I didn’t know what to do with that, so I did nothing with it.
The solar was empty when I entered. I dismissed the guards with a gesture and walked to the window. The courtyard below was lit with torches against the early dark, and a pair of stable boys were chasing each other between the water troughs.
I stood by that window for a while, my mind in shambles as I replayed everything from earlier. The Wardens: she’d confirmed the truth that they were tied to the land, and she’d done so without meaning to. Of course, I’d had my own suspicions based on intel from intercepted correspondence and from The Fox, who had reported on something along those lines. But suspicion wasn’t intelligence, and I’d been working with suspicion for too long.
At the thought of The Fox, I further thought about the fact that there had been no sign of him for months. He’d simply faded back into the shadows as quickly as he’d stepped from them.
Faded back into the shadows...
The thought arrived without warning, and when it landed, it did so with a weight that spread outward and kept spreading until it reached every edge of me, because the word ‘shadows’ now equated to one person in my mind and one person only.
Was it possible that The Fox was Corvin?
I turned from the window.
My first instinct was to dismiss the possibility. The Fox had served me for years. Years of intelligence from the borderlands,from the shadow-roads between Logres and Annwyn, from places no ordinary man could reach. He’d given me names, movements, whispers of Merlin’s positioning that I’d never been able to fully act on but that had kept me from walking into more than one ambush, or so he’d said.
I stood very still and let myself think it through properly. I’d never seen The Fox’s face, not even once. He’d come to me in darkness, always darkness, wrapped in that particular quality of shadow that didn’t behave the way shadow should. It clung to him, moved with him, answered him.
I pressed two fingers to the bridge of my nose.
How many shadow workers were there, truly? It wasn’t a common gift. It wasn’t even an uncommon one. It was rare. Truly, I’d known two in my lifetime. One was The Fox. The other was Corvin. And now I wondered if it had only been one I’d known.
Not only had I never seen The Fox’s face, but I’d never even heard his true voice, as he’d always disguised it with some type of resonance working, or so I’d always assumed. It would have been a simple enough trick for a man with the right training. At the time, I’d taken it as professional caution, just a spy protecting his anonymity.
Now I began to think otherwise, began to wonder if this wasn’t so much a spy protecting his anonymity but a man protecting his identity from someone who knew the sound of his voice better than almost anyone alive.
I walked to the table and put both hands flat on it as the rush of shock completely overcame me.
The intelligence The Fox had brought me was always just enough; it was always intel thathintedat Merlin’s movements without ever giving me anything solid I could use to find him. Coordinates that were three days stale, names of intermediaries who turned up dead before I could reach them, reports ofshipments of magical artifacts that had already been relocated by the time my men arrived.
It had never felt like failure; it had just felt like the nature of the work.
I was a fucking idiot.
The information hadn’t been useless by accident. It had been calibrated, given with enough truth to maintain my trust and enough absence to protect Merlin’s operation entirely. Years of it, years of me sitting across a darkened room from a man I’d once calledbrother, handing him my questions and receiving answers that led precisely nowhere.
And then Guinevere.
I straightened as I remembered the exact moment I’d tasked The Fox with locating her, the moment he’d gone silent. There had been no reports, no contact, nothing. I’d attributed it to the difficulty of the search, but I hadn’t considered who The Fox might actually be.
The Ghost of Blackhollow.
That was what they’d called him because he’d moved through villages like smoke, appeared and disappeared without even one witness. He’d made himself a legend along the borderlands before Arthur Pendragon had ever even heard of his name.
Of course Corvin was The Fox.
The thing that struck me, standing there with my hands on the table and the torchlight guttering in the draft from the window, was that even though I was surprised by this realization, I wasn’tthatsurprised. The shock lasted perhaps ten seconds, and then something beneath it simply settled into place with the grim satisfaction of a puzzle piece that had always belonged exactly there.
I should have seen it sooner.Why the fuck hadn’t I seen it sooner?
He was in my dungeon right now. My oldest friend and my most trusted intelligence source. Both of them the same man, and both of them Merlin’s.
I pulled out the chair and sat down. Slowly.
The candle on the table burned without flickering as I poured a cup of wine but didn’t drink it. Instead, I turned to take in the room around me, as if seeing it for the first time ever. The solar was one of my favorite rooms in Camelot, small enough to feel intimate, lavishly furnished enough to remind me of what the Pendragons had built.
It was then that there was a light tap on the door.
