From across the table, I heard Hailey murmur, “That’s fucking terrifying,” in a tone that suggested she’d meant it as a compliment. When I glanced at her, she gave me a small, genuine nod. Not flattery, but recognition. As though she understood exactly what it cost to be the kind of woman who walked through other people’s sleeping minds and found it useful rather than monstrous.
I looked away before the moment could become something, but I noted it all the same.
“If Corvin gets in and gets Guinevere out, we’ve lost nothing and gained everything.” I looked around the table. “If he fails—” I held Corvin’s gaze when I said the words and had the decency not to soften it. “—Vaelen’s team moves immediately. No deliberation. And not another round of this.” I gestured at the room.
Carlisle’s jaw worked, but he nodded once. Vaelen was looking at me like he hadn’t heard a word I’d just said because he was too busy reliving the memories of me riding his face.
Corvin said, “I won’t fail.”
“No, you most likely won’t,” I agreed. “But we plan as though you might.” His eyes narrowed slightly, and I gave him a smirk. “How long do we give you?”
“Twenty-four hours.”
“Forty-eight,” I argued, still giving him the smile. “Let’s give you the benefit of the doubt.”
Carlisle sat back in his chair and folded his hands across his chest in a way that suggested he’d already done the calculation and was simply waiting for the rest of us to catch up.
“Carlisle.” I turned to him. “In the rare instance that we don’t hear back from Corvin or he doesn’t return within forty-eight hours with Guinevere, you become our plan two. How quickly can you assemble your men?”
“Three days,” he said. “Perhaps two if the roads are clear. I can have three hundred ready to march.”
“Three hundred.” Merlin spoke for the first time since I’d taken his chair. He hadn’t moved from the hearth, but his planetary charts had stopped spinning, which meant he was actually paying attention now. “Three hundred soldiers against Arthur’s standing army.”
Carlisle’s eyes narrowed. “It’s a start.”
“It’s a gesture.” Merlin moved to the table then, the charts dissolving behind him. He set both hands flat on the wood and looked at the map with the expression of a man reading a sentence he’d written himself and found disappointing. “Arthur commands thousands, all of them trained soldiers. Not to mention the Knights of the Round Table, who all possess magic. At Camelot alone, there are hundreds of the King’s Guard. And Mordred.” He shook his head slowly. “Three hundred men will not breach those walls. They will die in the field and give Arthur a reason to tighten every chain he’s already laid.”
“And what of your own men?” Carlisle demanded.
Merlin continued to shake his head. “Both of our numbers combined are still not enough. I have forty-five elite mages and combat practitioners, every one of them capable of holding ground against ten ordinary soldiers. But Arthur has the benefit of numbers.” He said the words plainly. No pride. Just arithmetic. “The rest of Annwyn’s population are the Wardens.”
“Then call them,” Carlisle said.
“I cannot.” Something shifted in the old man’s face. “The Wardens are bound to this land, tied to Annwyn the way roots are tied to the earth. They leave, and they die.” He looked at the map. “All sixty of them remain here.”
The room went quiet.
Hailey had gone still beside Vaelen. Not the stillness of someone who had nothing to say, but the stillness of someonedoing the math and not liking the answer. Her eyes moved across the map with a focus that made me revise my estimate of her upward. She wasn’t decorative, and she wasn’t here because Vaelen was fond of her company.
She was here because she was useful, and she knew it, and so did he.
I wondered, not for the first time since I’d walked through the door, what exactly their history was. Not the obvious part. The part underneath it.
“So.” Corvin’s voice was flat. “Merlin’s forty-five. And Carlisle’s three hundred.”
“It will be a massacre.”
No one argued with me.
“Yes,” Merlin said as he nodded and ran his fingers down his long white beard. “I do not believe we are under the duress you believe us to be under,” he said as he faced Carlisle. “Arthur will not harm Guinevere. She is too important to him merely owing to who she is.”
I wasn’t surprised to hear as much because Merlin was a pragmatist, and I was still trying to decide if the old goat even possessed a heart.
“But we don’t know that for sure,” Corvin interrupted and gave Merlin an expression that was weighted. That was the moment I was certain there was more to this story than Merlin and Corvin were letting on. There was just some type of hidden conversation between the two of them that was playing out in their eyes.
Soon Corvin faced the rest of us again. “If I fail, which I won’t, but if I do, Carlisle and Vaelen’s men come after us.”
Vaelen’s network was real; I’d helped build parts of it myself in those early years before we’d become whatever we currently were to each other. He’d threaded operatives through every northern village between the Caldwyn hills and the Ashmarkborder. That included safe houses behind millers’ walls, escape routes carved through the oldest forest paths, and runners who could move a message from the mountains to the coast in under four days.
