I pulled myself back so quickly that I felt it physically in my body in the form of a sharp breath. My sleeping body’s fingers dug into the blanket. After letting my heart calm down a bit, I searched for someone else, for Guin.
I knew what I was looking for. Nimue’s bloodline had a signature I’d recognized since the first time I saw her. This was water magic at its deepest register, not the surface flash of elemental power, but something far older underneath it, the particular frequency of water that’s existed since before the land had its current shape.
Guin’s magic signature was faint. Faint in the way that strangled things are faint. It was wound around with something that made my jaw tighten: a binding. I felt for that binding and sensed Mordred’s signature. I knew its texture even secondhand. He hadn’t silenced her. He’d caged her. Which in some ways was worse, because it meant she could still feel everything she could no longer reach.
The thread of her magic was still there beneath the binding. It was thin but still present. Still hers. And there was something beneath it, something that was raging, something that was fighting against the binding and livid to be caged.
I followed it in.
What I found wasn’t a dream.
It was a room.
A room of stone walls. And the stone was the particular damp cold of Camelot’s interior. She was no longer inside the dungeon but was inside a bed chamber. Yet, I got the feeling she wasn’t alone. There was a thin pallet on the floor. A basin of water, the kind that gets left in a room and never replaced, the kind that has been cold so long the cold is simply its nature now.
The smell reached me even through the dreaming: it was the smell of blood and beneath that, leather. The kind of leather that’s been oiled and worked until it’s supple. The kind used for belts, for reins, and for the braided tails of a scourge.
I stood in the middle of Guin’s sleeping mind and understood what the waking world had been doing to Merlin’s daughter.
The dream-body showed me everything the waking one had accumulated. Welts across her back that weren’t from one session. No, this wasn’t a punishment delivered once in anger and then regretted. These welts were layered. Old ones and new ones, the old ones faded to silver-yellow, the new ones still raised and livid. And her upper arms carried bruises in the specific oval shapes that fingers make, while her wrists bore marks that told me she’d been held still.
The walls of the dream room were hung with religious icons. Small painted faces with gold leaf halos. Candles burned at precise intervals, not haphazardly, and not for comfort, but placed by someone who believed the spacing mattered. The kneeling stone beneath them was worn smooth in the center and only the center, which meant it had been used consistently, regularly, and for a very long time.
In the corner of the dream was a person. A tall, looming shape that cast a shadow longer than its body and recited scripture in a voice that had no warmth, no humanity, only the flat certainty of a man who believed his gods were listening and that his particular reading of his gods’ requirements was the only correct one.
The walls wept, literally, with moisture streaming down their surface in slow-moving trails, all of which was Guin’s water power seeking an escape through Mordred’s containment spell from the other side.
I backed away.
The stone room of Dunhaven enclosed me again, slowly, in all its familiar ways, with its narrow bed, its freezing basin, and its lone flickering flame that danced beneath the door.
Trembling, I raised my hands. Then I pressed them flat against the blanket and looked at the ceiling and breathed through it. The shaking wasn’t from the effort of the dream-walk. My body was trained past that kind of weakness. This was something different. Something older than training.
This was rage. Old rage.
Something that had been stored away for so long that it becomes more solid than ire, something that feels as if it sits in your chest, like an immovable rock, making it hard to draw breath. I’d felt this before: over the centuries. It had worn many guises, gone by different names, and worn different faces, but the gist was always the same: a man with power. A woman without it. And a holy text used as a weapon, the man wielding it absolutely certain that his gods approved.
I lay there and stared at the ceiling and thought about Merlin.
If he knew what Galahad was doing to his daughter, what I’d just seen in the architecture of her dreams, I wondered what he would do. I hoped he’d move. Immediately. Without calculation. I hoped he’d spend every resource he had and call in every debt and shatter every careful arrangement we’d built over the last months to get her out of that room. That’s what I hoped he’d do because it was therightthing to do. But whether or not he’d actually do it? I didn’t know.
Regardless, if he tried, he’d fail.
Because Camelot’s defenses weren’t what they had been a year ago. Because Mordred had spent that year quietly reinforcing the wards in ways that even I hadn’t fully mapped yet. What was more: a rushed rescue conducted by a grief-maddened sorcerer would be detected before it crossed theouter wall, and the failure would cost us Corvin, the network, and whatever slim chance Guin still had of surviving this long enough to matter.
And those were all the reasons why I didn’t tell Merlin what Galahad was doing to his daughter. On the hopes that he’d act like the father I hoped him to be, but knowing that if he did, it would doom us all.
I lay in the dark, made that decision, and held it.
A rescue couldn’t succeed, so I wouldn’t attempt a rescue.
Instead, what I planned would need more time, more information. It would require the patience to remain motionless while someone I cared about suffered.
I possessed that sort of patience; I’d spent years cultivating it through necessity and by discovering repeatedly that the world cared nothing for my urgency.
So, no, I wouldn’t plan a rescue attempt. What I would plan, though, was a reckoning.
When the time arrived, and all elements were in place: all the possible exits blocked, and all those men who had taken part in what I saw in Guin’s mind had no more room to maneuver, that reckoning would succeed.