“Perhaps you should.”
He shook his head, slow and certain. “Yes, you’re out for yourself; I won’t pretend otherwise. And you’re without question the most dangerous seductress I’ve ever encountered.” The faintest smile crossed his mouth. “But beneath all of that, beneath the games, the glamour, and the knives you keep at every throat... you’re a good woman.”
The words landed somewhere unexpected. I let them sit there for a moment in the dark between us because I couldn’t ever remember a time when anyone had referred to me as good. It was strange and didn’t quite sit right.
“I hope,” I said quietly, “you don’t live long enough to regret saying that.”
He looked at me like he knew more than he let on. Then he just stood there in the moonlight with all of that careful iron discipline drawn tight across his face. And beneath it, in the obsidian, a single flare of shadow bloomed outward from his feet, sharp and violent as a crack through ice, then pulled back.
He breathed once through his nose, then he turned toward the courtyard entrance, and his eyes went somewhere else entirely. Somewhere with walls, towers, and a woman in a cell who didn’t know the half of what moved in the blood Nimue had given her.
“The east passage,” he said. Clipped. Precise. “The ward rotates at the second hour.”
“It does.”
“And the guard at the lower postern. Does he still drink?”
“Heavily.”
He nodded, the way a man nods when he’s moved on and won’t be moved back. Whatever I’d told him, whatever had shifted behind his eyes, it was packed down now. Sealed. He’d carry it the way he carried everything: without visible weight, without visible wound.
Perhaps in another life, in another time, the two of us could have been something.
“Will Kay be a problem?”
“Kay,” I answered, “is always a problem.”
He nodded.
“He’s had his confrontations with her, and he wants his revenge,” I continued. “As far as I know, he hasn’t acted on it... yet. I believe he’s waiting for something he can use as leverage. As long as we move before he finds that leverage, he won’t be your obstacle.”
Corvin pulled his gloves from his belt and drew them on. “And Lance?”
I hesitated one beat too long, and his eyes cut to mine.
“Lance will be the obstacle.”
Something moved through his jaw, something barely visible that was gone a second or so later.
“Then I’ll go before the second rotation. Before Lance is on the morning watch.” He paused, and then he faced me. “And I’ll welcome your ravens.”
He turned away from me then and walked toward the far arch where the shadows gathered deepest and the moonlight gave up and went elsewhere. He didn’t look back. Men like Corvin never looked back when they’d made up their minds. It was one of the things I’d always found both admirable and deeply exhausting about him.
I watched him reach the edge of the dark and pause, just long enough for the shadows to recognize him, to open themselves around him the way shadows did when they knew who was asking.
And then he was gone.
I stood alone in the courtyard with the obsidian cooling beneath my feet, the night pressing in from every angle and the distant sound of the forest breathing below the walls.
Corvin was good. Certainly the best Merlin had. And the only one Arthur had never managed to fully predict because Arthur had loved him once, and love makes a man assume he knows another’s limits.
But Camelot’s walls would be thicker than they ever were before. Now, with the realization that Guin was Merlin’s, Arthur’s paranoia would have calcified into procedure, into a particular brand of cruelty disguised as order. And Lance wasn’t on our side. What was more, he might possibly feel Corvin coming if Corvin wasn’t careful enough. Yes, Lance might feel him coming the way he felt everything coming, seconds before it arrived, with that terrible instinct of his.
I pulled my wrap tighter around my shoulders and looked at the place where Corvin had disappeared. He’d either get her out or he wouldn’t. And I found, to my considerable irritation, that I cared about the outcome.
CHAPTER EIGHT
-GUIN-
