“I cannot bow, obviously. But you do not need to torture me. I will answer your questions.”
Anger surged through me. Rage I had not allowed myself to feel in the aftermath of hearing about Parys’ death. I had not fetched Igraine from Baylaur myself, merely held open the portal rift while Arran and Lyrena did it. I’d let her linger in Baylaur long enough. Now that Merlin was here, I could not delay facing the truth and all of its ramifications. I mourned, but I did not let it overtake me. I could not. I did not have the luxury of hiding as I had done in the months after Arthur’s death.
But confronted with Merlin’s perfect calm, I snapped. I lunged for her, my second dagger already in my hand. “That is where you are wrong. You murdered Parys—”
“I did not murder anyone,” Merlin quipped. She did not flinch away—not that she really could, given how tightly she was restrained—but her eyes were clear. As if she was ready to die. “Unlike Your Majesties, some of us are able to accomplish our tasks through nonviolent means.” She was practically begging me to kill her.
I swung, aiming for her thigh. A deep wound there would be painful, would gush blood, but would not impede her ability to talk.
Arran’s hand closed around my wrist.
How dare you,I raged, but I was met with a stern growl.
“You collaborated with the Dowager,” Arran said. He did not release my arm, keeping me a full two feet away from drawing blood.
“Briefly,” Merlin admitted freely. Wisely, her eyes focused on me, rather than Arran. If I went through the void, even he would not be able to stop me. “I had nothing to do with your brother’s death, and I was long gone before Igraine killed your friend.”
“You knew about Igraine’s involvement in Arthur’s death,” Arran said, his grip on me loosening fractionally.
“You are guilty,” I snarled. I shook free of my mate. A breath, that was all that stood between me and gutting the traitorous priestess.
But it was not my mate’s hand that held me now. It was his hope. I could feel it, small and white and glowing, deep in his dark soul.
Merlin exhaled. “Of not intervening? I suppose so. But I knew the Void Prophecy as well as your mother. Better, in fact. Because I knew what that coming darkness meant.”
I staggered back a step. I could not help it. Not even a lifetime of elemental composure could keep me in place.
“You knew about the succubus,” I breathed.
Merlin actually smiled. “Why do you think the Ancestors diminished the power of the priestesses? Too many of the witches were taken by the succubus; they had to be destroyed and their sacred object taken. They entrusted the grail to the priestesses. Nimue and Accolon felt that was sufficient power.”
The witches and the priestesses had both been eliminated after the Great War, in their own ways. I knew that, had seen theevidence. Only two witches had been left in Annwyn—one in the Tower of Myda, and one in the mountains of the Spine. I’d met them both and killed the first. The priestesses were not killed off, but their power reduced so that they were never more than one priestess and one acolyte at any given time. I’d punished Merlin in Baylaur for violating that law.
But we’d never known the true purpose behind those actions taken by our Ancestors. The explanation that Merlin offered was sobering in how perfectly it made sense. Witches’ minds could become unmoored from the present, making even the females vulnerable to the succubus. I’d seen as much in the Tower of Myda, guarded myself against it when I confronted the witch in the Spine, and leveraged it when Cyara used Diana to search for Accolon’s truth.
Percival had said that three joined together to make the Sacred Trinity—fae, witch, and human. Gwen corroborated it with Parys’ findings. And now, Merlin echoed them and added more.
It could not be. The answer could not have been sitting there in Baylaur all along. What did that mean? Arthur had died for no reason? All of the citizens of Baylaur, my subjects, dead because I had not realized? Not believed?
I rocked back another step.
“The priestess here had no knowledge of the succubus,” I said.
Merlin shrugged. “It has been seven thousand years. Much knowledge has been lost.” “But the grail was passed into my keeping, and with it the knowledge of its importance.”
I could feel Arran through the bond. While my insides screamed, his brooded. A dark, coalescing storm cloud. And at its center, that kernel of hope that he was so carefully nourishing.
“Why didn’t Accolon and Nimue use the Sacred Trinity to banish the succubus the first time?” Arran demanded, battle axe fully in his grip now. “Why carve those stones and lead us to believe that only Veyka’s sacrifice—”
He could not finish.
Merlin lifted her dark brows, exaggerating the slant of her eyes. I lifted my dagger in threat.
“They never united the three. The scabbards were entrusted to the humans, and the humans never offered them nor revealed their location during the Great War,” she said, one eye on my weapons, the other on Arran.
Outwardly, he was unchanged. But inside, I felt the clouds drop away until only that white ember remained. “The legend of the Sacred Trinity is true.”
“Yes,” Merlin said.
