This was definitely Mordred’s work. I’d know his patterns anywhere.
I let the shadows bleed back from my fingertips. Not dispelling them, butcontainingthem, folding them down until what I carried registered as nothing more than the cold draft of a dungeon corridor. Then, working from the outside in, I found the anchor point of the alarm ward which was a knot of intent no larger than a thumbnail. It was tucked into the upper corner of the frame, and I unraveled it one thread at a time. Not cutting. Never cutting. Mordred wove trip-lines into his cuts, secondary triggers for anyone who tried to force a clean break.
The binding lattice took longer. It had no anchor. It was ambient, distributed evenly across the surface, which meant I had to thin it rather than dismantle it, coaxing it apart the way you’d ease a knot from wet rope, finding the one loop that bore no tension and working outward from there.
When it finally went slack, I exhaled slowly through my nose.
The suppression net I left alone. There was no defeating it cleanly, not without Morgan standing at my shoulder. But suppression only acted on active castings, and by the time I stepped through, I was carrying nothing it could find.
The door swung inward.
The air beyond it was colder than the corridor and wrong in the way that warded spaces were always wrong. There was a subtle flatness to it, like the silence in a room after a scream. I could feel the binding stone somewhere above me, and it felt like a pressure at the crown of my skull, steady and patient. It had been doing this a long time, and it would go on doing it because I was fairly sure it wouldn’t detect my shadows.
The smell hit me first: stone damp and something underneath it: herbs, maybe. Something that had been used to clean wounds. The corridor beyond the door was narrowenough that my shoulders nearly brushed both walls. There were three cells on each side, iron-barred and dark. I didn’t believe anyone was in them. And I supposed that made a level of sense since Arthur didn’t bother incarcerating those with magic or the members of the Rebellion. He had them killed instead. Water ran in thin threads down the far wall and pooled in the grooves worn into the stone floor by years of feet and nothing good.
The torches in here were spaced too far apart. Long stretches of black lay between each cone of orange light, broken only by the pale gleam of the bars. A bundle of rags in the second cell on the left turned out to be a man when I looked closer. He was old, grey-bearded, and curled on his side with his knees drawn up. Not dead: the rise and fall of his ribs said otherwise.
Something skittered in the far corner: a rat, probably. The last cell on the right had a candle burning inside it. Not a dungeon candle, stumped and tallow-stinking. This one was thin, white, and nearly burned to nothing. I moved toward it, and then I saw her.
She was sitting in the last cell of the block, leaning against the far wall with her knees pulled to her chest. Her face and her wrists were thin, though her tunic and braies were surprisingly bright considering her surroundings. The closer I came, the more I realized that she didn’t appear dirty, which was strange given where she was.
The light of the torch along the outer wall threw copper light across her face, highlighting those high cheekbones, that mouth which was always set in quiet stubbornness, and the dark lashes that were fanned against pale skin. She looked like someone had carved her from the same bone and shadow as this place and then changed their mind halfway through and made her beautiful instead.
The gratitude hit me first: gratitude that she was alive. That single fact cracked something open in my chest that I hadn’tknown I was holding shut. I stood in the dark outside her cell and let myself have exactly one breath of it, the relief, the release of a knot I’d been pulling tight since I’d left Caer Gwyll.
Then I looked at her face more carefully.
She wasn’t a girl. Whatever she’d been when Arthur first locked her in here, she wasn’t that now. She was something angrier, something fiercer.
My hand went to the bars.
Every instinct I had told me to get the cell door open, to pull her out, and to put myself between her and everything this place represented. That wanting was immediate, and it was dangerous, so I crushed it.
Then a sudden image of her assaulted my mind, both uninvited and vivid: her head tipped back, mouth open, white hair spilled across the same stone floor she was sleeping on now, and Lance above her, Lance who had everything and still took more—
I clenched my eyes shut tight until the image of them blanched and there was nothing but darkness in my mind’s eye once more. I wouldn’t think of things that didn’t matter. And whatever Lance was to her, it was unimportant. None of it mattered. What mattered was this exact moment: getting her the fuck out of here.
I tapped the bar only once, and she looked up at the same time that I released my shadows. The shock on her face was immediate and total. Her mouth opened, but I held a finger to my lips before she could make a sound. She nodded as she pressed her lips together hard, and something in her expression cracked in a way I didn’t want to examine too closely.
Eyeing the sizable lock on the outside of her cell, I let the shadows unspool from my hand, thin and precise, thread-fine where they needed to be. It wasn’t the same as picking a lock with steel. Steel pushed, but shadowslid, finding the negativespace inside the mechanism, filling it, and learning the shape of the thing from the inside out.
The first tumbler gave. Then the second.
Guin got to her feet and watched with her back pressed against the far wall, her eyes tracking the darkness with an expression caught somewhere between awe and anxiety.
The third tumbler caught and I held still. Then I let my shadows simply exist inside the lock until the mechanism forgot to resist.
There was the sound of a soft, dull click. Then the cell door swung open an inch. I caught it before it could creak and held it, counting three breaths, listening to the corridor behind me, but there were no sounds of anyone coming. The guard must have still been asleep or he just hadn’t heard anything beyond the thickness of the heavy cell door. I pushed the door the rest of the way open and looked at her as I entered her cell.
“Can you walk?” I whispered.
She looked at me another half second as if she was trying to make up her mind whether or not I was really here or if she’d simply dreamed me.
“Yes,” she whispered finally.
“Are you hurt?”
Her chin lifted slightly. “No.”