“How long?”
She didn’t answer immediately. Instead, her hand found mine and held it absently, the way she did things when she was thinking about something else.
“Long enough,” she said, “that knowing precisely how long wouldn’t help you.”
It was the kind of answer that would have frustrated a different man, but I’d learned to accept what Morgan shared and what she didn’t. Not because I trusted blindly, but because I’d mapped the pattern of her withholdings over years, and the pattern was consistent. She didn’t withhold things that involved immediate safety. She withheld things that would require explanations she couldn’t yet give or things that she was still determining how to use.
Both categories were real. I didn’t always know which I was dealing with.
“If it becomes operationally relevant,” I said, “I need to know.”
“When it becomes operationally relevant,” she answered, “you will.”
The owl called again in the pines. Then a second one, further north, answered. I listened to them for a while before I found the beauty of Morgan’s face again.
“Get some sleep,” I said.
“In a while.”
She stayed where she was, her head on my shoulder, her eyes on the fire, reading something in it I couldn’t see. I stayed with her. The camp settled around us into the quiet rhythms of a military camp at night: watch rotations, low-voiced exchanges, and the stillness that comes over a group of people who are all pretending to rest while remaining, in some fundamental part of themselves, ready.
Across the dying fire, Hailey pulled her cloak around her shoulders and leaned back against the supply crate with her eyes closed. Her notes were folded and tucked inside her jacket, where she’d keep them until morning.
She was asleep within minutes. She always was, because she had the talent of someone who’d learned to take rest where she could, rather than waiting for conditions to be ideal.
Morgan watched her for a moment.
Then she turned her face back toward the fire and said nothing, which was, from Morgan, its own kind of answer to a question neither of us had asked aloud.
-MORGAN-
The stable boy’s name was George. I knew as much because I’d spent three days watching him before I ever entered his dreams. Such was the general rule: you didn’t enter a mind you hadn’t first observed, just as you didn’t go through a door without knowing what was behind it. So, I’d watched George through the eyes of my ravens. I’d watched as he carried water buckets, mucked stalls, and fell asleep sitting upright against a hay bale with a half-eaten heel of bread still in his hand.
I settled into the dream space the way you settle into cold water: slowly, giving the body time to accept it. George’s mind was warm, dark, and smelled of horses and wet straw. His physical rest was deep and without fret, just a consciousness that wasn’t doing anything and also wasn’t protecting anything. And that was exactly what I needed.
I moved along the edges.
The first thing I noticed was the texture of the space. It should have been smooth. An uncomplicated mind like George’s left no real impression: his dreams were sensation and muscle memory, not story. But there were grooves here: worn paths. The kind that form when something moves through the same space repeatedly.
I stopped and crouched, metaphorically, running my attention along the groove the way you run a finger along a scar to read how old it is. This one wasn’t recent, but it also wasn’t singular.
Someone had traversed his sleeping mind, possibly dozens of times. Maybe more.
And the route they took was always the same, Galahad’s quarters to the training yard, then Galahad’s quarters to the Great Hall. But mostly, they centered around Galahad’s quarters, and I knew enough to know that it wasn’t Galahad they were interested in.
This wasn’t a rebellion operative I was dealing with either. I’d felt the particular signature of rebellion dreamwalkers before. They were trained in the way all clandestine things are trained: quickly and practically. They left prints like boot prints that were both purposeful and mortal. This was different.
This was old. But old in the way that time is old. Old like a river is old.
The presence that had moved through this dream space wasn’t anchored in the living world the way I was anchored here, or the way Vaelen was anchored, or even the way Merlin was anchored. It sat at anangleto the living world, adjacent to it, yet not quite separate.
I knew that angle. I’d felt it before, years ago, in a place I didn’t visit any longer and had tried very hard to forget.
I traced the grooves forward through time, freeing myself from George’s mind to travel to the next dreamscapes I could find, those same paths traveled by whatever entity this was. I traveled through the dungeon cells, then landed in Galahad’s quarters once again. It was the same route, over and over again. Not the pattern of someone gathering information once and withdrawing. This was the pattern of sustained, deliberate, protective surveillance.
Someone was watching her.
And not watching her the way Galahad watched her, nor the way Arthur or Lance watched her. Whatever or whoever this was, they were watching her the way you watch something you’re afraid will break while your back is turned.
