Inside the room, I told the guard to wait outside as I pulled out my own chair and sat. She stood for a moment as she took in the room, then when I pointed to it, she took the chair across from me.
A pitcher of water sat on the table. I poured two cups and pushed one toward her, saying nothing about it, although I knew she must have been thirsty. But I didn’t even look at her to see if she took it. Instead, I stared out the window, allowing her privacy for a few seconds. I heard her reach for the water after roughly four seconds.
CHAPTER SEVENTEEN
-GUIN-
The chair was wooden and straight-backed, with no cushion. A reminder, in case I’d forgotten my place in Camelot.
Arthur sat across from me with his hands flat on the table. There was no wine on offer, and no food. Just water, but it was water I wanted badly, and even though I didn’t want to accept it, I did because I had to. Because my parched throat practically demanded it.
The room was small and stone-cold, lit by two iron sconces that threw orange light in uneven patches across Arthur’s face. He said nothing at first, just looked at me the way a man looks at a map before a campaign. It was the same thing he’d done when he’d walked into my cell earlier, and we’d just stared at one another for a few seconds.
“The Wardens,” he said finally. “Are they genuinely bound to Annwyn, or is that just a story Merlin tells?”
The sharpness of the question hit me before the words even finished emptying from his mouth.
I had half a second to figure out how I wanted to respond. The problem was that I knew the answer with the kind of specificity that made fabrication dangerous. I’d watched a Warden die when he’d tried to cross the Standing Stones, andthe memory lived in my body, not my mind, as did the sound he’d made when the binding of the land took hold of him. The sound had been something low and wet, a cry that didn’t sound like a man at all. Then I remembered the way he’d folded and the gray that had come into his face. They’d carried him back to Caer Gwyll, and he was gone inside the hour.
I could say I didn’t know, but Arthur would see right through that, and he’d push for the truth. That meant I’d have to build an alternative response with the same texture as the truth, and I’d already decided he was too good at this to miss a construction.
So I didn’t say anything.
His eyes moved across my face with the same patience he applied to everything else. I watched him read me, and in reading me, I watched him reach his conclusion before I’d offered him a single word.
“They’re bound,” he said.
I took a deep breath, but I didn’t argue.
He nodded once and filed it. There was no satisfaction and no triumph in his expression, just the flat acknowledgment of a man adding a column of numbers and arriving at the figure he’d already expected.
With that, he leaned back into his chair and let each of his arms rest against the armrests as he eyed me, and the back of my jaw tightened. I wasn’t comfortable with the fact that I’d spent half a second deciding whether to lie, but he’d been half a second ahead of me. And now he’d confirmed a military position he might or might not have arrived at by other means, but I’d handed it to him purely by the expression on my face.
I needed to be more careful.
“Merlin’s communication network,” Arthur said, moving forward and resting his elbows on the tabletop. “How do messages move? And through whom?”
This one I could work with. I took a breath, then described the structure as more centralized than it actually was, drawing the picture of a system that funneled through two named contacts. While these people were real, Arthur would have difficulty locating them, given how thoroughly they’d buried themselves. One quite literally: he was dead and had been for over a year, but I was betting that Arthur didn’t know as much. The second was a man Arthur wouldn’t have heard of because he was a peasant who had lived in the North before crossing into Annwyn and becoming one of Merlin’s citizens. When I described them both, I was sure to make them sound important and highly capable. The idea was to paint a picture of Merlin’s forces that would intimidate Arthur, if he was capable of intimidation.
“Mages,” Arthur continued. “Those who are combat-capable. How many?”
I built this one slowly, focusing on the distinction between mages who could hold a ward under pressure and those who could actually fight. When I responded, I layered in hesitation, correction, and approximation: the kind that makes a number feel arrived at rather than invented.
Even though Merlin only had forty-five mages, I told Arthur he had one hundred three, a number that was comfortably larger than the truth, but not wildly inflated. Why lie at all? Because I didn’t want Arthur to know that Merlin’s numbers were much smaller than his own. Granted, Arthur really only had the Knights of the Round Table in his magical elite (well, and Mordred, of course), but Arthur still benefited from numbers in general. And that was no small thing.
I watched his face while I said the lie. Nothing changed. I wasn’t sure what to make of that: I had no idea whether he believed me or not, but I figured it was better to assume skepticism and plan around it.
“Soldiers,” he continued. “Outside of the mages. How many men does Merlin have at his disposal?”
Technically none. Merlin had never really built the kind of standing army that required feeding, housing, and managing. The only other men and women he could call on if the need arose were the people of Annwyn who had deserted Logres. But they were little more than farmers and tradesmen. But I wasn’t going to give Arthur that.
“Hundreds,” I said with a shrug.
“Do they possess magic?”
“Some do. Some don’t.” I paused and decided to end this response with a well-placed barb. “But they’re all unified in their dislike of you.”
I watched his jaw set in a slow, deliberate tightening that moved through the whole line of his face, and there was something deeply gratifying about that.
