He didn’t look up when he spoke to me. “What didn’t you say in front of the others?”
I considered the shape of a lie. I knew several that would have fit the moment cleanly: partial truths dressed in just enough detail to feel complete. I’d used them before with him, and when I had, I’d told myself it was protection. His, mostly. Mine more, if I was being honest.
The salt air moved through the arrow slit in the far wall and carried the smell of the sea with it, something that reminded me of Tidefall Keep, of home. Vaelen’s particular scent was beneath it: wood smoke and something darker, something that had always made it difficult to think clearly.
“I didn’t say that we currently face a threat that’s larger than Arthur,” I answered.
He looked up. “Go on.”
“It’s a threat that’s larger than the rebellion. Larger than anything we discussed in this room tonight.” I moved to the window and kept my back to him because his face, when he was paying attention, had always made honesty easier than I preferred.
“The veil?”
I nodded. “So, you actually were listening when you were buried to the hilt in me the other evening.”
He gave me a wide smile. “Half-listening.”
I gave him one raised eyebrow. “Yes, the veil.”
“Why is the veil under threat?”
“It’s weakening. Well, notmerelyweakening. Perhaps it’s better to say it’s...responding. I’m fairly certain that something on the other side has noticed the damage in the veil and that something is using that damage deliberately.”
“Something? What is—”
“—I can’t tell you what that something is because I don’t fully know what it is. But I know it’s older than Camelot. It’solder than Arthur. And it’s older than Merlin’s war with the crown.”
Silence. “How do you know this?”
This was the part I had to keep buried, had to keep to myself. Part of me wanted to tell him, but the other part knew I couldn’t. “I...”
“Can’t tell me,” he finished for me. “Or won’t.”
I gave him a pitying smile. “Suffice to say, I need you to trust me. Even when I can’t explain why.”
“That’s a significant ask.”
“I know.”
“You’re asking me to follow a direction you won’t name, toward a destination you won’t describe, against a threat you can’t define.”
“Yes.”
Another silence, this one longer.
“The next months will test every alliance we have,” I continued. “Some won’t survive it.”
He came around the table. Not quickly; Vaelen never moved quickly, but with that unhurried deliberateness that meant he’d already decided something and was simply closing the distance. He stopped beside me at the window and looked out at the dark water below.
“When you decide I can handle the full truth,” he said, “I’ll be here.”
The simplicity of the comment hit me somewhere I hadn’t expected. Somewhere I hadn’t allowed myself to access in a very long time. A place where I kept things I didn’t want to think about.
He let it sit for a moment. Then — “There’s another matter.”
I waited.
“Carlisle.” He said the name the way he said most things, in that flat and precise way of his. But the word carried weightin its lack of inflection. “Yesterday he was ready to ride on Camelot with every man he had. Tonight he agreed to the cautious approach without a single argument, even though his lieutenants argued against him.”
