It turned its head and seemed to look directly at me.
I watched it longer than made sense, then I pushed off the wall and paced. Four steps. Turn. Four steps. Turn.
The water in the basin that sat in the corner of my dank cell rippled as if someone had just jumped right beside it. But no one had. I glanced up to find the corridor beyond my cell empty. And yet the water rippled again.
The surface seemed to be moving from within in a single slow pulse, like something below the waterline had exhaled.
It rippled again.
And then something pressed against the inside of my mind. The feeling arrived the way warmth arrives when you’ve been cold so long you’ve forgotten that heat even exists. Instantly, I knew the signature of the magic.
Nimue. My mother.
No words came. What came instead was understanding, arriving whole and fully formed the way a dream arrives, already complete by the time you open your eyes.
Do not come for the sword.
It wasn’t a sentence, and it wasn’t words. Instead, it was just this knowing, as if I could feel her message in the deepest parts of me, a message that was crystal clear: the sword wasdangerous. What was more, I could feel just whom that danger was attached to.
Arthur.
Arthur didn’t want me coming for Excalibur. And Nimue was worried that if I did, I’d suffer for it.
The understanding settled into my chest and just sat there. Then the rest came, but the rest was softer. That softness began to fill the hollow within me, that empty place where tears should have been, and for one moment the void filled with something that felt like comfort. It was like a hug that wasn’t a hug but felt like one all the same.
Endure, Guinevere. I am always with you.
The basin went still then, and my mother’s presence began to draw away from me. It was slow, but once it was gone, I was left with even more emptiness because I suddenly wanted her to be here with me, this mother who was never really a mother at all.
I sat with my spine against the wall and my hands loose in my lap and a deep hollow in my chest.
I looked at the basin. The water was smooth now, flat, dark, and quiet, reflecting nothing.
I am always with you.
I could only hope that was the truth.
CHAPTER THREE
-CORVIN-
The same day Guin was arrested and placed in Arthur’s dungeon
Caer Gwyll didn’t announce itself.
Instead, the forest swallowed the path, leaving it a thing of memory.
The trees here were old enough to remember the days before humans, the roots knotted above the ground like arthritic fingers. There was no birdsong here, just as there was no wind. It was the type of place that made a man aware of his own heartbeat.
Even though this was now my home and had been for years, I’d never quite gotten used to it. I often wondered if Merlin felt the same way, that there was an undercurrent of foreignness to this place we’d all but been forced to call home.
Wraith picked his way through the gnarled roots and the thinning underbrush of the landscape of Annwyn without any encouragement from me. He’d always had an unnatural ease in places like this, places where most horses would have balked, shied, and rolled the whites of their eyes. But Wraith seemed tounderstand the magic that threaded the air and simply decided not to be troubled by it.
The stronghold of Caer Gwyll materialized slowly, the way a dream clarifies just before waking. First, I spied the outer wall, the black stone thatmovedif you stared at it too long. Then the towers came into focus: narrow, asymmetrical, and rising at angles that shouldn’t have held weight. Moss covered everything, and vines threaded through the battlements like sutures through a wound. A waterfall ran backward along the eastern face, climbing the stone and disappearing into a cleft above.
Caer Gwyll didn’t look like a stronghold. It looked like something the earth had spit out.
-CORVIN-