But runners weren’t soldiers.
The people Vaelen’s network sheltered were farmers who’d discovered they could coax rain from a cloudless sky, mothers who’d woken to find their youngest daughter levitating in her sleep, and old men who’d spent forty years hiding the fact that they could read the land’s intentions. They were now frightened people. Yes, grateful but intimidated all the same. They were people who had survived by becoming very small and very quiet.
The point was that they weren’t fighters. Not even close.
I’d sat across from three of Vaelen’s regional contacts over the past month. The one in Thornfield had wept when I’d suggested they might need to defend themselves. The one outside Keltric had seventeen people in his care, including four children, and just one single iron knife between them. The third hadn’t met my eyes once during our entire conversation. He’d kept looking at the door.
They were scattered, untrained, and ungovernable in the way that terrified people always were when you needed them to hold a line.
I looked at Merlin.
He studied the map with those dark, patient eyes of his, and for a moment, I was struck, as I sometimes was, by howyounghe appeared. Not in years, but in scope. He was ancient, yes, but ancient the way libraries are ancient: knowledge stacked in careful systems, everything indexed, nothing wild.
He had no idea what I was, nor what moved in my blood. I’d been old when the first stones of Camelot were still riverbed.
And still, looking at him, I feltit, that particular ache that had never fully calcified into something I could ignore. Perhapsit was the reason I despised him as much as I did. It wasn’t a hate directed at him so much as it was directed at what he represented: memories.
Memories ofher.
Nimue.
I thought her name and once I felt that pain, I buried the memory again. It was the way I’d buried it a thousand times before, deep beneath the scar tissue of centuries, where it couldn’t reach me until the next unguarded moment when something (a quality of light, a name spoken aloud, the particular blue of water in a certain kind of dusk) would pry the wound back open, and the whole process would begin again.
He’dtaken her from me.
Or that was the story I’d told myself for a very long time. It had the appeal of all good stories: it was clean, simple, and it allowed me to consider myself as the wounded party. But it was also entirely wrong.
Merlin hadn’t stolen Nimue from me. I’d stolen her from myself. The moment I’d madethe decision,the moment I’d chosen my love for myself over my love for her, for us, for the love we’d built together. The moment I’d chosen to allow her to tether herself to that lake and that sword, that was the moment I’d lost her. Because I’d known I’d never be able to look at her again. It wasn’t so much that she hated me, knowing that I was the one who had walked away free, but it was more that I hated myself for choosing the easy way out.
And I still hated myself for that decision I’d made before the world had grown old enough to carry the weight of its own history. Before the Standing Stones had been raised, the wars had been fought, and the crowns had been hammered into shape. Before any of it. When the only thing that had existed was her, and me, and the terrible clarity of a choice I’d made with my eyes wide open.
The meeting broke apart the way all such meetings did: without resolution and with too many silences that had gone unaddressed. As the others filed toward the door, I gathered my gloves from the table and permitted myself one last look at Hailey.
She was speaking quietly to Vaelen, her head tilted toward him, one hand moving as she made a point. He was listening. Actually listening, the way he only listened to people he trusted entirely or found genuinely surprising. His expression had none of its usual performance. Whatever she was saying, he believed it.
She glanced up and caught me watching her, but she didn’t look away. She just held my gaze for a moment with those calm hazel-brown eyes, then gave me a small, unhurried nod: the kind that meant, I see you seeing me, and I find it neither threatening nor surprising, before returning her attention to Vaelen.
I pulled on my gloves one finger at a time.
Vaelen had always had good taste. I’d just never expected to come face to face with the evidence of it.
CHAPTER SEVEN
-MORGAN-
I found Corvin exactly where I knew he’d be, stalking the obsidian courtyard like a caged predator.
Moonlight slid across the polished black stone, catching in the ripples of his footsteps. The courtyard amplified emotion, a clever bit of old magic worked into the foundations of Caer Gwyll. That meant that every agitated step Corvin took sent tiny fractures of red light spreading through the stone.
I settled against one of the courtyard’s columns, my arms folded loosely as I watched him carve the same restless path through the dark stone. The moonlight was generous with him; it caught the sharp line of his jaw, the proud set of his broad shoulders, and the controlled violence in his every stride. Even furious, even fractured, Corvin of Blackhollow moved like something carved from the wild edge of the world. He was all coiled muscle and quiet danger, amber eyes burning with whatever war he was waging inside himself.
I would not have been surprised to learn that Corvin was some ancient war god given flesh and breath and sent to earth to tempt the unwary. He had hard angles everywhere and muscle that spoke of the many hours he’d spent honing himself into a weapon. He had the kind of body that promised both protectionand danger in equal measure, depending on which side of his blade you found yourself. There was nothing soft about the man, nothing yielding. He was all savage edges and ready strength, the kind of man who moved through the world like he owned every inch of space his body commanded. A finer specimen of man I’d rarely encountered, and I’d encountered rather a lot of them.
“You’re going tonight, aren’t you?”
He didn’t startle at my voice, didn’t even break stride. He’d known I was there from the moment I’d settled against that column, watching him. Such was the nature of his shadow magic: that quiet, unnerving awareness woven into his blood.
“They talk of strategy and tactics,” he spat. “Whilesherots in Arthur’s cells.” His hand tightened around the hilt of his sword. “Did you see them? Planning a rescue like it’s some elaborate game of chess.”
