I turned then, facing him fully, and let a thin smile settle on my mouth. “I mean exactly what I said. Six individuals. Six different dispositions, six different varieties of pride, power, and self-interest. And yet every last one of you is circling the same woman like moths around a flame.”
He crossed his arms, waiting for more. I began to walk a slow circle around him. Not seduction this time, but something older than that. I circled him the way a scholar walks around a problem they’ve been turning over for years.
“Do you know why Merlin: cold, bloodless, and ancient Merlin, a man who seems to feel nothing for anyone beyond theabstract love of strategy... Do you know whyhewas so utterly taken by Nimue?”
Corvin’s jaw shifted. “I admit that until most recently, I didn’t know that Nimue was anything to Merlin.”
“Because they both were quite good at keeping their love a secret. But I knew.” I always knew. It was part of my curse. “The reason why Merlin felt anything for Nimue was owing to the fact that Nimue is what she is,” I continued. “Water given form and terrible beauty. Her nature carries a lure in it that no mortal and very few immortals can resist.” The same was true of me. I’d fallen for Nimue’s siren song just as surely as Merlin had.
“Magic manipulation?”
I shook my head immediately. “No. It’s not manipulation. It’s not so simple as that. It’s simply what sheis.”
“I don’t understand.”
I thought of another way to phrase it. “What is the only substance you can’t live without?”
“Water.”
I nodded. “Nimue is exactly that: she’s the pull of the tides, the call of the Siren. The song that calls you to the edge even when you know you can’t swim.” I completed my circuit and stopped in front of him. “That lure lives in her daughter’s blood. Just as Guin carries the shape of Nimue’s eyes, that particular bell-like cadence in her laugh, and Nimue’s water magic... she also carries the thrall of the Lady of the Lake, passed down like a birthright. Or, I suppose you could consider it a curse neither of them chose.”
He gave me a look, a knowing one, as a sort of smile curved the edge of his lips, and he was even more handsome than he’d been only a second or so ago.
“You were in love with Nimue.”
The silence between us stretched. “That’s neither here nor there,” I said finally.
Something shifted in his expression, something subtle. It was just a narrowing of the eyes that had nothing to do with skepticism and everything to do with recognition. He was quick, Corvin. That had always been true of him.
“Morgan.” His voice was careful, measured. “You saidsixindividuals, yet you only named five.”
The obsidian underfoot didn’t betray me the way it betrayed him. I’d long since learned to keep my feelings from bleeding into the ground beneath my feet. A woman in my position couldn’t afford otherwise.
But he was watching me with those eyes, and Corvin of Blackhollow had always been extraordinarily good at seeing what people didn’t offer willingly.
“And perhaps,” he said quietly, “there’s a reason you know so much about the precise quality of the pull Guin exerts.”
“What are you hinting at?”
“That you’re as taken with her as the rest of us.” I gave him a lofty expression, and he appeared taken aback. “I admit, I’m surprised. I thought you only hungered for men.”
I laughed at him. “Do you truly believe a woman like me would be satiated only by men?”
“I admit the thought never crossed my mind.”
“Well, suffice to say, the answer is that I’m a woman of many appetites, and women are certainly one of them.”
“Truth be told… I find nothing wrong with that.”
I chuckled at that. “Most men don’t.” Then I gave him a look. “My point is: there’s a reason all of us have fallen under Guinevere’s spell.” I smiled. It cost me something, that smile, but I gave it freely enough that it looked like nothing at all. “It’s the same reason I was...movedby Nimue.”Moved! Ha! What I’d felt for Nimue, what I felt for her still, was so much more than “moved”! So much deeper, so much more painful.
“Tell me.”
I was not, by rule, a woman who spoke about herself much. That was by design. But those two words, offered with such sincerity, struck something within me. The truth of it was that I needed this; I’d needed it for longer than any man in this courtyard had been alive to witness. I’d carried the name of Nimue like a stone sewn into the lining of my chest for years beyond counting, and there had never been anyone worthy of the unburdening.
The words came out even, composed, even if they were only the edge of what existed within me. “Years ago, before any of this. Before Camelot, before the exile, before any war worth naming, I met the Lady of the Lake, and I understood in that moment why oceans have no bottom.” I paused. “Her daughter carries the same unnameable quality in her veins, but a different shape. It’s the same source, though, and any of us who come into contact with either of them are incapable of staying afloat. We all fall, though some of us fall harder than others.”
He absorbed this without speaking.
