I kept my eyes on Alec. He was moving through the weight shift again, still half a beat early on the pivot, and I tracked him without letting the rest of my attention scatter. The prescient flicker sat at the edge of my mind, quiet yet insistent. Someone was at the castle gates, maybe. Or they were coming through the main passage.
Alec pivoted, early again.
“Hold the weight longer,” I said. “You’re committing before you know where your opponent is.”
He nodded hard and reset.
The flicker in my mind faded, and that was the problem. It was the specific, stupid problem I’d been carrying for days: that every time the precognition surfaced, every time that sharpened attention tried to tell me something, it found its way back toher. And when it did, it would bring up some image of her that lacked detail. Perhaps it might just be a sense of her proximity. Or it could be that particular advance warning my gift gave me when someone was about to cross my path, only I’d seeherin my mind’s eye and I’d hearhervoice, even though the person who eventually walked in front of me had nothing to do withherat all. It was just my mind playing cruel tricks on me.
I adjusted my grip on the practice blade. Unnecessarily.
Alec stopped. “Did I— was that wrong, sir?”
“No.” I meant it. “That was my fault.”
I walked him back through the sequence from the beginning. Weight first, then feet, then blade. I broke each phase down smaller than it needed to be, smaller than I’d broken it down for anyone in years. I talked through the mechanics of the wrist rotation with a specificity that was probably unnecessary, but I had no choice; I had to let the instruction fill up the space orshewould.
Alec worked. He made mistakes, corrected them, and then made different mistakes, and that was right; that was exactly what training was supposed to look like. I watched him with the attention he deserved.
My gift had been misfiring since she’d been thrown into the dungeon. That was the truth I hadn’t said to anyone. The precognition was precise under ordinary circumstances. Under extraordinary ones, in battle, it was absolute. It gave me seconds, sometimes a handful of them, but those seconds were reliable, and they always had been. They’d kept me alive. They’d kept Arthur alive. Because of that, I’d trusted my gift the way I trusted a blade I’d sharpened myself.
But I no longer trusted it. Because want dressed up as instinct looked the same from the inside. Because my mind, apparently, was now in the business of inventing reasons toanticipate her, to manufacture justification for an obsession I had no business entertaining.
I was aware of how pathetic that was.
Again, I told him.From the top.
The sky had shifted from dark gray to midnight blue by the time he was moving through the sequence with any real fluency. He wasn’t doing well by any stretch, but at least he was less frantic about it.
I stood back and let him work it alone.
There was something in this I’d never been able to explain to anyone: the particular satisfaction of watching skill transfer. The pleasure in watching a body learn. It was slower than combat and quieter than glory, and no one wrote songs about it, but it was real in a way that most things weren’t. This couldn’t be faked. Either the wrist opened or it didn’t. Either the weight dropped or it didn’t.
Alec came through the sequence and glanced back, checking to see if he’d done so correctly. I gave him a small nod, and he took confidence from it because he turned back and ran it again without being asked.
From the direction of the gates, I could see in my mind’s eye a blurry outline of someone moving, someone coming through the stone arch at the yard’s far end. But I didn’t consider it. Instead, I slammed it into the dark recesses of my mind where it belonged.
CHAPTER TEN
-CORVIN-
The outer wall hadn’t changed since the last time I’d been here. ‘
It was the same pale stone, the same iron-tipped battlements, the same smell of torch smoke and horse sweat rising from the courtyard below. But the wardshadchanged.
I sensed their presence even before I touched the wall. They gave me an impression of pressure; of something that was methodical, well thought-out. It took extraordinary craftsmanship to weave them into each gate, arrow slit, and drain that was wide enough to accommodate a man’s shoulders. This was the second version; the latest design done by Mordred. Morgan hadn’t given me much information on them and I hoped that wouldn’t prove to be a problem, now that I’d be right in the middle of them.
Arthur had been busy. Or rather, Mordred had been busy on Arthur’s behalf, which was a different thing entirely and considerably more dangerous.
I pressed myself flat against the treeline and waited. A patrol passed along the eastern parapet: two guards, gold and red, King’s Guard insignia catching the moonlight. They moved insync, which meant they were trained, which meant I had exactly the window between their rotation and the next.
Forty seconds. Maybe less.
Two of Morgan’s ravens cut lazy circles above the eastern gatehouse. One cawed. Then the other. And that meant the way was clear.
I moved.
The gap between the treeline and the wall was thirty yards of open ground, frost-hard and pale under a half-moon. I crossed it low and fast, boots silent against the dead grass, and pressed into the shadow beneath the gatehouse arch before the next patrol crested the parapet.
