In the years I’d lived alongside it, it had murmured at me about gold, power and enemies it wanted burned. It had never once told me togo tosomeone. Never fixated on a single living person the way it fixated on her from the moment she’d walked into the Great Hall in a fake man’s armor with violet eyes and a face I’d been looking at ever since in the dark behind my own eyelids.
I hated the beast more than I hated anything in this world or the next. More than Merlin. More than treachery. More than Corvin. More than Guinevere, even. More than the slow rot of everything I’d built by my own hand and sword. I hated it with a clarity that was almost clean.
And the beautiful, singular thing, the only comfort this fucked arrangement offered, was that the beast couldn’t do a single gods-damned thing about it. No, it was trapped, caged inside my skin, inside my blood, pressing against my ribs like itwanted to split me open and crawl out, but itcouldn’t.It raged, it howled, and it sent needles through my eye sockets, and still it sat in its cage because I held the lock.
I lifted my head and looked at the door.
The headache was extraordinary. The beast was shrieking now, not in words, just pressure, just want, just the image of her face on a continuous loop behind my eyes.
WE MUST GO TO HER!
I picked up my crown from the desk and turned it once in my hands.
“Fine.”
My voice came out flat. I was speaking to my own chest, to the tattoo coiled under my linen, to the thing sealed in my blood that had been screaming itself hoarse since sundown. “Fine, I will fucking go to her.”
I set the crown back down, crossed to the door, and pulled it open. The corridor was dark and cold, the torch nearest me guttering in the draft. Two guards snapped to attention, but I didn’t look at them.
But you won’t fucking like what’s about to happen.
CHAPTER FIFTEEN
-ARTHUR-
The guard straightened when he heard my boots on the stairs.
Once he saw the white-haired witch as I thrust her in front of me, he began to fidget.
“Leave,” I said as I stopped in front of him. “Don’t come back until I summon you.”
He hesitated one breath too long but then nodded and turned around, retreating down the long and dank corridor.
I unlocked and opened the large wood door, stepping inside but not before thrusting her in front of me. The dungeon settled around us, all torchlight and stone as well as that particular cold that lived this far underground, both wet and permanent. Mordred’s wards hummed in the walls. They were barely audible and were really more felt than heard, like low pressure behind the eyes.
“Why are you bringing me here?” she demanded, not for the first time. And just as with the other times she’d asked, I said nothing.
Instead, I walked the length of the corridor, pushing her in front of me whenever she faltered. We passed numerous cells. In the first, a man sat with his back against the far wall, knees drawn up, and his eyes fixed on nothing. He was a debtor, most likely, given the softness still left in his hands despite the weeks he’d clearly been down here.
We must take our mate to our own bedchamber.
She looked back at me, but I shook my head. “Keep moving.”
Two cells along, another man slept upright against the bars, his chin dropped to his chest, one wrist wrapped in a filthy rag where he’d worn the irons raw. Across from him, an older man with a miller’s build and a split lip stared back at me without flinching. He was the kind of man who brawled badly or had blasphemed in the wrong company and was still too proud to regret it. Near the end of the corridor, a gaunt woman sat perfectly still on the edge of her cot, her hands folded in her lap, watching us pass with the quiet, hollow patience of someone who’d already made her peace with however this ended. All of them stared at us.
I found Corvin’s cell at the farthest end. There was no one locked up with him, and neither was there anyone in the cell beside his, as I’d instructed.
He was sitting against the wall with his knees up and his arms resting across them, in the posture of a man who’d spent time in worse places and knew how to wait. His entire cell was bathed in light, courtesy of Mordred’s magic. And this wasn’t just torchlight. There were specific wards that Mordred had carved into each corner of the cell, above the iron bars and into the stone, wards that filled the cell with the light of day, an important feature when you were trying to imprison a shadow worker. Without access to the dark, Corvin wasn’t a threat to anyone.
His head came up when he heard us approaching, and those all-knowing eyes immediately landed on her. Then they moved from her and began tracking me, calculating all the while without appearing to.
We care not for the man! Take our treasure away from here!
I ignored the relentless beast and unlocked the cell. Corvin didn’t move, but I hadn’t expected him to.
“Get up,” I said.
His eyes narrowed on me before he stood, but he didn’t say a word; just watched me. As soon as I had his cell door open, she was already inside it and throwing her arms around him.
