I crossed back to my chair and stood behind it, hands on the carved back.
What I needed to tell her was this: that the dragon inside Arthur was not a possession or a curse. It was a fundamentalforce that had been incorrectly housed for too long. That it was tearing at its container the way water tore at stone, not quickly but without cease. I needed to tell her that the veil was the consequence, and that she was the only person alive whose nature was capable of receiving the dragon.
I didn’t want Arthur’s death. I wanted to be precise about that, at least in my own mind. I’d spent considerable effortnotwanting Arthur dead. Wanting him reduced, removed, chastened, yes. Would the dragon’s passage require his death? I didn’t know, but I hoped not. What I did know was that it would require his surrender, which might be harder to arrange.
But I couldn’t tell her any of this, not with the current situation.
I pulled out the chair and sat.
The coals in the fireplace had gone almost entirely dark. A thin orange thread wound through the gray ash, barely visible. The room was cold enough now that I could see my breath, just faintly, each exhale a small ghost dissolving before it reached the ceiling.
I had trained her to read water, to hear what it carried, to follow a current back to its source. I had also trained her to sense a presence within a presence, a thing beneath the surface of another thing.
She was observant. She noticed human contradiction. She was skeptical of everyone, including me,especially me, which was the correct response to me, even if I’d never told her so.
But, yes, she’d now been near Arthur long enough that she would have felt the entity beneath the king, the dragon. She would have felt the heat of it, the way it rose up in the king’s eyes. She would have felt the otherness of a man who wasn’t just a man, but something so much more. I could only hope she was aware of the dragon’s existence, because then it would be easierto make the case for it and why she was meant to take it unto herself.
She was half her mother’s child, which meant she was water-born, water-reading. And while the dragon was fire, they did not cancel one another out. Fire was only water’s opposite in the way that a key was a lock’s opposite. Theyansweredeach other.
She would have felt it, but whether she would have known what she was feeling was another question.
I picked up the book again, then set it down again.
The visions had never shown me the conversation where she agreed to house the dragon, to become its cage. They showed me the outcome and nothing of the method, the way prophecy always cheated you: handing you the destination and leaving you to build the road for yourself. That meant I did not know if she would choose this destiny. And I did not know if she would refuse it.
I had hoped the visions would have shown me more; I’d been hoping as much for the last twenty-three years.
The last coal went dark, and I sat in the cold as I thought about my daughter, the way I always thought about her. Not as a father, precisely, because it wasn’t natural for me to think as a father would. But I thought about her more in the way a man thinks about a fire he lit a long time ago in a forest, as he watches the smoke rise from a distance, unable to tell if what he started is burning well or burning wrong.
When I looked at it, I realized the fire in the hearth was dead.
I hadn’t noticed it go. That happened sometimes, in the long nights, when the thinking became too consuming to leave room for anything as ordinary as tending a fire. The cold had come in quietly and established itself while I wasn’t attending the logs, and now the room was dark and the ash in the grate was the same gray as everything else.
I should have gone to bed, but I did not move.
The calculation had been running beneath everything else for weeks, the way certain calculations did when I did not want to look at them directly. Instead, I let them run in the peripheral dark of my mind and I called them something else: perhaps a contingency, or a consideration, or a path not yet necessary. I built other structures around them, structures that were tall enough to block the view.
Every one of those structures had now come down.
I knew the shape of what remained. I had known the shape of it for some time. I had been calling it by softer names, the way a man calls a wound a bruise because bruises heal on their own, and wounds require attention, and attention requires admitting the wound is there in the first place.
No matter how I looked at it, the wound was there.
There was a place. Not far, as distances went in the world, though the world’s distances had meant less and less to me as I aged, and the other kind of distance, the kind measured in what a journey costs rather than how long it takes, had come to mean more. There was a place in the Whispering Wilds where the trees grew wrong, the light came in sideways, and the silence was not the silence of emptiness.
It had been many years since I had stood in that silence. Many years since I had walked that path and breathed that air, old stone and older magic and the particular cold that gathered in places where power had been held a very long time. It was the type of cold that had nothing to do with temperature, but the type you felt in the teeth.
I’d had reasons not to go. Good ones at the time. The exile had made travel dangerous, and then Caer Gwyll had required establishing, and then there had been the question of Guinevere, which had consumed the better part of a decade in various forms. I had told myself the timing was wrong repeatedly. ThenI had told myself the situation had not yet demanded it. I was a man who understood timing, who had built his entire practice on the principle that the correct action at the wrong moment was indistinguishable from the wrong action, and I had used that principle as a wall.
The wall had to come down now.
I stood from the chair. My knees registered the cold, the way they always did now, even if I ignored them.
The window was dark. Below, Caer Gwyll was quiet. The ivy, or the thing that was n0t quite ivy, moved along the eastern wall with a motion that was not wind. I watched it. The veil had been thinner again today; I had felt it twice, each time like a thread pulled somewhere deep in the fabric of things, not snapping, not yet, but stretching in a way that the fabric was not designed to accommodate.
The dragon was growing stronger.
That was the plain fact of it. Arthur had contained it through sheer density of will, and his will was extraordinary, but it was also no longer enough, because the dragon was older than his will and patient in a way human will could not sustain. What Arthur had built was a cage, and the cage was holding, barely, and the holding was costing him things he did not know he was paying, and in the spaces where his control was loosening, the veil thinned.