A lie, probably; her chin was too high and her jaw too tight for a clean truth, but it was a functional one, and right now I’d take what I could.
What I didn’t take into account was what she’d do next.
Before I could speak, before I could even draw breath to tell her we needed to move, her arms were around me, locked around my waist, and her face was pressed hard into my chest like she was trying to disappear into the wool of my tunic. She didn’t make a sound, didn’t sob or shake. She just held on to mewith a grip that said she’d been holding herself together by sheer stubbornness alone.
It took me maybe a second, the span of a single, slow breath, before my arms came up around her. And I held her the way I’d always wanted to hold her but never allowed myself. I held onto her with all of me. I didn’t weigh it nor measure it the way I measured everything. Instead, my hands settled against her back, and I held her the way you hold something fragile that’s also, somehow, the least fragile thing in the room. My chin dropped to the crown of her head, and her hair was so soft against my jaw. I stayed very still, letting her take whatever she needed from me.
“We haven’t much time, Guin,” I finally whispered into her hair.
When she pulled back from me, she did it slowly, like she had to convince herself to let go. She nodded and her eyes were bright with tears she hadn’t shed: almost luminous in the torchlight, full of something she refused to let spill. She blinked once, and that was it. Just the one concession to the grief mixed with relief she was doing her best to swallow back down.
I looked at her and felt something sharp and cold move through me. Rage.
But it was a quiet and settled type of rage, the kind that didn’t burn hot but banked low and steady, the kind that lasted. I’d carried that particular fire before, kindled first in the ash-filled streets of Blackhollow, stoked again in every village I’d watched the crown abandon to rot. I knew how to keep that rage from consuming me because I’d had years of practice.
But this... this was different. This washer. And whoever had put that look in her eyes: Arthur, his knights, his guards, that cold-eyed bastard Lancelot with his perfect armor and his entitled hands... I noted every name like a debt. Every oneof them would be paid in full, in time, in whatever way the opportunity afforded me.
I was very patient when I needed to be.
I pulled the thin cloak from my pack: dark wool, undyed, and held it out to her. She took it and pulled it around her shoulders with hands that were steadier than I expected. Good. Steady was something I could work with.
“Stay close,” I said. “Don’t speak unless I do. If I stop, you stop. If I pull you back, don’t fight me.”
She nodded once, and her violet eyes were very bright. I smiled at her, and she smiled in return.
Then I stepped back to the door and gathered the shadows. They came the way they always did, the dark pooling outward from the corners of the room, from the space beneath the torch bracket, from the gap under the door. They wrapped around us, and when they took her, she made no sound at all. A braver reaction than most.
“Ready?” I murmured.
“Yes.”
Now hidden by shadow, we walked back up the corridor, past the sleeping guard, and then into the lower corridors. A patrol walked by us at the first junction: four guards, and they were close enough that I could hear the creak of their leather armor. Guin froze at my side, her control impressive.
I’d trained her well.
The cat waited at the intersection, where one corridor led up to the kitchen exit and the other led deeper into the castle’s roots. It regarded us with mild interest, typical of its breed—and Morgan’s, for that matter—and then went down toward the kitchen corridor.
We followed.
The kitchen was empty, the coals banked low in the hearth, the smell of yesterday’s bread still heavy in the air. I moved usthrough it quickly, past the long prep tables, past the hanging herb bundles, and the row of copper pots, to the low door on the far side that opened onto the rear yard.
Two more corridors and another patrol approached, but this one was slower this time and easy to miss.
I brought us through the corridors and through the door that led to the yard. And then I wrapped my shadows around us even more tightly and started across the large expanse of green that would bring us to the treeline. Once there, my shadows freed us, and Guin took a long, shuddering breath as she pressed one hand flat against the trunk of the nearest tree as if to make sure it was real.
I scanned the treeline. Nothing moved.
“Corvin,” she started, but I shook my head and held my index finger to my mouth. We weren’t out of trouble yet.
Behind me, Camelot loomed pale and gigantic against the sky, aglow with internal fires. It was full of guards who didn’t yet know she was gone and full of a king who would be furious when he found out, full of a man I’d called ‘brother’ for most of my life.
I didn’t look back at it.
“This way,” I said quietly and moved into the darkness between the trees.
-ARTHUR-
I woke with fire in my throat, and that wasn’t a metaphor; there was actual fire riding my breath. What was more, I could taste char on the back of my tongue as heat pushed up through my chest like it was trying to claw its way out of me.