Galahad was on his feet again, but I only registered it distantly. Blood ran from the cuts on his face, dark against thefrost that coated his eyelashes, his brows, and the fine hairs of his forearms. He looked at me, and his eyes narrowed.
“You see?” His voice was almost calm as he pressed the back of his hand to the bleeding wound on his cheek and looked at the blood and then at me. “The demon reveals itself.”
“There is no demon to reveal itself. Only me, and I’ve had enough of your hypocrisy.”
I raised my hand, and the ice responded before I’d fully formed the thought, pulling from the frost-rimed walls, the shattered basin, and the air between us. Six daggers formed in a spinning arc above my palm, each one a foot long and translucent. I didn’t wait; I threw them at him, wanting nothing more than to see them bury themselves inside him, just like he was about to do to me.
He summoned his own protective light instinctively, and soon he was glowing with a golden radiance that protected him like a large bubble. The daggers struck it and exploded in bursts of crystalline shards, yet Galahad’s light held. But I was already pulling more water from the walls.
The second volley I threw against him was larger: twelve this time, each one spinning with the speed of a sling stone. They hit his light barrier, and this time the force drove him back a half-step.
He looked at me then, and whatever prayer he’d been composing behind his eyes went quiet.
“I have failed you,” he said quietly as he moved toward the door and threw it open while shouting for the guards.
The moment the door swung open, the world beyond the threshold rushed into my awareness. There was water in the corridor, so much of it. It was in the condensation bleeding from the cold stone walls, or standing in shallow puddles between the flagstones, and hanging in the breath-fog of the guards who wererunning toward us. All of it registered at once, the way a sound registers before you’ve consciously heard it.
I heard people arriving before I saw them, the metal-on-stone clatter of armed men responding to something they hadn’t been trained for. As they came into view, their footsteps slowed, and I heard one of them say something, and another one cut him off. Then there was only silence except for the boots crunching frost and the sound of a serving girl somewhere behind them who had started screaming and wouldn’t stop.
They reached the doorway and froze.
I saw their faces. Faces I recognized from the training yard, from the Great Hall, from six weeks of existing on the margins of their world. They looked at me, and none of them moved.
Water ran along the floor in streams that defied gravity, flowing toward me rather than away as ice crystals formed and shattered in the air between us. My hair was still moving, caught in currents that had no physical source.
No one entered the room.
Galahad was standing across from me, gesturing, shouting scripture and commands simultaneously, ordering them to call Mordred, to bring iron chains, to restrain the witch before she destroyed the entire castle. The guards looked at each other but made no move to do anything because they were all frozen in place with their own fear. These were warriors, yes, but they had been trained to fight men with swords. This wasn’t that.
Ice was still spilling across the flagstones of the bedchamber in jagged sheets, even as I tried to pull it back, tried to gather it, shape it, do anything deliberate with the power screaming through me. But it didn’t answer; it wouldn’t answer. Instead, the magic was answering to something rawer. A chair lifted off the floor and hit the wall, one I hadn’t touched. I’d just looked at it. A candlestick followed it. The frost on the ceiling thickened and groaned, and a stalactite the length of my forearm droppedand buried itself point-first into the pallet where Galahad had pinned me.
Someone in the doorway swore.
I pressed my hands together, the way Merlin had taught me, and tried to find the center of it. But there was no center. There were only weeks of compression releasing in all directions, blind and indiscriminate.
Another chair. A prayer book. A bootjack.
The walls wept water that froze before it reached the floor.
Breathe,I thought.
Nothing slowed.
More people arrived, including some of the knights. Servants pressed against each other at the back of the crowd, standing on their toes to see. The magic kept expanding, pulling, converting everything within reach into an argument for its own power.
Then I saw Lance breaking through the crowd. He elbowed through the others, then stood at the edge of the doorway as he took in what was happening. His dark gray eyes moved from the cracked floor to the frost on the ceiling to me, and something in his face...
I started crying.
I didn’t understand it, didn’t choose it, but also couldn’t deny the emotion that was surging through me. One moment I was barely present, and the next there were tears streaming down my face. I was shaking, and I had no idea how long I’d been shaking, but the magic kept going because I couldn’t find the part of myself that knew how to stop it. The cold, the spiraling water, the pressure of something ancient still moving through me, all the weeks of Galahad’s torture and being unable to tell anyone—it was all suddenly too much, and I couldn’t—
Someone walked into the room.
Not Lance. Lance hadn’t moved from the doorway, where he stared at me and then at Galahad, who had blood still streaming down his face. And there was hesitation, confusion in Lance’s expression because I wasn’t the one who was bleeding.
Tristan walked past Lance and then walked right through the doorway, like the maelstrom wasn’t even there. Water whipped toward him as if it thought him an enemy too, but then seemed to change its mind at the last second, parting around him in long arcs. Ice formed near his boots, and he simply stepped over it without looking down. I didn’t understand the quiet of his expression, but all I could see were his eyes and how they were focused entirely on me. He walked toward me the way you’d walk toward someone who was standing on a ledge: deliberately and unhurried, watching my face instead of the magic that was doing its best to completely destroy everything in the room.
Tristan’s eyes were dark, steady, and completely unafraid. When he reached me, he didn’t say anything. He just stopped walking and stood in front of me. The magic churned around us both, cold, furious, and directionless. A water spiral caught his sleeve and soaked it through, but he didn’t flinch. He didn’t even seem to notice it. Instead, he held out his hand.
