Instead, I’d stayed in the doorway and I’d made the rational argument to myself that Icouldn’tgo to her. And now I couldn’t even seem to remember the reasons I’d given myself. All that remained was the fact that I hadn’t acted, buthehad.
Behind me, I heard Arthur exhale slowly through his nose. It was the sound a man makes when he’s deciding something. As to what he’d just decided, who knew?
The dripping water counted out the seconds, and I stood there in the cold and felt the exact shape of the thing I’d been telling myself I didn’t feel, outlined now in perfect clarity, the way frost outlines what it touches.
It wasn’t a comfortable thing to finally see clearly. No, it wasn’t fucking comfortable at all.
I looked back at them once more, and a tremor of something tore through me. She was still shaking, and his arms were still around her. The room was destroyed: still flooded and freezing, and she was clinging to him like he was the only solid thing in a world that had just become entirely liquid.
That was the part that would stay with me.
Not the magic. Not the ice. Not Galahad bleeding against the wall with that bewildered expression.
No, it was the way she was clinging to Tristan.
-CORVIN-
The ice came first.
It started as geometric formations that bloomed across the cell bars in patterns that were too precise for frost and spread too fast for any temperature change to explain. I was off the pallet and against the far wall before the vibration reached me. And when it did, it was deep and concussive, the kind of shudder that travels through stone the way a distant explosion travels through your back teeth. I felt it rather than heard it. It was a wave moving outward from somewhere above me and to the east.
The light-runes flickered.
I’d been in this cell long enough to understand what that meant because Mordred’s runes didn’t flicker. They were engineered against fluctuation, calibrated to hold against the specific magical signatures he’d accounted for.
But they were flickering now.
The blue-white light pulsed in an ebb and flow pattern I’d never witnessed before. It didn’t fade slowly, as in a ward under constant stress, but rather in a sharp way, almost as if a pulse were being sent through the entire system at once.
I knew what it was before the shouting started and before I heard the sounds of running footsteps. I knew what it was before the guard passed my cell door at a dead sprint without slowing, without the half-second hesitation they usually gave my cell justto confirm I was still in it. I knew because I knew whathermagic felt like because I’d known that feeling for three years straight.
I’d been there when she first came to Annwyn, when her power went haywire. It was late autumn, and we’d been training at the lake behind Merlin’s tower. The lake had been still, but then suddenly it wasn’t still at all, and ice began climbing the reeds in spiraling formations. I remembered how she’d stood there: with her hands pressed to her mouth and her eyes wide with shock. It was at that moment that I’d picked up the signature of her magic and now I knew it the way I knew her voice.
And what had just moved through the stones of Camelot was, without a doubt, her magic. Not only that, but it had been fully unbound and operating without constraint.
It was her magic, yes, but the detonation of it hadn’t been her choice. I could feel as much in the wave that accosted my cell. It didn’t possess the quality of control it usually did: that elegant application I’d watched her develop over years of careful work. This was an eruption.
I pressed myself to the cell door and listened, trying to ignore the pain in my shoulder which had only gotten worse as the days ambled on.
The corridor was bedlam, and the sound of guards walking in opposite directions and talking to one another reached my ears. There was a shout for Mordred, another for the king. I parsed the sounds as I’d been taught, finding what mattered and trying to make sense of the fragmented pieces:Galahad’s quarters. Third floor east. Magic user... the witch. Maelstrom. Uncontrolled. Guards won’t go in.
Ice. They kept describing ice. I heard that word repeated at least six times in the first three minutes.
Galahad is bleeding.
One of the knights walked into the room, but the maelstrom didn’t touch him.
Tristan.
The king is there.
The footsteps moved out of range, and I stood at the door with my hands flat against the bars and my forehead against the iron. I allowed myself one moment, one single moment of the terrible ache that was already consuming me. Gods, let her be alright.
Then I breathed.
She was alive: I knew because the magic had told me as much. An eruption of that magnitude didn’t come from someone defeated. It came from someone who was still fighting. The binding had shattered because she needed it to shatter, because the force of the threat had exceeded the force of the cage, and the cage had given. Galahad was bleeding: only because he must have accosted her and she’d protected herself.
What was more, the guards were describing ice rather than a dead body, and that meant she’d succeeded. She’d succeeded in protecting herself against him.
