But knowing wasn’t proof. Knowing was just knowing. And it wasn’t something I could prove should it come to that. No, I needed more.
A torch guttered in its bracket above me. The flame bent sideways, steadied, then bent again.
Lance had built his entire life on being unimpeachable. That was the makeup of the man: immaculate armor, immaculate record, immaculate loyalty, and underneath it all that hollow space he kept so carefully hidden. I’d seen that too, the first time I’d ever laid eyes on him. The emptiness behind the confidence. A man that hungry didn’t stay satisfied for long, no matter what oaths he’d sworn.
But hunger wasn’t evidence either.
What I needed was something Arthur couldn’t dismiss. Something that couldn’t be explained away with a shrug, adenial, and that easy, practiced smile Lance wore like a second piece of armor. Arthur trusted Lance the way men trust a weapon that has never misfired: completely and without scrutiny. Breaking that trust required more than just my suspicions.
I pushed off the wall and started walking, not in any particular direction. My feet knew the corridors of Camelot well enough to carry me without thought.
There were ways to get proof. I was methodical by nature and patient by necessity: patience being the one virtue bitterness teaches without meaning to. I’d spent all my life watching Arthur’s court from the edges of it, taking note of every crack and inconsistency, every alliance and appetite. I knew how people behaved when they thought no one was watching them. The servants talked. The knights drank. The walls of Camelot were thick but not impenetrable.
And she was still here.
That meant she was still near Lance, still close enough to act as his biggest temptation. When people were under pressure, they made mistakes. People who kept secrets found themselves revealing those secrets sooner or later, whether through a look or a misplaced word in a misplaced silence.
I would find the proof. Of that I was certain. It was just a matter now of where to look.
-PERCIVAL-
The three women stood at the edge of everything.
This wasn’t a place I had words for because it was a time before there was land, before there was sky, before there waseven the concept of either. It was just a raw humming expanse that felt like the moment before a scream.
The first woman had created everything that now existed. The second was made of water and something ancient. The third stood between them, and she was the most human of the three.
The first woman reached sideways. Not toward the other two, but toward something else entirely. Something that had no color and no warmth, and yet it was full of its own energy. It was a dark energy, the energy of death. She reached into the place where things stopped existing.
And her hand came back changed.
I couldn’t describe what changed about it, though. The fingers looked the same. But everything around her recoiled from that hand, especially the light. The water woman took a step back. The most human woman went very still in the way animals go still when they smell fire.
Then there was a war between them. Between the one who had touched the ice of death and the other two who never had and never wanted to.
The images moved too fast to follow, the way real violence always does. Light, shadow, and that third terrible energy colliding, reshaping, destroying. A sword got forged somewhere in the middle of it. I watched water rise off the ground and fire that burned blue and cold stitching together to form a blade that looked like frozen lightning.
Then the veil came down.
That was the only description for it. A veil, something that separated the dark from the light, death from life. This veil slammed shut like a door in a storm, and on the other side of it, one of the three women. The one who’d reached into death. She was now caught in between. She wasn’t dead, but she also wasn’t living. Instead, she stood in the in-between, just pressingher palms against something invisible, and she screamed without sound across centuries.
I jerked awake and then lay there panting.
The ceiling of my chamber stared back at me as I slowly realized where I was. In my bed. In my chamber. Asleep... I’d been dreaming. I turned my head and noticed the single candle had burned itself to a puddle of wax on the table beside the bed. Outside the narrow window, the sky sat at that particular shade of gray that couldn’t decide whether it was late night or early morning.
My hands were shaking.
I pressed them flat against my chest and waited for the trembling to pass, waited for my heart rate to calm. The fear would pass. This I knew. Yet, it was taking longer than usual.
The visions had been coming for three weeks now. They were always of the same women, the same war, the same sword. Sometimes I got pieces I hadn’t seen before. Tonight had been the worst of it, though. The woman behind the veil, her face contorted, her hands bloody from pressing against something that wouldn’t give, wouldn’t leave my thoughts. Her expression hadn’t been desperation, and perhaps that was the thing that bothered me most. No, it was patience.
The kind of patience that had learned to wear desperation as a costume.
I sat up and swung my legs over the edge of the bed. The cold of the stone floor bit through my wool socks, and I stayed there, hands still pressed to my thighs, and tried to breathe the way Brother Antoine had taught me when I was nine years old and had accidentally absorbed a dying soldier’s last twenty minutes of agony.
Name what’s yours, he’d said.Release what isn’t.
The trembling was mine. The grief behind it wasn’t. So, I let it go.