I was their creation, but I was also a hindrance to the grand plan, one that surprised me and changed everything I thought I had known about Arthur’s fate.
“No,” I whispered, completely alone. “It cannot be.”
Chapter Thirty-Seven
The castle dungeon was colder than anything I had ever felt before. Water dripped from above at random, making it hard for me to avoid as I pressed my back against the cool stone wall at the rear of the little cell I had been shoved into and wrapped the sheet tighter around my body.
I didn’t know where they had taken Lancelot, but other than the single guard posted in front of the barred door, I was completely alone.
All I wanted to do was cry. Everything had changed in the blink of an eye in a way that I didn’t know how to fix.
The servants all around me seemed to be of the same mind as Arthur—spitting at me in the hallway as they glared at me with the same glazed over eyes that Arthur had. He had kept calling Morgana his sister earlier, something he would never have been caught dead doing of his own free will.
Merlin had once mentioned that the magic Morgana specialized in was that of the mind, but as long as he was around Morgana’s hold could not take hold of the castle residents or Arthur.
But Merlin was also nowhere to be found, a fact that did not bode well for my fate.
Where had the wizard gone and what had happened out in the hills surrounding Camelot to change things so drastically? In one night it felt as if I had lost everything.
Gently bumping my head repeatedly on the wall behind me, I tried to force myself to come up with an answer.
Come on,Gwen, I thought to myself,think. How can you fix this?
There were only a few iterations of the legend that did not end with Arthur forming the first pack in the British Isles. In those iterations, Queen Guinevere and Sir Lancelot’s affair had ended with both being put to death, though in some, Guinevere was let off to live the rest of her life in confinement while Lancelot was banished from Camelot and history.
And if that was our best case scenario, I was pretty sure we were fucked.
Merlin wouldn’t have let this happen if he knew, but where the hell was he?
I tried to remember all of the different versions of the story that my mother had told me as a child, but the more I thought about it the more I realized that, at some point, Merlin disappeared from the story every time, never to be heard from again.
Had he died? The very thought sent a chill down my spine.
Normally, Arthur would never let anything happen to his oldest friend and closest advisor, but the Arthur upstairs was a far cry from his usual self.
I needed to find him. Every single instinct I possessed told me that Merlin would be able to solve our problem and break whatever magical hold Morgana had over Arthur and the rest of the castle.
Groaning a little bit as another heat cramp twisted through my body with no relief in sight. I forced myself to ignore it—to push down my misery and focus on a solution.
My heat would have to wait.
Closing my eyes, I reached for my magical core and smiled when it rose easily to the surface. At least that seemed to be working.
I wasn’t sure if I could use my water magic for anything useful down here in the dungeon, but Icoulduse it to find Merlin.
He had shown me how to send magical threads out into the land around me, using the lakes and the rivers that webbed out from it to see more of Logres than I had been able to on the journey here. He taught me how to let the magic of the land empower me and I did that now, searching for his distinct magical signature.
“Where are you, Merlin?” I mumbled under my breath, my brows pinched in concentration.
Through the lake, I followed each river as it branched out to creeks and streams, searching for my wizard.
They could not have gone far after they had left seeing as Arthur had returned in a little over twelve hours and I tried to remember the direction in which Bedivere told me they had gone to fend off the Saxons. The very same Saxons that had now invaded our castle and my new home.
This was not in any of the myths. Castle Camelot had never been overtaken in any iteration that I could remember, so while my general outlook was bleak at the moment, it still lit that tiny kernel of my desire to change our fates for the better.
Then, as if my determination had conjured him, I felt Merlin’s magic. It was weak—almost as if it had been caged—but when I reached out with my own magical threads it grasped on for the lifeline.
Guinevere! Merlin’s voice echoed loudly in my head, making my already pounding headache worse.
