I went. Then I lay with my face to the wall and listened to him pray. I had no idea what time it was, but the air outside had the tinge of early morning.
He was quieter than before, but urgent in a way the earlier prayers hadn’t been: those had the structure of liturgy, but this had no structure at all. His voice caught on certain words butkept moving. I heard my name once. I heardforgiveseveral times. Then I heard a long silence that had more in it than the words did.
My shoulder ached where he’d pushed me into the wall. I pressed my palm to the stone and felt the cold of it and thought about what Merlin had told me once about men who make war on their own bodies.
They’re not seeking pain,he’d said.They’re seeking proof. That the flesh can be defeated. That the thing inside the flesh can be made to submit.
He’d been speaking about someone else. Someone he’d known once, before the exile, before everything, but he’d never told me the man’s name. I wondered now if that man had been Galahad. I supposed I would never know. All I did know was that Merlin had said the words with his usual detachment, the scholar’s distance he kept between himself and emotion. But his voice had done something strange on the wordsubmit.
I hadn’t understood it then, but lying on my thin pallet in Galahad’s room while listening to him pray against the impulse to accept comfort from me, I understood it better.
Dawn came gray and mild through the window.
Galahad was at the table when I woke for the last time. His tunic was already on, his face was freshly shaven, and his hair was combed. The scourge was nowhere to be seen. He poured water from a clay jug into a basin and set out a cloth and turned to look at me with the same measured calm he’d had when he first showed me the room.
“You’ll wash,” he said. “Then we pray to Kaelthar.”
I sat up. My body was a catalog of complaints: the cold had settled into my joints, and the ache from Mordred’s binding had moved from my shoulder blades to somewhere lower. But all of that paled in comparison to my thoughts, which were still frayed from the night before.
I looked at the man who’d shoved me into a wall six hours ago. Then I looked at the tunic that covered the wounds he’d made in his own skin.
The calm on his face was real. That was the thing that stuck with me. He hadn’t manufactured the calm for my benefit: he’d rebuilt it from the inside, laid stone on stone in the dark hours, mortared it with prayer, will and whatever else he used to keep himself sealed. It was genuine, it was impenetrable, and underneath it was something that had shaken, cracked, and pleaded with its god for protection against a woman who had only tried to touch his bleeding back.
He wasn’t performing cruelty. He was losing a war.
The part that made my stomach drop was understanding that the battlefield was now me.
-CORVIN-
The light never went out.
That was the thing about Mordred’s cells. Every other dungeon I’d ever seen, and I’d seen a few, ran on shadow. Torches died. Guards forgot to replace them. Darkness crept in the way it always did, patient and inevitable, and if you knew what to do with it, you were never truly trapped.
Mordred knew that.
The runes were carved directly into the stone. All four walls, the ceiling, the floor. They were pale gold script in lines so precise they looked printed rather than chiseled, and they glowed without heat, without flicker, without any of the small vulnerabilities that fire carried. The light wasn’t bright enough to hurt, just bright enough todeny.It sat at constant middaylevel, and it didn’t care what time it was outside, whether I’d slept or whether my eyes had started to ache from having nothing to rest against.
This was a cell built for a shadow worker. Mordred hadn’t needed to know my name to build it right.
I sat with my back against the far wall and breathed through it. The light pressed against my awareness as a persistent reminder that something was wrong, that the magic I took for granted was no longer there.
I couldn’t use the dark any longer. So I used my ears to listen for sound because it was the next best thing.
The first shift change came at what I estimated was early morning, based on the quality of the footsteps. They were heavier, slower, the shuffle of men whose bodies hadn’t finished waking. Four guards on the lower level. Two stationed at the corridor entrance, two walking the rotation. The rotation ran at approximately twelve minutes. They were disciplined, whoever had trained them. Perhaps Lance.
The second shift was crisper. That meant it was around midday, probably. The sound now was boots with a different sole pattern: harder heel, less wear. One of the walkers had a slight drag in his left foot, though it was barely perceptible. I only noticed it on his third pass.
I carved the pattern into my memory and left it there.
The wards flickered during the changeover. I’d felt the first one on accident, a half-second where the gold script dimmed from bright to dull before stabilizing, and I’d gone still so fast I nearly pulled a muscle. It was too short a beat to use, but not short enough to ignore.
I started timing it.
The flicker lasted between two and four seconds. But it was inconsistent, which meant the weakness wasn’t mechanical; it was human. Someone had to maintain these wards, and duringthe handoff between maintenance cycles, the spell sagged. Two to four seconds wasn’t enough to do anything useful, though. But it told me the wards were held by a person, not a permanent enchantment, which meant they could be disrupted if the person was disrupted.
I filed that away too.
And then I was back to thinking about Guin. Maybe that wasn’t a surprise because I thought about Guin constantly. And it didn’t help that the compass in my chest never stopped pulling. It pulled in a northwest direction, and I had to assume that meant she was no longer in the dungeon, which was located in the lowest reaches of the castle.
