The cat rubbed against me and began purring in a way that I was sure was meant to comfort me, to let me know that Morgan hadn’t forgotten about me and she was still here, in this castle. Somewhere.
The still place at my center cracked as I breathed through my nose, slow and deliberate, until the crack sealed itself back up. The cat watched me with its beautiful eyes, and I reached out to touch the top of its head just to feel that luxurious fur beneath my fingertips.
“Be careful,” I whispered, suddenly afraid that Galahad would return, and if he did, I didn’t know what he’d do to the cat. I also didn’t want to find out. “You should go. It’s not safe for you here.”
The cat blinked once. Then it turned and moved back toward the gap in the wall and was gone.
Outside the window, Camelot went about its afternoon. Somewhere below, a blacksmith’s hammer beat against iron in a steady rhythm that had nothing to do with canonical hours, the theology of correction, or the seven gods and their seven demands.
Illara’s Hour was coming.
And this time I’d be damned well awake for it.
CHAPTER TWENTY-NINE
-LANCE-
The dream featured the training yard.
That should have told me something, because I almost never dreamed of pleasant things.
The yard was empty, which was wrong, but dream-wrong: the kind of wrong you accept because the light is good, the air smells like summer, and there’s no particular reason to question it. There was dry sand under my feet. There were practice figures in their rows. I’d started doing a blade drill I’d learned when I was fifteen, something that since then I’d repeated tens of thousands of times: mechanically, mindlessly, and gladly.
Then the light changed. Perhaps it would have been more fitting to say itflattened, the way afternoon light flattens before a storm, when the color drains out of everything and the shadows go wrong. The sound went with it, along with the wind, the distant voices, and the birds. So all that was left was just a certain kind of silence that wasn’t peaceful because it’s a silence that means something has stopped.
I lowered the blade.
Shewas standing at the edge of the yard.
I recognized her immediately even though I hadn’t seen her for over a decade.
Morgan.
I knew her the way you know things in dreams: without reason, without process, the knowledge simply just there. She hadn’t changed: she was still just as devastatingly beautiful. The midnight black hair, the emerald eyes with their trapped-light quality, and the gold flecks within them that never quite stayed still. She wore something dark; perhaps it was just a gown made of shadow, and she was looking at me the way a physician looks at a patient who hasn’t yet understood his own diagnosis.
“Lance,” she said.
Not a greeting. A summons.
“You’re dead,” I answered because I’d heard she was dead. Three different people had told me she was dead. And because I hadn’t seen her in over a decade, I’d always assumed it was true.
She didn’t answer. Instead, she walked toward me with the unhurried certainty of someone who knew I wasn’t going anywhere. The dream-space rippled, the practice dummies blurring, the walls of the yard softening like they were made of wet clay. She stopped a few feet away and studied my face.
“You need to see something,” she said. “Something I must show you.”
“This is a dream.”
“Yes.”
“So whatever you show me—”
“—is real regardless.” She said the words the way she used to say things at court, back when she’d still been at court: with that absolute, almost bored certainty, like she was confirming the color of the sky. “Stop talking and simply watch.”
I tried to take a step back, but my feet didn’t move.
The yard dissolved.
What replaced it wasn’t a room I recognized... not at first. The walls were made of stone, and there was a narrow window in one of them. The light coming from inside the room was pale,thin, and fell across the floor in a single stripe. A cell, I thought, but then I understood it wasn’t a cell at all. It was a room in one of the tower keeps, one of the knight’s rooms. Then I saw the icons. Galahad’s bed chamber.
