But then the second vision hit before I’d even finished exhaling.
It was a woman with white hair. Though I couldn’t see her face, I knew who she was, as there was only one woman with white hair: Guinevere. She was holding a sword that was on fire.
She was standing somewhere I couldn’t place, but there was marble underfoot and blood spreading across it in lazy arcs. The sword she carried burned with light that was and wasn’t fire. It ate the darkness around it.
Then the dragon.
Not a small one. Not a heraldic decoration or a carved stone on a castle gate. This was a real beast, as black as the space between stars, and it rose from somewhere beneath everything. Somewhere it had been hibernating for a very long time. The dragon wasn’t angry. It was freed.
That was when the veil tore.
Not like cloth, more like the way ice cracks across a frozen lake: one line, then branching into many more lines, then a sound like the world cracking into millions of pieces. Through the tear came the dead, shambling and horrifying, filling up spaces that had been empty. They looked at the living with an expression I recognized because I’d felt it on my own face at every feast, every tournament, every Round Table gathering where the laughter came too easily and the wine flowed too freely.
I don’t belong here.
Everything was then interrupted by an old woman’s face. A second later, though, the face was no longer old. It became something else wearing the memory of an old woman’s face, the way a mask retains the shape of its previous owner long after it’s changed hands. The old woman who was no longer old had no expression.
Soon the image shifted, and I found myself looking at two dragons spiraling together above a burning kingdom. One black, one white, circling around each other as if they were caught in a lovers’ embrace. Orbiting. Like they were two halves of one thing that had forgotten how to be separate.
Then it was Guinevere’s face I saw.
She stood at the edge of a cliff leading down to something I couldn’t see. I also couldn’t make out the landscape around her. There was just the edge, and her, and her arm extended behind her. Not reaching forward. Reaching backward. And from the darkness behind her, a hand appeared. It cut through the curtain of black, reaching for her just as she reached for it.
I couldn’t see the face attached to it. Couldn’t see the body either. Just the hand, and the darkness it came from, and the feeling that rushed through me like ice water along my spine.
She trusted whoever this was.
Not cautiously. No, this was the kind of trust that didn’t question itself. The type of trust that was earned, not given.
The vision released me.
It was a few seconds before I became aware of my own breathing again and how fast it was. I slowed it deliberately, counting the exhales. The candle wax had solidified completely; it had been warm when I’d lain down. However long the visions had lasted, it was longer than it felt.
I stood and walked over to the window.
The training grounds lay empty below, the jousting lists reduced to dark shapes in the pre-dawn. Only a few doors down, Guinevere was presumably sleeping under Galahad’s watchful, pious guardianship. Depending on which other direction I chose not to think about, Corvin of Blackhollow sat in a dungeon cell and waited for whatever Arthur had decided his life was worth.
Three weeks of visions, and I’d said nothing to anyone.
The first one had been easy to dismiss. A strange dream that could have been attributed to too much wine at supper and too little sleep before it. The second I’d chalked up to proximity to the prisoner: I sometimes absorbed residual emotion from people I’d spent significant time with, and I’d spent a good deal of time over the preceding weeks with Lioran. It stood to reason that her anxiety about her situation had bled into my sleeping mind.
Except by the fifth vision, that excuse had worn thin.
And now I was watching Guinevere stand at the edge of annihilation with her arm extended toward a hand I couldn’t see, and I was considering whether my policy of strategic silence had perhaps run its course.
The problem was who to tell?
Arthur would either reject the visions as nothing to worry about or, worse, he’d weaponize them. Whatever the visions meant, whatever they were pointing toward, Arthur’s first question would be how to use the information to consolidate his position, and the delicacy required to handle something this large would be entirely beyond his current emotional state. There was just something...offabout him. I couldn’t put my finger on just what.
And Lance would be useless because he was already fighting demons of his own. He’d been fighting a war inside himself that he hadn’t even acknowledged yet, and men in that particular battle were worse than useless; they were actively dangerous to anyone who came too close.
I rubbed the back of my neck and watched the sky lighten by increments.
Galahad would pray over it and conclude that the Boundless had a plan, which may have been true but wasn’t actionable.
Kay would want facts and logistics, and he’d look at me with that expression he used on junior knights who’d just reportedsomething he considered strategically irrelevant to the matter at hand.
Yes, there was no one I could tell. Not yet, anyway.
