But there was no way around it. As Nimue sat at the bottom of her lake, she knew the truth of what was happening because the veil and the water were the same language, and Nimue was fluent in both. Whatever was happening was happening to her too, in whatever way things happened to an entity that was partially water and partially something older than water.
And somewhere Nymera was taking a chisel to the wall between the living and the dead and I was fairly sure that chisel had poked a hole through that wall.
The shape of it was almost visible.
Three points. Three women. The lake, the castle, the forest. Each one tied to the others. The problem was I could only see it from one angle at a time.
The wind came up and cut through my cloak. I heard the door behind me open and close, but I didn’t turn around.
“Carrow is two fucking days’ ride from the nearest reported anomaly,” Hailey said.
“I know.”
She came to stand beside me at the parapet wall, not close, but close enough that I was aware of the warmth of her in the cold air. She looked at the treeline the way she’d looked at the map: reading it.
“You think it’s connected,” she said. “Not just the veil but something more…specific.”
“Yes.”
“Do you know what?”
“Not yet.”
She was quiet for a moment. Then: “You’ll tell Vaelen when you do.”
It wasn’t a question. It was a thing she was deciding, right now, in front of me.
“Yes,” I said.
She nodded once, looked at the treeline a moment longer, and then went back inside without another word.
I stayed where I was and thought about a woman with an old grudge and the particular patience required to chisel through reality one hairline crack at a time.
Whatever Nymera was building, she’d been building it for a long time.
And we had only now just noticed.
-VAELEN-
Morgan left the next day.
She didn’t announce it. That was the first thing. She told me she was going to walk the eastern border where the veil had been thinning. She’d mentioned it before, and it wasn’t implausible, but when I woke the next morning, her rooms were empty, her ravens were gone, and the cat had disappeared from whatever corner it had occupied.
I stood in the doorway of her room for longer than was dignified.
It still smelled of her. Something dark and green, like rain on old stone. The small collection of objects she kept on the table beside her bed: a shard of blue glass, a bundle of dried herbs, two rings she never wore, were all gone.
She’d taken everything that mattered.
That told me she wasn’t coming back anytime soon. And the fact that she hadn’t said where she was actually going told me she knew I’d try to stop her.
I didn’t know what she’d found in her dreamwalking. She’d been walking more frequently over the past two weeks; I could tell by the hollows beneath her eyes, and the particular exhaustion she wore in the mornings that was different from ordinary tiredness. She’d been somewhere important, repeatedly. And she’d seen something.
She hadn’t told me what.
We’d always operated on the understanding that we didn’t owe each other anything. Those had been the terms from the beginning: unspoken, but clear. Morgan wasn’t mine. She never had been, not fully, not in the way that word implies ownership. And I wasn’t hers.
But there was something that had lived between us for years that was built on, if not trust, then at least a particular kind of honesty. The kind where you don’t say everything, but what you do say is true.
