The woman falling with the white-silver hair? That was the part I had no category for, because I’d seen her before. Not in this vision, but in an earlier one, weeks ago, before I understood what I was looking at. The woman standing at a precipice, stones crumbling beneath her feet, and from the darkness below, a hand reaching up. Long fingers. Pale. Patient in the way that only things that had been waiting a very long time could afford to be patient.
And now the same woman, the same hair, falling between two dragons. The same hair color as Guinevere. Of course, it could only be her.
I picked up my taper from where it had rolled against a tomb base and relit it from the small oil lamp that was mounted by the door. The flame threw shadows across Uther’s carved face, and he looked, as he had always looked, like a man who had made peace with the fact that nothing he’d built would survive him.
I stood there for a moment.
Then I went to find her.
It took longer than I expected. The castle after midnight had a specific geography: servants with reasons to be where they were, guards on rotations I’d learned over years of insomnia, and then a narrower category of people moving in ways that didn’t match the official map of the place. I was one of them.
After the business with Galahad, she had been moved to the bedchamber beside the king’s. An interesting arrangement, to be certain, but who was I to question such things? No one,as it happened. When I reached her door, it was being manned by two of the King’s Guard. I recognized one but not the other. Neither of them seemed to notice me, so I figured they wouldn’t question why I was there. I knocked on the door quietly.
There was no answer, so I knocked again.
She answered that time, and when she did, her expression lit with curiosity as she took in my countenance, which must have seemed spooked, I assumed, for I was rather unsettled.
“You look like you’ve seen something,” she said.
“I have,” I answered. “May I come in?”
She moved her legs slightly to make room, which was the closest thing to an invitation I was going to get at this hour. Then she closed the door behind her without even pretending to notice the guards. I supposed that was the way it was between them: them silently watching and her silently pretending they didn’t exist. She sat on her bed and motioned to the chair beside it. I took the seat and then set the taper between us. The flame steadied.
“Have you come to warn me to remain inside again?” she asked.
I shook my head. We both knew nothing had come of that warning. But I could still feel the truth in the air: that something was on the horizon. Something bad. I just didn’t know what that something was.
“I’m sure word will get back to Arthur that you came to visit, and then he’ll have a thousand and one questions for you,” she continued.
I nodded because she was correct. “I have nothing to hide.”
“Why have you come?”
Leave it to Guinevere to get to the bottom of things quickly. “I need to tell you about the visions I’ve been experiencing lately,” I answered. “All of them. From the beginning.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then: “All right.”
I started with the three women, who were ancient in the way that mountains were ancient, standing at the edge of something I didn’t recognize. All I did know was that itwasn’t the edge of the world, but it was the edge of something that existed before the world even had a name.
“One of them was weaving,” I said. “Not cloth, but something else. The threads were… they were time, I think. Or something like it. And the second one was watching, and the third was... unraveling.”
“Go on.”
I went on, and I explained the second vision: a sword in water. Not Excalibur; I knew Excalibur, had seen it in the Hall, knew its shape the way everyone in Camelot knew it. This was different because it was older. The water was black, and the blade was dark iron, and something was attached to it, wrapped around the hilt in a way that made my stomach turn when I tried to look at it directly. Like looking at a dead thing that had been in the water too long.
Then I told her about the most recent vision, in the Hall of Lineages, and the color drained from her face entirely.
“I’ve had the dream about the Hall of Lineages,” she said quietly.
“You had the dream tonight?”
She shook her head. “Not tonight, but weeks ago and many times. The tombs—”
“—were cracked open.”
Her breath caught. “Yes.”
“I saw the same in my vision whilst I was in the hall, not twenty minutes ago.”
