Not in hunger. Not in want. With something rawer than either.
I turned and walked back through the trees.
Cabal stood where I’d left him, and I mounted without ceremony, putting the southern wood behind me. The path widened and the branches thinned as the sky opened up overhead. All the while, I rode with my jaw set, the dragon still howling, and the Lady’s words moving through me.
Camelot’s towers appeared through the treeline, and my jaw tightened even further.
Pendragons—my legacy—had built every stone of this fortress, along with every gate, every ward, and every lock. Yet the Lady of the Lake had just told me, without raising her voice, that none of it mattered.
I rode through the eastern gate as the first light broke.
The guard didn’t ask questions.
Smart man.
-GUIN-
The cell was seven paces long and four wide. I knew because I’d counted my footsteps to and fro, then I’d counted them again.
Two days.
Arthur had left me here for two fucking days. Of course, I understood why. He’d left me here to sit and rot in this dank darkness because he thought it would soften me. After all, isolation was a tool as reliable as iron.
Let her sit. Let her think. And in her loneliness, let her fear. Let the walls get smaller. When she’s small enough, she’ll bend and then she’ll break.
Arthur thought he knew how that worked, but he didn’t know that I’d been alone before. What was more, I’d already lost everything once, and I’d come back from it. I could come back from it again.
Then I thought about someone that, in general, I tried not to think about: Merlin, my father.
My father.
I sat with those words the way you sit with a stone in your boot: aware of it constantly, yet unable to decide whether to stop and deal with it or just keep walking.
Merlin had lied to me. Repeatedly. Perhaps not so much in his words, but omission was a lie all on its own. And the scope of his lies still hurt because they weren’t small lies. No, they were the comfortable omissions of a man who had been keeping secrets for his own good. They were structural lies. If he’d told me the truth about my parentage, would that information have changed my actions to this point? No. Whether or not I knew I was born of Merlin and Nimue, it wouldn’t have changed the fact that I wanted revenge against Arthur.
At that thought, I had to laugh. But it wasn’t a happy, jovial sound. It was an acidic one because I’d failed. And I’d failed so spectacularly. I’d walked into Camelot with fire in my stride and revenge in my heart, and look where I’d ended up.
I was a failure. A joke. I’d let my feelings and emotions get in the way of my mission, and now I’d suffer for it. I was already on that path of suffering now.
Your suffering started way before this,I told myself.It started the day you were born because all you ever were to anyone was a tool.
Merlin had built me for a purpose, and Arthur wanted to use me for a different one. The only one who had ever truly given a damn about me was Corvin.
That thought settled into my chest like a quake: slow at first, but then heavy, spreading outward until it reached every edge of me. Gods. I missed his face. Not the idea of him, not the comfort of what he represented, but his actual face. Those amber eyes, that strong jaw, the dimple set into his chin that made him look almost boyish when nothing else about him was. I missed the way he looked at me when he thought I wasn’t watching, like he was trying to solve something he already suspected the answer to. I missed the way he was always annoyed with me, and the way I was always annoyed with him.
Don’t do this to yourself.
As if fate were sending me a reprieve from my own thoughts, I watched as a moth, a single pale thing, floated in through the bars of my cell door and pressed its body against the iron. It beat its wings in slow intervals and then held perfectly still against the iron bar, wings spread flat. Strange. It appeared to be waiting, as though it had somewhere to be and wasn’t in any particular hurry to get there.
I pushed off the wall and crossed the cell. When I was close enough, the markings on its wings stopped me cold.
It had two pale hindwings, both dusty white and ringed in the faintest silver. But it was the forewings that grabbed my attention because a pattern sat centered on each one. The pattern was dark as charcoal and precise in a way that naturerarely produced. There were two hollowed sockets, a nasal cavity, and a grinning row of teeth.
A skull. Two of them, mirrored perfectly.
My breath left me slowly.
I’d spent three years in Annwyn. In that time, I’d witnessed creatures that defied every category known to man. I’d seen Gwyllion, shadow wolves, and water spirits that wore borrowed faces. But I’d never seen anything like this. No moth in any forest I’d walked through, mortal or magical, carried markings this deliberate.
