He left without being told twice, and the door closed quietly behind him as I wondered if he’d just made up everything he’d told me. It was all specific information, yet it was also completely useless.
I sat with it. The fire threw orange light across my hands, across the scar that ran from my wrist to my elbow, the skin there still paler than the rest even after all these years.
She was looking for a gap. And that had to mean she wasn’t ready yet for whatever she was planning, if she was planning anything at all. Perhaps she was waiting for something specific? A moment?
Or perhaps there was nothing to Tristan’s report at all, and I was making a story where no story existed.
I picked up my quill.
If the report was true, then what I hadn’t decided yet was what to do about the gap she was looking for: whether to close it or whether to leave it open and see what she did with it.
CHAPTER FORTY-ONE
-MERLIN-
The book lay open across my knee; it was a treatise on celestial alignments I’d written myself three decades prior, but I hadn’t turned a page in the last hour because the words had stopped meaning anything.
They’d been replaced, as they always were in the quiet hours, by the image ofherface.
My daughter.
I set the book aside, and seemingly in response, the fire popped as a log shifted, settling into ash.
I’d been tracking her through the water. Not directly; that was impossible now, with Mordred’s fingers in everything. But I could still feel the shape of her presence in the condensation that gathered on Caer Gwyll’s walls, in the rain that fell on its courtyard, and in the cold damp of the stone. And in that presence, I could feel her; it didn’t matter where she was.
All I knew was that Guinevere was in Camelot, and she was alive. She wasn’t well, but she also wasn’t broken.
I wasn’t in fear for her life, for I knew Arthur would never kill her. It didn’t matter that she was his enemy. She was too important to him.
I stood and crossed to the window. Caer Gwyll spread below me: the old fortress I’d made my seat after the exile, its towers stubbed and weathered, its walls grown over with something that hadn’t been ordinary ivy for decades. The valley beyond was dark, while the stars above were not quite right; they hadn’t been quite right in some time.
The veil was thinning.
I didn’t need Morgan to tell me in order to know it was true. I’d felt it for a while now, like a seam coming loose in a garment you’d trusted for a very long time. The boundary between what was and what should not be, between the world the living inhabited and the darkness that pressed with patient, ancient interest, was unraveling. It had held since the beginning of time, but it wasn’t holding now.
I knew why.
The dragon.
Arthur’s cage was rotting from the inside, and the dragon’s essence was leaking out and upsetting the balance between this side and that. There could be no other reason for it. Whatever iron will the man had used to contain it, and I’d watched him build that will, stone by stone, it was no longer sufficient. The dragon was older than Arthur. Older than Camelot. Older than the Pendragon line itself. It had slept a long time before Blodeuwyn had awakened it for Uther, and now it pressed against its vessel with a hunger that didn’t diminish, and every time it pressed, the veil thinned a little more.
I touched my thumb to the cold glass of the window. In the last twenty years of my visions, I’d seen the same ending. Not the same path: the paths had varied endlessly, branching and reconverging; some of them catastrophic, most of them insufficient. But the ending was always the same. Always the same image at the center: Guinevere.
Always Guinevere, standing at the threshold of something I couldn’t fully see, and the dragon coiling toward her not like a predator but like a thing coming home. I’d seen the vision before Guinevere ever drew her first breath, and I saw it still. It always came without warning, as the important ones do: violent, clarifying, and completely unwelcome.
A girl with silver hair and violet eyes and a dragon that had burned for centuries, finally still. The veil sealed.
It had taken me twenty years to find her.
I took my thumb from the glass.
The trouble was simple and also impossible. I needed to tell her what she was. Notwhoshe was; she knew enough of that. Butwhat: that she was the vessel the visions had always named. The only living person with the blood and the water-gift and the particular quality ofresonancethat the dragon would recognize as something other than a threat.
She didn’t know the truth: that she was the answer to housing the dragon, and in housing it, the answer to keeping the veil from splitting.
I’d kept the truth from her deliberately, early on, because she’d been young and terrified, and the last thing a terrified girl needed was to be told that her existence was load-bearing. I’d planned to tell her before she went to Camelot, but the timing had been wrong, and then Arthur had imprisoned her, and the timing had become a different problem entirely.
The communication between us had grown silent, most likely because Arthur saw no reason for it, not when I knew both Guinevere and Corvin were his prisoners. What would be the use in pretending otherwise?
