I remained, and I knelt again at the altar. I did not pray further, for prayer had already served its purpose. Whatremained was the quiet, and the candle smoke, and the carved marble eyes looking down at me from above.
My hands rested on my thighs. They were still, and I was still.
I examined my hands as I sat there, looking at my knuckles and the calluses along my fingers from years of sword work, the pale half-moons at the base of each nail. They did not shake, and I was happy for it.
I had wondered, in some distant and theoretical part of myself, whether my hands would shake once this decision had been made. I had read accounts of men who had performed necessary acts: soldiers, inquisitors, the great purgers of the Third Age whose names were recorded in the texts, and some of them had written of trembling, of the body’s resistance to the mind’s clarity.
Mine were still.
I understood what that meant. It meant I had been made for this, not chosen in some vague, flattering sense, but made, designed, purged, shaped, and refined across years of deliberate denial until what remained was only what the Boundless required.
Perhaps I did not shake because the facts were what they were. The witch had broken through the binding, and only strong magic could break through binding. The scholars said it was impossible. The magic would turn inward, they said. It would destroy the host before it escaped, they said. That was the function of the binding: that it was a container as much as a suppressant. At least, that is what they said, but hershadbroken through.
I had told Arthur that. And I had told him what that meant: that the demon within her was more powerful than any demon I had ever come across. And he had looked at me with those cold blue eyes that had once held something resembling a soul, andin response, he had gifted her with her own bedchamber right beside his.
He was lost. I had accepted that, and I did not grieve it, for grief was a luxury I had purged years ago. But I remembered the theoretical shape of grief, and I applied it briefly to Arthur, or to the man he had been as well as the king he might have been. Then I released it because grief was also a distraction, and tomorrow required everything.
I stayed until the last candle guttered. Then I rose, straightened my robes, and walked out of the old chapel into the corridor.
Dawn was beginning. That pale, indeterminate light that was neither night nor morning, that belonged to neither state. The sky above the courtyard was the color of old iron as I walked across the stones toward the east wing.
Behind me, the chapel windows caught the first true light of the sun as it crested the valley walls: caught the deep reds and ambers of the stained glass, the figures of the faithful rendered in a thousand fragments of color.
The light moved through them slowly, and from a distance, the glass looked like it was bleeding.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FOUR
-PERCIVAL-
The vision forced me to the middle of the Hall of Lineages.
There was no warning, not even some type of slow approach I could brace against. One moment I was standing between the stone columns with a lit taper in my hand, moving through the dark the way I sometimes did when sleep refused me. The next moment the taper was gone, the floor came up, and I was on my knees with my palms flat against the cold stone, and the hall was burning.
Well, not quite burning. That was the wrong word for it. The hall was becoming something. The walls remained the same, as did the columns, but the tombs were cracked. Great fissures ran through the carved lids like something was pushing up and out from inside. From each crack came light that was the color of old wounds: puce, greenish, and wrong.
As I watched, the former Pendragon kings, who were now long dead, began to rise. And as they rose, the sound of bone creaking against bone reverberated through the air. Soon, all the once-dead kings stood between the tombs, watching and waiting.
But waiting for what? I didn’t know.
The carved faces above the sarcophagi and the standing figures matched, feature for feature. There was Uther, Aurelius, and Constans. Further back existed skeletal bodies that represented names I only half-remembered from manuscripts. None of themlooked at me. Instead, they all looked upward at what had once been a ceiling of the crypt but now lay open as if it had been blown away by something. Every one of them stood looking up, their necks craned, skull faces tipped toward the now-open ceiling.
I looked up, too, and what I saw there made very little sense. Two dragons. One was the color of banked coals: dark red shading to black at the wingtips, scales that caught light like polished iron. The other was the color of a winter sky just before the first snow, pale, luminous, and cold. But beautiful. They circled each other in the dark above the tombs, and the air between them crackled as the columns trembled with each wingbeat.
Below them and between them, a woman appeared from nowhere and everywhere all at once. It was as if the air had simply spat her out. And as soon as it did so, she began to fall. She was small against the scale of the dragons, her white-silver hair spread behind her like smoke. Her arms were out, not reaching for anything, just open, as if she’d stopped fighting the fall or perhaps she’d chosen it.
She didn’t scream.
That was the part that stayed with me after the vision broke. I came back to myself already gasping, hands still flat on the stone floor of the Hall of Lineages. My hands were shaking. I pressed them against my thighs until they stopped shaking, or until they stopped enough that I could stand. The taper candle was perhaps a foot or so away from me, and the flame had gone out, probably when I’d dropped it.
The visions had been accelerating for three weeks. I’d kept count the way I kept count of everything: obsessively, in a small leather journal I carried tucked against my ribs where no one would see it. There had been four visions in the first week, then seven in the second week, and now eleven in the third.
Tonight was the fifth vision in four days.
The trouble with my gift, with visions specifically, as opposed to the healing, which at least had a clear mechanism and a predictable cost, was that they didn’t announce themselves as past or future. They just arrived, and I stood inside them, never understandingthe picture they painted. When they released me, I was left to sort out the wreckage, to decide what I’d seen andwhenI’d seen it.
The dead kings standing... That could be the past, I supposed. After all, history was full of dead kings doing improbable things in the old texts.
But the dragons? That could be present, I supposed, although I hadn’t heard of any dragons recently, so perhaps they too were a thing of the past? Or perhaps they had never been real to begin with? I didn’t trust that my visions always represented things that were true and real.
