The sound the scourge made hadn’t been loud. And I couldn’t seem to get beyond that visual.
My hands were still clenched at my sides, but I didn’t uncurl them. The room was very cold, and I didn’t sleep again.
It was all a dream,I told myself for the nth time.
None of it was real.
-CORVIN-
It had been nineteen days that I’d been imprisoned.
I knew it because I’d counted every hour by sound, including the guard duty change and the fires starting up in the kitchens at dawn, which I judged by the sound of that distinctive thump as the grate was pulled open. Or sometimes it would be someone shouting through the courtyard where I couldn’t see them. There were also the chapel bells three floors above and halfway across the castle. Mostly, however, it was the quiet: the kind of quiet that comes from that particular time in the day when a fortress this large stops moving, almost as if it can finally breathe.
Nineteen days, and I’d had maybe two hours of consecutive sleep. And that had everything to do with thelight-runes. They were the hardest to bear. Even worse than the pain in my shoulders, courtesy of Arthur. I was fairly sure they were dislocated. I’d tried to put them back into the socket, and I’d succeeded with one (possibly), but the other wouldn’t give.
There was one thing that kept me from falling into complete and total despair, and that was the crack. It wasn’t large, but it also wasn’t something I could exploit yet. Instead, it was a hairline fissure in the stone above the door frame where one ward-rune sat slightly canted, the seal imperfect, the glow a fraction dimmer at that one point than everywhere else. Mordred was thorough, but he wasn’t flawless. And in my experience—many years as a spy and my entire life as a man who made it his business to survive—the gap betweenthoroughandflawlesswas where opportunity lived.
I knew Guin was with Galahad from Kay’s visit when he’d made it a point to tell me. Not only that, but I’d heard the rumblings from the guards. Interesting how castle gossip eventually made its way down here, to the deepest depths of Camelot. Granted, it took longer to arrive, but it landed all the same.
I thought about Galahad. I’d sat at the Round Table when he was young: barely twenty. Young and burning-eyed, precise in the way of someone who has organized the world into clean categories and intends to keep it that way. He’d looked at magical practitioners the way certain men look at plague rats, even though he, himself, possessed incredible magic. But his abilities, he believed, were divinely sent. And he imagined himself to be a different type of person than the rest of us. The way he regarded the magic of others, who weren’t devout, wasn’t just with fear, and it wasn’t just with contempt. It was with a combination of both that, inmy experience, became violence when handed authority and sufficient justification.
Arthur had given him both.
I wasn’t given much time to further ponder it because the cat came through the gap near the base of the door again, simply stepping out of the shadows of the empty cell across the way from me. It had used that same gap every night this past week. The space it originated from was barely two fingers wide, but it was enough darkness, apparently.
It was always the same cat: Morgan’s cat. Whether it was just a familiar sent to gather intel about whether or not I was still alive, or it was Morgan taking a feline shape, I wasn’t exactly certain. It wasn’t as though the cat could speak to me either, so I figured that particular mystery would remain exactly that.
The stunning black creature wound itself around the bars with that specific Morgan energy that was both elegant and yet put-upon, and faintly theatrical as it looked at me.
“Tell me she’s safe,” I whispered.
I said the same words every time the cat visited. And I said them the way a person recites a prayer, not because the answer comes back the way you want it to, but because not saying it is worse somehow.
The cat’s ears moved. They went back, though they didn’t lay flat all the way. It was a reluctance to respond, the body language of a creature that’s been asked something it doesn’t want to answer.
And that wasn’t good.
I closed my eyes.
The blue-white light pressed against my eyelids and turned everything red.
“How long has she been in trouble?” I asked, even though doing so was a waste of time, because the cat couldn’t answer.The question was too complex for a borrowed body. I knew that, yet I asked it anyway, maybe on the hopes that the cat could somehow figure out how to respond? I didn’t know. Maybe I was just a desperate man in a desperate situation.
What the cat did instead was push one paw through the gap in the bars and extended it toward me. Even though it hurt my shoulder, I leaned forward and let the soft fur press against my fingers. We stayed like that for a moment as I realized this was Morgan’s way of comforting me. I wasn’t sure if it worked.
All I could think about was the fact that I’d made things worse for Guin. That was the realization I kept returning to, the way a tongue finds a split lip. I’d come here to rescue her, but I’d gotten her caught instead, and because of that she was in that room with Galahad, and I was twenty feet below it, and the distance was the whole problem. She’d had some kind of position before. Some kind of leverage or negotiating ground or at least the relative safety of Arthur’s attention, which was terrible but comprehensible. What she had now was Galahad, and I was starting to wonder which was worse.
She’d survive Galahad; I believed that to be absolutely true. She’d survived the Standing Stones, and the Shadow Trials, and whatever Merlin and I had put her through in Annwyn to make her what she now was. She had an iron spine, incredible water magic, and a mind that kept moving when everything else went still. She was surviving this; there was no doubt in my mind.
But none of that was the point. The point was that I was stuck down here when I needed to bethere, where I could protect her against anyone who intended to do her harm. Faith in her survival wasn’t a plan.
I pulled my hand back from the cat’s paw, and I sat up, pain lancing through my right side as I did so. Morgan’s catdisappeared back into the shadows from whence it had come, and I was alone again.
CHAPTER THIRTY
-GUIN-
The interval between Aethon’s morning prayer was the only peaceful one.
