“I do.”
“And what would that be?”
“How well you know this castle,” he said then. His voice had changed, the lightness gone.
“You forget I served Arthur for many years.”
“True, but you’ve also been away for many years. And in those years, things here have changed as they’re wont to do. And yet.” He moved a pawn with one finger. “As I understand it, you entered through the eastern ward.”
I kept my expression still.
“The eastern ward gate has a blind spot. Twelve feet of it, where the guards’ sight lines don’t overlap during rotation.” He tilted his head. “Most people don’t know that.” He paused. “Especially people who have been away as long as you have.”
The approach to Camelot had been fast, and I’d taken the route automatically, the way you took familiar roads: not thinking, just moving. Years of knowing these walls in my bones, and I’d let them carry me without checking what I was revealing.
Fool.
“As I said, I spent many years here when I was in service to the crown.”
“Mmm.” Kay moved a rook. “And the ward-stones on the western wall. The one below the old garrison barracks. Someone moved it, perhaps eight months ago, creating a gap in the suppression field roughly fifteen yards wide.”
That was interesting because the ward-stones had nothing to do with me, so I could only assume they’d been Morgan’s handiwork.
Kay looked at me in that assessing way of his, and something shifted in his expression. Like a hypothesis gaining weight.
“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” I answered honestly.
“Interesting. I mean, that you know as much as you do, for a man who’s been in the enchanted wilds these past years.”
I moved my queen again. Took his bishop.
“Check,” I said.
Kay looked at the board. His mouth curved.
“You’re going to lose eventually,” he said.
“Everyone does.”
He studied the board for a long moment. Then he began moving the pieces into a little sack he’d placed on the ground, methodically and unhurried, and I understood the game was over in more than one sense.
He stood when the board was cleared and tucked it under his arm. Then he knocked twice on the door for the guard before turning back to face me.
“I’ll tell Arthur you weren’t cooperative and that I didn’t get anything I came here hoping to get,” he said.
“He’ll be surprised by that, will he?”
“I don’t know—will he be?”
The door opened. Kay stepped through it without looking back, and the door locked. The rune-light hummed against the stone walls, steady and inescapable.
I sat in the middle of it and thought about the ward-stone, the eastern gate, and the way Kay’s eyes had moved when he’d saidinteresting.I thought about the way he’d been quiet and unhurried, the way a patient man stored something he expected to use later.
He’d come here fishing. That much was obvious. But I feared he’d left with more than he’d brought.
I pressed my thumb against the floor, felt the grain of the stone, and let myself think about what that meant. Then I counted the seconds between the flicker at the next shift change.
Two and a half.
