1
GUINEVERE
Sleep was a waste of time.
A weakness.
Sleep stole the hours that needed to be dedicated elsewhere.
Meeting, training, torturing.
Sleep brought dreams. Dreams turned to nightmares.
Nightmares were the only place Gwen saw her friends anymore.
Still, she avoided them. The white-haired queen, young and broken, who’d entrusted her with a kingdom. The Brutal Prince, commander turned friend turned king. When their faces came to her nightmares, they spoke words of disappointment. The queen’s beautiful features filled with rage, the knife in her hand swiping for Gwen’s throat.
She always woke before the queen could land her death blow.
That was the real nightmare.
Gwen had no doubt that the queen would come for her. That she would demand vengeance for her failures. Merlin gone. Parys dead.
Parys.
Perhaps her first true friend.
She had not deserved him in life. In death, at least, she would honor him. In the ways she knew, as well as those she was still learning.
She shifted in the tall wingback chair, arching her spine to stretch. That was fatigue curling around her bones, tightening her muscles. When she did sleep, it was always in her dark lioness form. She was lethal, in any form—and knew it. But knowing and believing were far from the same thing.
Fatigue she could tolerate.
Weakness, she could not.
She rolled her shoulders and refocused her eyes on the book in her lap.
The Travelers.
Parys had carried this book with him from the library, through the tunnels as they chased down Merlin, Igraine, and their Shadows.
It was important. It had to be. Otherwise, he would have left it behind.
Or he’d simply forgotten that he carried it at all.
Gwen shoved that thought away.
She would read the entire damn book, forward and backward again, if that was what it took to find some nodule of meaning. Something to mark Parys’s contribution. His importance.
His absence.
The Travelers.
Few among us have the power to travel through space, to sense the grains of creation and bend them to our will.
What utter drivel. Nonsense.
She’d traveled the entire length of the continent. The humans had come from Eldermist. If humans could travel, anyone could.
