tighter, and walked to the window. Caer Gwyll lay below me in the dark, its scattered lights small and yellow against the black. Somewhere in the distance, a bird called once, but then it didn’t call again.
Guin and Corvin were still prisoners in Camelot. Guin was now being held by Galahad, from what my ravens had reported, and Corvin was still in the dungeon. And he’d been tortured: also something my ravens had brought back to me. But he was alive and that was the most important thing. They were both still alive. And that meant they were secondary problems at the moment. The primary, pressing problem was whatever was happening to the veil.
Three days ago, when the raven had arrived with the dead sparrow, I’d sat through a council meeting in which Carlisle had argued for an immediate strike and Merlin had argued back with the quiet ferocity of a man who knew he was right and also knew his being right wouldn’t matter. I was convinced that Carlisle, being a soldier himself, simply wanted bloodshed. He wanted a fight; that was his main intent. And I was growing tired of him. Soon, I’d have to do something about him.
Merlin’s prediction of the Northern Rebellion attacking Camelot as “a death sentence” had been accurate. Both Corvin and Guin were deep within its walls, and any aggressive measure taken to free them would activate Arthur’s safeguards, the result being that both would be dead by the time the first protective spell fell.
Merlin was right.
What was more, the crisis at this point wasn’t Guin and Corvin.
Guin and Corvin were captured and alive, which meant they were recoverable as long as Arthur hadn’t decided what to do with them yet, and Arthur’s indecision was one of the few constants in the known universe. He’d take weeks, perhaps even months, to make a decision this significant. He always did. Not to mention that he’d never murder Guinevere. Not when he was completely obsessed with her. Not until he’d fucked her (an interesting subject that was, as I would have placed money on the fact that he would have fucked her by now).
But that was beside the point. What wasn’t beside the point was the crisis of the veil.
