“Hmm,” I said, shrugging. “Sounds like a man who’s changed his mind.”
He shook his head. “That’s not a man who changed his mind. That’s a man who wasmovedto change his mind.”
I kept my eyes on the water. “He must have had... an epiphany, I should imagine.”
“An epiphany that goes by the name of Morgan.” He raised a single brow at me, and I returned the expression but didn’t say anything.
“Did you have anything to do with it?”
“I don’t assume I do.”
Vaelen’s frown said he didn’t believe me but had decided, again, not to push. He had a talent for that. For identifying the walls I built and choosing not to beat himself against them.
I closed the distance between us and reached up to put my hand against his jaw. This wasn’t strategy. There was no thinking going on, no maneuvering on my part. I simply wanted to feel the sensation of his rough stubble under my hand and the way he stilled instantly when I made contact with his body.
For a small amount of time, I allowed myself to wish I were a simpler person, that this was a simpler time.
And then I withdrew my hand.
“I need to sleep,” I said.
“You mean you need to work.”
“Yes.”
“I could help.” He said the words carefully. Not pressing, just offering. “My ability—”
“—No,” I interrupted before he could finish the thought. “Not tonight. Not on this.”
He didn’t ask why. He never asked why in the moments when I needed him not to, and it was something I’d always appreciated about him.
“Sleep well,” he said. Which was his way of saying he knew I wouldn’t.
-MORGAN-
The chamber that Carlisle had provided me was made of stone: stone walls, stone floor, and a wooden ceiling. The bed was narrow, though it was lavishly appointed, and the only heat came from a candle that was lit on the sill of the window. Creature comforts were certainly not something Carlisle bothered himself with, and I supposed that wasn’t surprising, given the fact that he was a soldier, through and through.
I lay down on the bed without undressing since this wasn’t going to be restful. It was dreamwalking, something altogether different from sleeping.
I started with breathing. Each breath made me travel farther away from my body and into another world, one where I left my body behind and became something else entirely, just an entity that could move freely like thoughts do, unencumbered by flesh.
I reached for Camelot and the hundreds of minds resting there, the hundreds of minds caught in the snare of slumber. They looked like tiny lights flickering in darkness, but with a special kind of incoherence.
I sifted carefully through them.
The first mind I found that could be of interest belonged to a guard. He was dreaming of his patrol, replaying it the way tired men do when they’ve repeated the same route until it has grooved itself into the brain’s resting state. I walked through his memory with him. The northern gate first. The timing of the ward-pulse at the threshold, twelve heartbeats between, then a gap of three. I noted it. The eastern corridor came next, especially the particular arc the torchlight made against the stones, and the guards who nodded to each other without speaking. There was a shadow at the far end of the passage that the guard thought wasn’t quite right, but which no one had yet investigated because no one wanted to be the man who raised an alarm over a shadow.
I withdrew.
One of the scullery girls was next, and she was dreaming of her dead mother’s hands. I was sorry to interrupt it. I moved through her memory of the castle’s interior quickly and without lingering: the servants’ passages, the angles of the inner ward, the section of the west corridor where the flagstones were uneven and caught the light differently, which told me something about what lay beneath.
I withdrew.
Mordred.
He was there before I realized it was him. His sleep mind was precisely what I imagined it would be: rational, luminous, and meticulously designed. Even asleep, his dreams took the form of equations that magically figured themselves out only to branch off again as soon as they were solved. His entire mental architecture while dreaming was like a lattice, and this lattice possessed something I instantly recognized.
A trap. The sort of trap made specifically for an intruder engaged in the kind of act I was presently carrying out. The typeof trap that reveals its existence only once you’ve stepped into it and can’t get back out again.