I didn’t fight now the way I used to fight: all explosive magic, kinetic force, and ice-threaded speed. The reasons I didn’t fight the same way were numerous. But first and foremost, I simply couldn’t. The binding sat against my chest, and every time I reached for anything beneath it, I found only the weight of emptiness, of Mordred’s power working against mine. Not only that, but after being starved by Galahad for weeks, I didn’t have the necessary energy to really go after Arthur.
All I had now was what little energy I could summon from my body, which wasn’t really much. All the while, the memory of every drill Corvin had put me through came back to me.
Step left. Close the distance before he can use his reach. Don’t telegraph with your shoulder.
He came at my right side hard enough that I had to drop back two steps to absorb it.
“Is Merlin capable of entering Camelot without being detected?”
Of course, these training sessions were just a pretense for Arthur’s true reason for calling me here: to interrogate me. I caught his blade on a cross-block and shoved it wide. My arms burned with the effort.
“Yes,” I said.
A pause while I circled right. The morning was still cool, but my tunic was already damp at the spine.
“Then why hasn’t he come for you?”
There it was. The real question. He’d been building toward it ever since he’d stepped onto the yard; I was certain. Every question about Annwyn’s geography, about Merlin’s habits, about the structure of the wardens... all of it had been leading here.
I bought myself half a second by pressing forward, making him defend instead of advance. He did it easily, turned my blade, and stepped aside with the ease of a man who’d been fighting all his life. But I got my half second.
“The mission comes before the operative,” I said. “That was made clear to me before I ever crossed the border.”
It wasn’t a lie. That was the thing about it. Merlinhadsaid as much. Well, not in those words exactly. His version had been softer, wrapped in the language of necessity and the greater work and “you were made for this, Guinevere.”But the meaning had been identical.
Arthur lowered his practice sword by an inch. Just an inch.
“And you accept that?”
“I understood it going in.”
He studied me the way he’d been studying me. Not the way Galahad watched me, as if I were a problem to be excised. No, this was more as if I were a text Arthur was reading in a language hemostlyknew.
I let him look. I held my sword at a neutral guard and kept my breathing even and tried very hard not to let the silence do what it was doing.
The thing was, and this was the part I kept pressing down, pressing flat, folding over and over again so it took up less room, saying that truth out loud was different. In Annwyn, it had made sense. Everything in Annwyn made a particular kind of sense, the way things make sense when you’re standing inside them. Merlin’s logic was the air you breathed there. The mission was sacred. The operative was a vessel.Iwas a vessel, and I’d been honored to be one because the work was larger than any single person and Arthur’s reign was a slow wound on the land, and someone had to be willing to...
But I was standing in a training yard in Camelot, after learning I was Merlin’s flesh and blood, and Galahad had done what he’d done, and Corvin was somewhere in the dark below me, and Merlin hadn’t come. For either of us.
I’d told myself a dozen different reasons why he hadn’t come: the wards that protected Camelot, his numbers against Arthur’s, the timing, the strategy of it: that showing his hand too early would cost him more than it cost me. All of it was probably true; Merlin wasn’t a careless man. He didn’t move without a reason.
But standing in the morning light with Arthur’s eyes on my face, the space betweenhe hasn’t come yetandhe is never going to comefelt narrower than it had before.
Arthur held my gaze for a moment. Then he raised his sword again, and the question was done, filed away somewhere behind those blue eyes where everything I told him went. His expression hadn’t changed, but it rarely did.
We went back to the drill.
But the answer sat in my chest differently now, occupying the same hollow space where my magic used to live. I’d always been told the mission came first, and I’d believed it. I still believed it, probably.
Arthur pressed forward. He was testing me, not fighting yet, just feeling me out. I could tell by the economy of his effort, the way he let me find a rhythm before disrupting it. He was watching my feet as well as my grip and the lag between decision and execution.
I didn’t give him a clean read. I’d been trained by someone who knew exactly what Arthur’s knights looked for because not only had he been one, but he’d trained most of them. So, I slipped angles, and I used my smaller frame as a feature instead of a liability. I was thin now, genuinely thin, and it made me faster in small ways even as it cost me in endurance.
“Who are the rebellion’s allies among the noble houses?”
I dropped back a step and let my blade come down to neutral, not to buy time but because I genuinely didn’t know. The not-knowing had a different texture than deflection.
“I don’t know.”
