She’d stopped giving me even that.
I sat at the edge of her bed, which wasn’t a thing I’d done before, and which I was aware was strange, and I looked at the empty space on the table where her objects had been.
She’d gone to Camelot.
I didn’t know how I knew. I just did. The way you know things you can’t afford to know.
-VAELEN-
The owl form came easier in the dark.
I didn’t do it often at Caer Gwyll: too many people who knew me, too many pairs of eyes, but that night I walked to the far end of the north courtyard where the wall met the old storage sheds, and I let myself change. It was never comfortable. It was a translation more than a transformation: my consciousness reorienting itself, the world reshaping from vertical to horizontal, sound sharpening at the high end, sight going from ordinary to something almost unbearably precise.
I lifted. The cold took me.
From above, Caer Gwyll looked small. The fires in the yard, the sentries walking their routes, the horses turning slow circles in the paddock: all of it small, precise, and comprehensible in a way it never quite was from the inside.
I flew east until the lights disappeared and there was only the forest beneath me, and then the moors beyond, gray-silver under cloud cover.
I wasn’t going to Camelot. I knew my limits.
But I flew anyway, for a time, letting the cold work through what the fire hadn’t.
All the while, I thought about Morgan, about Camelot, and about the fact that I was the head of a rebellion that was running faster than I could steer it. Then I thought about Guinevere, a woman I’d never even spoken to, not in waking, not properly. I was still trying to determine whether she was a weapon or something else entirely.
I turned back when the cold became serious.
Below me, a single light moved along the road: a rider, heading south. One of ours, or one of theirs. Impossible to tell from here.
That was the thing no one talked about in war councils and at dinner tables surrounded by lords and their careful eyes: the impossibility of knowing. The fact that at some point you stopped having information and started having inference, and the distance between those two things was exactly the width of everything that could go wrong.
Carlisle wasn’t wrong that we had more men than we’d ever had. He also wasn’t wrong that Arthur was weaker than he looked. And he wasn’t wrong that hesitation had a cost.
But Guinevere was still in there. And Morgan was moving toward her, quietly, without telling me what she’d learned. And something at the back of my mind, the part I’d trained for years to listen to, kept saying,Wait.
Wait.
She’s not ready yet. And neither are you.
I landed back in the courtyard and stood for a moment in the dark before I let myself return to my human shape. A single moth drifted past in the torchlight. It was small, brown-winged, and unremarkable.
I watched it go.
Then I went inside to face what the morning would bring.
CHAPTER FIFTY-EIGHT
-MERLIN-
I had walked this path before: twice, maybe three times across a span of years long enough that the number blurred.
Each time my feet knew the route before my mind did. They turned where the path vanished, they stepped over roots that shouldn’t have been there, and they carried me forward while the rest of me argued for turning back.
I had been arguing with myself for three days.
The vision that broke me came just before dawn on the second day. I had been standing at my window in Caer Gwyll watching the treeline go gray with the approaching light, a cup of something cooling in my hand when it came without warning the way the worst ones always did: a sudden superimposition of one reality over another, as though I had pressed two wet paintings face to face.
Guinevere, wreathed in gold.