I breathed out and let the shadows bond with the bones of my hands first, then my arms, then the length of me, until I was no longer flesh and blood but shadow. And in becoming shadow, the dislocated shoulder, all the evidence of Arthur’s torture were taken from me, replaced with the weightlessness of darkness.
I reached forward into the lock that held the cell door closed, and my shadows easily manipulated it, causing the cell door to swing inward without a sound.
The guards were still arguing at the far end of the corridor. One of them had gone for help, and now only two more remained. I moved out of the cell that had kept me prisoner for too long, and they never turned their heads.
I stopped in front of Lance’s cell, which was right next to mine. His eyes were wide in the darkness as he, no doubt, figured out just what was going on: something monumental.
His breathing was controlled and deliberate. It was the breathing of a man who’d been a soldier long enough to sleep light and wake clean. But he wasn’t sleeping now. I could hear him jumping to his feet before I reached the door. When I did, I leaned close to the iron and allowed my shadows to penetrate the lock the same way they had mine. Soon, the cell door was opening, and then there was nothing separating us but the cold of the air. Yet, Lance made no move to exit his cell. Instead, he just stood there, looking at my shadows as if he wasn’t sure whether to trust that they were even real.
When I spoke, I kept my voice below a whisper. “Are you coming or not?”
There was a pause of two seconds, maybe three. It was long enough that I wondered if pride was going to be the thing that kept him here. But pride over what? A king that was most likely going to send him to the executioner? He must have made the same decision because he made a single quiet exhale that said everything.
Then he nodded into the darkness and stepped out of his confines and into the corridor beside me. He was broader than I remembered, or maybe the dark just made him seem larger. I gave him a nod, then we started up the corridor. Before we could reach the guards, I wrapped Lance in my shadows, and he didn’t fight me. Then we simply blended in with the darkness, which was already ever-present, and we slipped past the two guards, who didn’t even realize anything was amiss.
I took the left passageway, and Lance didn’t question it. We moved silently, hugging the wall, the darkness wrapping around both of us. It was thicker now, more accommodating. The veil’s disturbance fed the darkness in ways that should have scared me, but instead, it felt like an answered prayer.
Two guards were near the bottom of the stairs, and they were desperately trying to light their lanterns. I held up a hand, and Lance stopped behind me. Then I walked us around them through a darkness so complete the guards were looking straight through us, turning their heads and seeing nothing. Their hands were shaking.
We reached the top of the stairs, and when I opened the door that led to the open night air, the cold air immediately hit my face. It was the smell of the woods, with woodsmoke in it, and somewhere distant, horses.
Lance was one step behind me, but I didn’t look back. Instead, the shadows carried us out to certain freedom.
EPILOGUE
-BLODEUWYN-
The eagle came at dusk.
It landed on the sill without sound. There was no beat of wings, no scrape of talons on stone. One moment the sill was empty, and the next, the bird was there, its eye catching the candlelight like a chip of obsidian dropped in oil.
Outside, the Wilds shifted. The trees here didn’t stand still the way trees elsewhere did. Instead, they leaned, breathed, and tilted toward sound the way a dog tilts toward a whistle only it can hear.
The Whispering Wilds were the only place where the veil was the thinnest, where the lands of the living and the dead were separated only by the thinnest gauze. I’d lived among these woods long enough that their attention no longer registered as strange, but it was now simply background noise: something akin to the creak of a ship you’ve sailed so long you’ve stopped hearing the hull.
“Well?” I asked the bird.
The candle on my table burned without flickering.
He’s going to marry her.
“Very interesting.”
Arthur.MyArthur... and I used that word the way a sculptor uses it about a piece of marble. It had nothing to do with possession, but authorship. I hadn’t made him from nothing. Truly, the Pendragon blood had done the rough work, but I’d carved the channels. I’d looked at Uther, so bloated with power he didn’t understand, and I’d seen the architecture underneath him: the draconic thread that ran through his bloodline like a vein of ore through granite.
I’d watched the beast take Uther first, the way a fire takes green wood. By the end, Uther had been more dragon than man, but he hadn’t known the difference. Arthur was smarter, and Arthur was stronger than his father could have ever hoped to be. Arthurknewthe power of what lived in his chest, and thus he built walls of law, crown, and rigid self-control, stacking stone on stone against the thing that leaned against them every night. But the price he paid, that grinding, relentless war against himself, was exactly what I’d intended.
After all, you don’t create a weapon by making it comfortable.
And now he was going to marry the girl. I almost smiled.
Guinevere.
I hadn’t engineered her: that was the part that still struck me. No, instead Merlin and Nimue, the prophet and the lake-woman, had come together to create this impossible child. Even their pairing was a miracle in and of itself for Merlin thought in lines, cause and effect, step and consequence, the patient arithmetic of prophecy while Nimue thought in depths, in currents and pressures, and the slow geological weight of water on stone. Their daughter should have been a contradiction, something that canceled itself out.
Instead, she was aconvergence.
And I’d felt it the moment she was born, felt it the way you feel a shift in pressure before a storm, the way your ears know before your mind does that something fundamental has changed in the air.
