I flattened my hand against the wall of stone by the bed.
The veil was close here. It was always close in Dunhaven: the fortress sat at the edge of an old boundary, one of the seams in the world where the fabric between what is and what lies beneath had always been thin. Merlin knew about it. So did Vaelen. But neither of them had realized yet how thin it had become.
Under my hand, I could feel the weight of something huge and unmovable. Whatever that thing was, it felt the weight of my hand and it pushed back.
I didn’t pull away.
-VAELEN-
I didn’t sleep.
This wasn’t out of the ordinary. For years, I’d thought of sleeping as a thing one controlled, not a thing one indulged in. Sleep was a commodity, much like money, manpower, or trust. One did it because one needed to.
Tonight was an exception.
It wasn’t the alert, scanning wakefulness of a commander expecting an attack. No, this was something quieter and more stubborn: it was the sort of restlessness that comes when a woman you’ve chosen, knowing exactly what she is, is lying in the next room doing something you can’t see, touch, or help with.
Morgan was dream-walking into Camelot.
I’d seen her do it a dozen times, but I never seemed to get used to it, even though I could do it myself. It was just the particular stillness her body took that unnerved me. Maybe, more specifically, it was the almost imperceptible shallowing of her breath, or the way her eyes moved behind their lids, tracking something in a place I didn’t have access to and never would.
In all the time I’d known Morgan, she hadn’t aged. I was thirty-eight years old, and as such, I had gray at my temples and a wrinkle here and there. Yet, she hadn’t aged since the first time I saw her, which had been many years ago. Furthermore, I had no idea how old she truly was. I’d never cared enough to ask. But I was fairly sure she’d continue not to age long after I was gone. Strangely, the thought wasn’t painful. It was clarifying. I’d known what she was—some type of goddess or witch—beforeI chose her. And I’d chosen her anyway. I wasn’t a man who wasted time on regrets that served no operational purpose. So, no, this wasn’t about regretting.
What kept me awake had everything to do with what shehadn’tsaid.
I’d been tallying the things Morgan didn’t say the way I tallied intelligence reports: with the practical acknowledgment that everything she withheld was something she’d decided I couldn’t yet handle. I supposed that decision was hers to make, even if it needled me. Someday, the accumulated weight of withheld things would reach a point where it changed the integrity of what we had. I wasn’t there yet, and I didn’t know if I ever would be.
But the veil.
She’d mentioned the veil thinning at multiple points across Logres. Not just near the Standing Stones, butmultiplepoints. And she’d said the words the way she said things she’d been carrying alone for a long time. But she’d only given me one corner of it, not the full shape, not the whole truth. Only one corner. Yet, that was more than she’d given me before.
I sat up.
My mind wandered, as it occasionally did when sleep refused me, to the moment I’d noticed Morgan watching Hailey.
It had been brief. Morgan was too controlled to let anything linger visibly, but I’d spent enough time studying her face to know the difference between professional assessment and something else. She’d watched Hailey the way she watched things that surprised her: with a stillness that was slightly too deliberate.
I’d found that interesting.
Hailey and I had a history, though history was perhaps too grand a word for what it had actually been. It was short. And it was good while it lasted, and it had lasted exactly as longas Hailey had decided to let it, which wasn’t very long at all. She’d taken one clear-eyed look at the full picture of who I was, concluded I was a bad bet, had her fun with me accordingly, and moved on without apparent damage to either of us. She wasn’t wrong, and I hadn’t argued the point. I’d respected her for it, actually. It took a particular kind of woman to make that assessment accurately and act on it without sentiment.
What remained was something I valued considerably: she was the best mind in my operation, and she was entirely loyal to the work rather than to me personally, which made her more useful than any operative who liked me too much to tell me when I was wrong. Hailey told me when I was wrong on a fairly regular basis. And she was usually correct.
She also still had a magnificent arse, but that was neither here nor there.
The point was that Morgan had noticed her. And Morgan, who moved through centuries without appearing to notice most things that didn’t directly concern her, had found Hailey worth watching twice.
I didn’t know what to do with that observation yet, so I filed it in the same place I filed everything I didn’t have a frame for and moved on. But, I did have to admit that Morgan’s noticing her pleased me. Though I couldn’t say quite why: perhaps because that slight sense of jealousy meant she cared about me? Hmm, I didn’t know if Morgan was truly capable of caring for another person, but I liked the idea of finding out.
The leather dispatch case lived under the bed. I pulled it out, lit the candle on the floor beside me, and opened it on the stone floor. There were thirty-two active cells across the northern territories. Most of what came through was operational: guard movements, supply lines, purge activity, magic users who needed extraction before Arthur’s men reached them. I readthose reports, acted on what I could, filed what I couldn’t, and moved on.
But over the last six weeks, I’d been noting a second category: things that didn’t fit the operational frame. There were seven reports that fit this category so far. I spread them on the floor in the candlelight.
Cell three: the border station at Caer Nanthi where every flame in the village burned blue and gave no heat for half a day. Candles, hearths, forge-fires: all of them. The miller reported it. My contact confirmed it personally before filing the report. No explanation was ever offered because no explanation existed.
Cell eleven: the village of Ash Crossing. There, the cattle had stopped giving milk for three days. On the fourth day, every animal gave at once, in twice the normal volume, simultaneously, as though something had been held and then released all at once. The farmer’s wife said the milk tasted wrong. She’d said it was much too sweet. She’d thrown it out, and the cattle hadn’t behaved strangely since.
Cell nineteen: the eastern border near Thornwood. Soldiers on night patrol had reported seeing figures in the tree line. Not rebellion fighters; my contacts would have described those differently, with the clipped, specific language of men who know the difference between an enemy combatant and something else. These figures were described as pale and translucent. Like ghosts moving slowly. They’d be present for a moment and then gone as soon as someone started to investigate. Three separate patrols, seven men total, all reporting the same thing on the same night.
