Not the warm gold of candlelight, but a gold that lived inside the light itself, threaded through her like a second skeleton, like something that had always been inside her waiting for the right heat to make it visible. Her eyes were violet, but the gold was moving in them.
And the dragon was moving toward her.
That was what had kept me at the window until the cup was cold, the treeline was fully light, and my left hand had gone numb from gripping the stone sill. Every vision I’d pulled from the currents in the preceding months and years had revealed one truth: that Guinevere must take the dragon, for she was the only one strong enough to act as its vessel. I had built my strategy around that understanding; I had sent her to Camelot with that understanding.
I set the cup down, then I walked to my chair and sat for a long time. I sent word to no one, gathered nothing except my cloak and my staff, and walked out of Caer Gwyll before the morning bell had finished ringing.
The Whispering Wilds began where the forest stopped being a forest. You could stand at the edge and observe it rationally: there were trees, undergrowth, the smell of damp earth and old leaves. You might note that the light fell strangely, the shadows collected in the wrong places, the birdsong cut off at a precise invisible line and was replaced by something you couldn’t quite call silence because silence was an absence, and this was a presence. This was a listening. The kind that made you aware of the sounds your own body made: the rasp of your breathing, the shift of your weight from heel to toe, the complicated percussion of your own blood.
I crossed the line.
The temperature dropped as though the air here had more substance, more specific gravity. The trees thickened around me, and I watched a ruin assemble itself from the undergrowth the way ruins did inherterritory: gradually, incrementally, each step revealing one more stone, one more rotted beam, one more window that looked out on nothing from inside a wall that had no business still standing. The structure was different from the last time I had come here. Or perhaps it wasn’t, and the last timeI had simply seen it differently. Blodeuwyn’s place had a way of presenting whatever face served her best.
By the time I reached it, it was a cottage that had been a temple that had been a cairn—all three at once, depending on where I looked.
She was outside.
She sat on a stone that had probably been an altar at some point, working something through her hands: a length of cord, dark and thin, with knots I didn’t look at too closely. She didn’t look up.
“You smell like guilt,” she said.
“I do not feel guilty.”
She still didn’t look up. “Yet you smell like guilt because you’ve waited too long.”
Her voice was the same, but that was not a surprise, for it was always the same: both low and unhurried. It was the voice of someone for whom the wordurgentwas a philosophical problem rather than a lived experience. She was old in the way certain landscapes were old: not deteriorated, just compressed, every year of it still present and accounted for underneath the surface.
I stopped a few feet away from her out of courtesy and old caution. You did not walk into Blodeuwyn’s space without being invited.
“I didn’t wait too long,” I said.
She looked up then. Her eyes were pale, the color of the winter sky, and they moved over me with the deliberate assessment of someone valuing livestock.
“You waited until the visions stopped being something you could interpret and became something you had to act on.” She pulled a knot through the cord. “That is waiting too long. But you’ve always needed the evidence to pile up before you moved. I remember that about you.”
I didn’t answer. There was nothing useful to add to that because she was right. But Blodeuwyn was always correct in her surmisings, so I supposed I should not have been surprised.
She gestured toward the stone beside her, not in welcome but more as a concession. I sat.
The cord moved through her fingers as above us, something that was not quite wind moved through the tops of the trees, and the sound it made was almost its own language.
“Tell me,” she said.
So I told her.
I told her about the frequency first: the way the visions had moved from occasional to regular to, in the last two weeks, nearly constant. I explained how they interrupted me mid-conversation, mid-incantation, mid-sleep, the way they had a quality now ofinsistencerather than information, as though whatever was generating them had grown impatient with my pace. I told her about Guinevere at the center of them, not at the periphery the way she had been early on, but always at the center now, always standing still with that gold threaded through her.
And I told her about the dragon moving toward her. Coming to her. Not as a predator, but as something else.
Blodeuwyn was silent through all of it. She didn’t nod, and she did not shift her weight. She just worked the cord and listened, and her stillness was that of someone who had heard this before, perhaps not this specific account, but the category of account, the shape of inevitability arriving at her door once again.
When I finished speaking, the silence lasted long enough to become uncomfortable.
Then I said, “I believe it is time, hence why I have come.”
The words left me, and something shifted inside me, something I had been carrying for days, turning it over, examining it from various angles, finding ways to defer themoment of naming it. Saying it aloud was different, though. The words had weight that the thought had lacked.
Blodeuwyn set the cord across her knees.
