It wasn’t a command, and it wasn’t a plea. It was just an open hand, turned upward, waiting.
I looked at it for a long moment, but whatever was inside me, moving through me, didn’t want to be quiet; it had been caged for weeks, and now was freed, and it wanted to keep burning. But underneath it, I was exhausted. Beyond exhausted.
“Guinevere,” he said my name calmly. “You don’t have to carry this alone.”
I put my hand in his.
His power moved through my skin like water into parched earth: cool, dark, and devoid of violence, his death magic flowingagainst the heat of mine, not opposing it but absorbing it, the way deep cold absorbs sound. His magic didn’t fight mine; it just received it.
For the first time in longer than I could account for, the constant churning pressure at my center went quiet. It wasn’t suppressed exactly; it was more the difference between a hand over a mouth and a room where you simply didn’t have to speak.
We stood hand in hand in the wreckage, just staring at one another as the water dripped from the ceiling and the frost melted in long rivulets down the walls. My hair settled against my shoulders, damp and heavy.
From across the room, Galahad watched us. The blood had dried on his cheek, but the frost still caught in the fibers of his robe, the cut from the ice shard running a slow dark line toward his jaw. He looked at me and then at Tristan and then at me again.
His expression had changed.
It was no longer the serene cruelty he usually wore. Now it was something different, something harder that had moved in behind his eyes. Something that had finished calculating and had reached a conclusion.
-ARTHUR-
The dragon hit me harder than it ever had.
One instant I was walking along the hallway to my solar, and then I could feel my spine bending backward. The pain was so intense, I had to stabilize myself against the stone wall. The beast within me was now fully awake, and its violent flailing caused my teeth to clench and blindness to creep into my vision.
She is in pain, and she needs us.
I knew the truth before the shouting reached me, before the first guard came sprinting around the corner with his face the color of a white sheet. Something had happened to her, and she was in danger. I could feel the truth eating me from the inside out, so I followed the cold that came down the corridor like a gale wind.
The drop in temperature was so sudden that my breath fogged in front of me, and the torch nearest me guttered and then died. Ice was creeping along the floor in jagged fingers, climbing the baseboards of the walls, and crackling through the mortar between the stones with a sound like breaking teeth. Two guards stood at the far end of the passage, both completely motionless. They were frozen in the way that prey animals freeze: the instinct that says,if you don’t move, it can’t see you.
The corridor parted for me just as it always did. Lance was standing at the front, and when I arrived, he turned to look at me. His face was just as blanched as the guard’s. He didn’t say anything but just turned to look at what was happening inside Galahad’s chamber. I followed his gaze and then stopped in the doorframe as I took it all in.
The room was unrecognizable. Water moved through it like something alive: not pouring, not spraying, butcircling.It lifted the debris from the floor and held it suspended midair: a wooden stool in the middle of the cyclone was rotating. Next to it was a tin cup, spinning lazily at eye level. Frost coated the ceiling in a spreading white bloom, and the glass window had blown out entirely. The frame was packed with ice.
Galahad was pressed against the far wall, and his robes were disarranged. There was blood on his face in the shape of three wounds that had been cleaved into his cheek. They looked like claw marks. He was shouting, but the words were hard to distinguish over the sound of the maelstrom.
“—corruption’s breath, the mark of the defiled... the demon takes many forms, a purging rite must be... she called it forth herself, it answered her sin...”
And at the center of all of it.
Her.
She stood in the middle of the room with her arms slightly raised and her head back, and her eyes... her eyes were wrong. The violet had gone almost entirely. What was left was white and rimmed with ice-blue. She was breathing, but barely. Instead, her chest moved in shallow, rapid increments as her hair whipped around her face, and she didn’t blink.
The dragon slammed against my ribs so hard, I lost a breath.
Ours.
We must go to her.
I gripped the doorframe with both hands until the wood creaked under my fingers, and I felt the grain of it splintering. I held on because letting go meant stepping into that room, and stepping into that room meant closing the distance, and closing the distance meant...
GO TO HER!
But I couldn’t. I wouldn’t. Because I knew that if I did, I’d lose control, and the dragon would usurp me entirely. And that was something I couldn’t afford to do with so many witnesses.
Galahad was still shouting. His voice cracked on the worddemonfor the third time, and I looked at him, looked at the blood on his face, the displaced robes, the way he was pressed to the wall with something that wasn’t entirely fear in his expression.
