He said, quietly enough that only I could hear it, “You look like you’re going to be sick.”
“I’m debating exactly that,” I answered, and I was surprised my voice worked.
One corner of his mouth moved into a hint of a smile. “Debating whether to be sick?”
“No. Debating whether you deserve the warning before I do it.”
The almost-smile held for a half second longer than it should have. Then it closed, and he was the king again, and he offered me his arm in a motion that wasn’t an offer at all, but an order.
The court was watching, and all I could think about was Corvin and Lance in the dungeon and how the dragon had stopped a blade meant for my throat.
I put my hand on his arm. I had no other choice. If I refused his announcement in front of all the court, I knew it wouldn’t be good for me. What was more, maybe this was exactly what was meant to happen. Maybe in uniting with Arthur, it would stop the animosity between him and Merlin, and peace could be found?
Or maybe this was simply fuel tossed onto a fire of hatred that would soon burn uncontrollably.
The silk of my sleeve pressed against the rough wool of his, and beneath that was the warmth of him, solid and undeniable. Ilooked straight ahead at the assembled court of Logres, but soon my attention sought Isolde again.
Her chin was up a fraction too high. That was the tell. Not tears, not a tremor in her hands, not any of the things a lesser woman might have allowed herself. Just that fractional overcorrection: her spine going precisely too straight, her shoulders pulled back. She looked first at Arthur, and then, because she couldn’t help it, she looked at me once more.
And for one single moment that was barely a breath, barely long enough to be called a moment at all, she couldn’t hold my eyes. Her gaze dropped, not to the floor, but just slightly downward and to the left, as if she’d found something of interest. Then she found herself again and looked back up, and her expression was perfectly composed once more, the performance fully resumed. But I’d seen the fracture. It had lasted less than a second, but it had cost her everything she had to close it.
And I suddenly hated Arthur in a different way than I’d ever hated him before. I hated him for what he’d done to Isolde: for the completely insensitive way he’d handled her. I hated him for the fact that her expression was breaking as if she were made of porcelain and someone had just come at her with a hammer.
-CORVIN-
The ward-light had burned for over forty days.
I knew because I’d counted, made note of every morning and the way it brightened by a degree. In the evening, it dimmed into a pale imitation of a sun cycle. Mordred had built the fluctuation into the enchantment in order to keep me oriented, to keepme sane, maybe, or to remind me that he controlled even the rhythm of my days.
I’d come to hate that light more than I could say. So when it died, I didn’t panic. Instead, I sat up on my cot and listened.
The torches went first. I heard them gutter out in sequence down the corridor, one after another, like something moving fast was swallowing them whole. Then the ward-light followed: that cold, bluish luminescence Mordred had threaded into the stone above my cell door. It simply flickered twice and went out completely.
Then I was in blackness, total and absolute. We all were.
The guards noticed immediately, and in noticing, I could hear their panic.
“What in the gods’ names—”
“Don’t touch it, don’t—”
“Someone fetch a taper, fetch—”
“The wards are down. All of them. Something’s wrong with the wards.”
Their boots scraped against the stone. There were two of them on duty this evening, maybe three, and they were clustered near the corridor junction. By the sound of their voices and their footsteps, they were confused, and now I could hear them reaching for torches that wouldn’t catch. I could hear the spark of a flint, over and over, but nothing was taking.
I pressed my back against the wall and breathed in the dark, felt it filling my body, giving me the strength of night that I’d been missing for so long. But the darkness here was different from Mordred’s ward-light absence. This wasn’t merely the absence of flame, of light; this was somethingotherthat was moving through the corridor. It was something with weight to it, and I recognized it the way you recognize a smell from childhood: distant but certain.
It was the veil, the line between here and there. I could feel it straining as the darkness roared through my cell and filled me with a strength that wasn’t entirely shadow. In fact, the shadow magic within me answered to it immediately. It felt as if the void that had been within me was now filling up in overtime.
Whatever shadows had just passed through the cell, I’d felt them, felt them bonding with me, filling up my reserves. Something was happening to the boundary between here and there. I’d felt fragments of it over the past week: in whispers through the stone, Morgan’s cat bringing me scraps of information that didn’t quite add up, but this was no fragment. This was a rupture.
Which meant the wards on my cell were down too. All of them.
I stood quickly and moved to the cell door. As I pressed my palm flat against the iron, there was no resistance and no buzz of enchantment pushing back against my skin. There was only the darkness pressed in from every direction, and I let it press.
That was the only way I could describe what I did with shadows. I didn’t command them, and I didn’t wield them like a weapon. It was more like I was simply opening a door that had been kept closed for too long. Well, now that door was wide open, and I intended to step through it. The darkness recognized me, just as it always had. Since Blackhollow. Since before Merlin had named it what it was: shadow magic.
