It was harder with an animal. Horses felt magic differently than people did: not with suspicion or fear, but with a full-body awareness that made them want to move away from it. Wraith had learned to hold still, though. And now he locked his legs and dropped his head, breathing through his nose in long, measured pulls while I drew the darkness across his coat.
The deep black of him dulled first, fading to a washed-out gray that aged him twenty years in mere seconds. His powerful haunches softened under the illusion, the lean muscle blurring into the rounded, dropped lines of an old working horse past his prime. His mane thinned, and his back swayed slightly. Next, it was his hooves; the trick was to make them look worn, the way a horse looks when its owner can barely afford the farrier.
He turned one eye toward me when I finished.
“I know,” I said in a way of apology.
He didn’t move while I backed him into the traces and buckled the harness across his chest. The leather was plain, cracked, and deliberately ugly. Everything about us needed to look like it belonged to a man too tired and too old to matter.
When I climbed up and took a seat on the rickety wooden bench, the wagon creaked under my weight in a way that felt appropriate to the character of an old man and his failing cart. Wraith turned his head and looked at me with one milky eye.
I clicked my tongue, and he started walking.
By the time we reached the main road and fell in behind a cluster of farmers heading for the gates with the last of the evening’s deliveries, I was simply another old merchant coaxing an older horse toward home.
The guards didn’t look at us twice.
I rode through the gates as Morgan’s ravens sailed overhead, entering Camelot without any fuss or fanfare. I couldn’t help my smile.
The compass within me went absolutely still the moment I passed under the arch. And then, in the next breath, it lurched so hard I pressed a fist to my chest.
She was close.
-LANCE-
My squire, Alec, was fighting his sword again.
I watched him perform the third sequence for the fourth time, and there it was, in his wrist; that tiny, frantic clutching before the parry, as if he was squeezing water out of his sleeve. He was sixteen or seventeen years old, and had that focused look on his face like he’d stolen it from an adult. There was no doubt in my mind about what his goal was: to be good, and that was exactly his problem.
I let him finish the sloppy sequence.
“Do it again,” I instructed. “But slow down this time.”
“I thought—”
“—You’re fighting it. Don’t fight it.”
He tried it once more, this time with a little less tightness. I moved closer and placed my two fingers on the underside of his wrist, letting him know gently that I wanted the blade moved differently; he complied, and the sword took its natural path.
Improvement.
I stepped away and nodded quickly at him. He seemed to stand half an inch taller than before.
The yard was deserted at this late hour, save for us. The torches around the inner perimeter were low, and the sky above Camelot was playing that little trick it did in the hour before the dark truly took over. I could see my breath, but the chill didn’t bother me.
Next, I taught Alec about the importance of the feet by showing him how changing his stance and knee position made it go from being a static movement to a dynamic one. He was too excited to get to the sword work and kept expecting to pivot. In response, I made him drop the sword and just focus on the footwork.
“No one tells you the footwork takes the longest to learn,” I said.
“Sir.”
“That’s not a criticism.”
He went back to it.
I knew the training yard the way I knew my own hands: every uneven flag, every drain channel that turned icy in the cold months, the particular echo off the south wall that sometimes caught men off guard. I’d been training in this yard for the majority of my life, which meant I’d bled on most of it.
Alec was in the middle of another attempt at footwork, this one just as awkward whenitcame. And when it did, it didn’t come as vision or as sound, but as more of a sharpening. Usually, my precognition worked by allowing me to see what was going to happen in the seconds leading up to when it did. This, though, was different. It was more of a feeling. And the feeling was that someone was arriving or something was about to change. Or perhaps it was just a feeling of paying attention because whatever was coming was going to matter.
