She nodded. “I am worried for all of us.”
-ARTHUR-
The fire had burned low by the time Mordred finished. I didn’t move to add wood because the chill suited the conversation.
He stood at the edge of the hearthlight with his hands clasped behind his back, one blue eye catching the glow, the black one swallowing it entirely. The pendant at his throatpulsed once, faintly, and then went still. He’d laid out his findings the way a surgeon laid out instruments: each piece placed with care, nothing extraneous and nothing soft.
Three weeks. He’d been sitting on this for three weeks.
“You’re certain it isn’t Merlin?”
“Though I’m not entirely certain of anything.” He paused. “I can say I’m certain it isn’t Merlin.”
I stood from my chair and walked over to the window. The northern courtyard was empty below, and the training grounds beyond it were dark shapes, the fence posts and practice dummies reduced to silhouette. Beyond the castle wall, the treeline of the Whispering Wilds was a solid black mass against a sky that offered very little moon. I thought of the witch who lived in those woods and was met with a shudder that passed right through me.
Three weeks of ward anomalies, and they had been clustering toward the east; the Whispering Wilds were also in the east of Camelot.
“The rebellion doesn’t have anyone capable of this?”
“No,” Mordred said. “The rebellion is capable of delaying or doing away with our shipments that help to reinforce the wards, but that is all.”
“Then is that what this is? Are the wards affected simply because the last convoy they took had all the items you needed in it?”
“I would like to say that such is the answer, but it isn’t. I still had enough items to work the ward repairs, and we have been doing exactly that. But this... this is something foreign. Something strange.”
“Well, if it wasn’t Merlin and it isn’t the rebellion, then who is responsible?”
He didn’t answer immediately, and that itself was an answer. In general, Mordred didn’t pause because he wasuncertain; no, he paused because he was choosing his words like a man defusing something.
“The signature in the ward readings doesn’t correspond to any living practitioner in my reference,” he said finally. “It doesn’t correspond to any dead one either, for that matter.”
“How is that possible?”
He shrugged. “Well, the closest analogue I can find, and I want to be clear this is analogue, not a match, is the residue left in sites of significant pre-Uther magical activity.”
“Pre-Uther magical activity?”
He nodded. “Ritual sites. Places where the veil between what is and what was has worn thin from repeated use over generations.”
Pre-Uther.
My father had torn down every pre-Uther ritual site he’d found because he hadn’t trusted old magic, and neither did I. Hence, I’d continued the work. It had seemed like prudent policy at the time: old magic left old wounds in the land, old channels that other practitioners could exploit. Better to close them.
“How old?” I asked.
Mordred was quiet for a moment. The pendant pulsed again. He watched it, or appeared to.
“Older than the kingdom. Possibly older than the current structure of the veil.”
“How is that possible?”
“I don’t know.”
The fire popped as a log shifted and sent up a brief column of sparks that died before they reached the chimney mouth.
I turned that over in my mind.
Older than the veil’s current structure meant older than the last time the veil had been remade, which the old texts placed at the founding of the first kingdom of Logres, which predated Uther by generations. Which meant we were talking aboutsomething that had been operating, or had operated, in the age when magic and the physical world were not yet fully separated, when things moved freely between states.
