Mordred shifted his weight, and I pulled back, afraid I might have overplayed my hand.
“I don’t know what to expect now,” I finished.
“Very good,” Merlin responded, and the water went dark.
Mordred reached forward and collected the basin without comment. Then he dried it, stoppered the vial, and gathered his things with the same economy he brought to everything. Then he bowed once to Arthur and left the room without looking at me again.
The door clicked shut behind him as Arthur stepped out of the shadows. He stood across the table from me with his arms crossed, and he looked at me the way he’d looked at me from the beginning: like I was a puzzle he was solving.
“Why did you come to Camelot?”
“Because Merlin asked me to. And because I thought Logres was worth saving.”
The silence lasted two seconds. Maybe three.
Something moved across Arthur’s face, something that flinched.
CHAPTER NINE
-CORVIN-
The Same Night As The Conversation With Morgan
I left Caer Gwyll that night.
No sleep and no deliberation.
Wraith moved beneath me like he also understood the urgency. His long strides ate the road, his breath steaming in the cold darkness. Three of Morgan’s ravens kept pace above me, their black shapes cutting through the iron-grey sky like tears in cloth. They didn’t cry out or wheel unpredictably the way wild birds did. Instead, they flew with clear purpose, steady and deliberate, angling south-southwest in a loose formation that Wraith seemed to track without any guidance from me.
I’d been riding for three hours when the pull started.
It wasn’t pain exactly, more like pressure behind my ribs, like a tightening that had nothing to do with the cold air or the intense pace. I’d felt this pull before: once, years ago, when Merlin had pressed two fingers to my chest and said something in the old tongue that I hadn’t understood. He’d called it a compass, a gift from him. And he’d said it would only wake for something important.
It had been sleeping for a very long time.
But now that internal compass pulled even further southwest, steady and insistent as a hook through my skin. Morgan’s ravens cawed overhead, still leading the way, and Wraith continued to follow them.
What Morgan had told me earlier about Guin and Lance was information I hated, but I was glad for it because she’d been right: it was information I needed to know. Yes, it turned my stomach whenever I thought about it, but it refused to leave my mind, all the same. As I rode in silence with nothing but my thoughts for company, of course I continuously turned the information over.
I didn’t blame Guin for Lance bedding her. I didn’t blame her because I knew her as well as I did. And even though she might have been a formidable warrior, she was an innocent when it came to anything else. She’d been a maiden when she’d left Caer Gwyll for Camelot, and a maiden knows little about the appetites of men.
I was more than certain that Lance had somehow figured out that beneath the guise of Lioran existed the most beautiful woman in the realm, and as soon as he’d laid eyes on her, he’d coveted her. Yes, this was entirely on Lance; it wasn’t on Guin.
He’d no doubt warmed her into his bed with that way he had with all women he fucked. I’d witnessed it many times when I’d been among Arthur’s closest knights. Lancelot had always had a reputation with women. And I was kicking myself for not warning Guin about him when I’d had the chance. Looking back on it now, I didn’t know why I hadn’t. Perhaps I simply assumed that she’d never end up in his bed? Or perhaps the idea was so unsavory that I’d chosen not to imagine it as a possibility at all? Whatever the reason, I didn’t know.
Regardless, if Lance had harmed her in any way, he’d suffer for it. Lance’s way with women was to take what they had to give until he grew bored, and then he’d send them on their less-than-merry way. If he’d done the same to Guin: used her for her body and then thrown her away, he’d pay for it. And if he’d taken her maidenhead against her will? If somehow Morgan had gotten it wrong and Guin hadn’t wanted it? If he’d abused his power over her...
I’d kill him.
-CORVIN-
I’d been traveling through the night. The journey between Caer Gwyll and Camelot wasn’t a short one, and I hadn’t taken a moment’s rest aside from a quick stop at a tavern, just long enough to eat something hot and forgettable. Wraith had had a drink at the trough and he’d rested his legs for half an hour before we pushed on.
Wraith, a horse bred in Annwyn, didn’t tire the way ordinary horses did. The shadows fed him the same way they fed me, the way sunlight feeds other living things. It was a deep, quiet magic that was threaded into his blood from birth, the same way mine was threaded into me. Where the road darkened under tree cover or the light dropped toward dusk, Wraith’s stride actually lengthened, grew easier, and he tossed his head like he was pleased with the world.
It was in the late afternoon that Wraith crested a low hill and Camelot appeared on the horizon, the towers catching the dying light of day. I’d looked at those walls a hundred times from a hundred different angles. And I’d done so in every season, in rain, snow, and scorching sunshine. I’d ridden through those gates as a knight, as a confidant, and as a brother.
And then I’d ridden through them as a spy. As The Fox.
