Chapter Text
The road into Camelot did not narrow into a single gate but unfolded, wide and spiraling, as though the city itself wished to delay its secrets until the very last moment. From afar, Will had seen the walls rising pale against the storm-smudged sky, towers cutting like spears through low clouds, pennants shivering in the rain. Now, close enough to smell the wet stone, he found it less a castle perched on a lonely height and more a living organism: town and stronghold braided into one, houses pressed like children against the skirts of the fortress, smoke coiling from crooked chimneys, cries of vendors clashing with the ring of hammers. Chickens darted through puddles, dogs barked at horses’ hooves, and above it all loomed the keep, grim and bright in turns, its banners heavy with Arthur’s lion, red against the sodden gray.
Will’s horse clopped steadily through the mire, each hoof sucking free of mud with a wet slap. His cloak was plastered to his shoulders, curls sticking damp against his brow. He was not the sort of figure ballads would compose — no golden-haired champion, no broad-shouldered knight in shining steel — but there was a quality to him nonetheless, an intensity that clung as surely as rain. His bow was strapped across his back, quiver of arrows brushing against his hip, and though his frame was lean, even slight by the standards of soldiers, there was no mistaking the tempered will coiled in him.
He asked, as he had asked since the first outer gate, Where can I find Merlin?
A washerwoman wringing out linens gave him a smirk, water splashing at her feet.
“Merlin? Find him? Best of luck, stranger. He finds you, not the other way round.”
A blacksmith, his arms black with soot, barked a laugh without looking up from his anvil. “Aye, if Merlin wants your company, you’ll know it. If he doesn’t, you’ll not catch even the echo of his staff.”
A boy chasing a goose through the mud called over his shoulder, “Ask the wind, it knows him better than men do!” before disappearing into the drizzle.
By the tenth answer Will’s jaw was tight; by the fifteenth, his lips pressed thin. By the eighteenth, he was nearly spitting. He already found me, he wanted to shout at them all. He tore me out of a village before it burned me alive, and now you tell me he cannot be found? Instead, he muttered under his breath, words as sharp as his scowl, “Yes, yes, he already did,” earning only a strange look from a woman bent beneath a basket of onions.
The nearer he came to the inner keep, the more the noise thinned. The streets narrowed, lined with stone rather than timber, the crowd giving way to armored sentries who glanced at him without concern. The gates of the fortress itself yawned open, heavy wood grooved with the scars of long-forgotten sieges, rain trickling in rivulets down their ancient faces. Within was a quieter courtyard, less crowded, cobbles shining wet beneath the pale light, arches of carved stone framing the space.
There, beneath one such arch, sat a knight.
His armor gleamed despite the rain, as if he had stepped from some painter’s panel rather than a muddy world. His hair, dark and clipped close, lent his features an elegant severity, and his posture was one of someone who could command a hall as easily as a battlefield. He did not rise immediately but watched Will with a steady, assessing calm, the way a man watches a hawk whose wings are still folded.
Will drew rein, swung down from the saddle with a thump of boots in water. He was tired of the horse, tired of asking, tired of the way the city seemed to laugh behind its teeth. His voice, when it came, was taut.
“I need to find Merlin.”
The knight’s brow arched, his expression curious rather than mocking. His tone was smooth, measured. “And why is that?”
Will blew out a breath, irritated. “Because Merlin told me to come here.” His hand tightened on the reins, jaw rigid. “He pulled me from a village that wanted me stoned to death. He said there was a place for me in Camelot. So unless you’re going to laugh like the rest, spare me the questions.”
For a moment the knight only watched him, silence stretching, and then a smile curved his lips — not cruel, but edged with recognition. “Ah. Then you are the one he spoke of. You must be Will. Or Galahad.”
Will rolled his eyes, curls dripping against his temples. His mouth twisted into something between irritation and irony. “Not Galahad. Or rather — yes, technically, but don’t call me that. Just Will. It’s simpler.”
At this the knight rose, the movement fluid, graceful, as though no weight of armor could hinder him. He extended a hand in greeting, his voice warmer now. “Then welcome, Will. I am Lancelot. And it seems I am the first here to recognize you.”
Will hesitated, rain running down his temples, suspicion tightening his jaw. Yet he reached out, fingers clasping the knight’s hand.
And in that instant the vision struck.
It was always like this: sudden, merciless, unbidden. Will did not choose it — he never did. Touch was the surest trigger, a key that unlocked what the body itself remembered, what the soul could not hide. He had learned, with bitter practice, that those who carried secrets burned brightest in his grasp.
Lancelot’s life bled into him at once.
The courtyard dissolved. The air thickened, alive with voices that were not present. The Round Table blazed before him, firelight flickering over polished steel, the faces of knights gleaming in sweat and wine. He saw them as if he were seated among them: Gawain’s laughter loud and unchecked, Kay’s barbed tongue lashing, Percival’s earnest eyes, Mordred’s pale smile curling like smoke. All of them alive, raw, distinct.
And then — her. Guinevere. A woman of luminous beauty, every glance at Lancelot tethered by a love she could not disavow. The ache in her gaze hit Will like a fist; he felt the weight of her longing, the knife-edge of devotion sharpened into guilt. And through Lancelot’s heart, through his blood itself, Will tasted the torment of a man who had loved too much, too wrongly, and still could not let go.
Will staggered, but the vision did not release him. At the far edge of it all, another presence loomed — indistinct, shrouded, more shadow than flesh. A man. Strong, calm, watchful. The pull of him was violent, magnetic, but the face blurred whenever Will tried to seize it. He strained, desperate to fix the features, but the harder he reached the further it slipped, until only the weight of inevitability pressed against him.
And then it was gone.
The courtyard returned with a lurch, cold rain on his skin, the steady grip of Lancelot’s gauntlet. Will tore his hand free, flexing his fingers as though scalded, chest heaving.
Lancelot pulled his hand back, his expression shifting from courtesy to raw astonishment. His brow furrowed, his voice low and insistent.
“Was that—was that a vision? Did you… did you see something?”
He was not mocking, not like the townsfolk with their jeers and riddles. This was the startled urgency of a man who had just glimpsed a mystery he had never known to exist. Merlin was a sorcerer, yes. Merlin spoke of omens and patterns, read the stars, wove truths from signs. But this—this shock of clarity that had passed visibly across Will’s face—Lancelot had never seen anything like it.
“What was it?” he pressed, eyes bright with curiosity. “What did you see? How does it work?”
Will shook his head, curls dripping rain into his eyes. He was pale now, his breath uneven, his body dizzy with the afterburn of it. For him, there was never just the vision itself — there was the weight of it, the way it hollowed him out and filled him at once. He could not steady himself on his own feelings because they were never wholly his; every glance, every brush of skin, every voice carried too much. He saw through people the way others saw through glass: the honesty or the lie in their marrow, the cowardice, the cruelty, the flicker of tenderness. He could taste shame, fear, the frailty of longing. He could see almost everything — what they had been, what they had done, and sometimes, terrifyingly, what they would do. It was like staring into the soul’s crystal and finding it shattering in his hands.
His voice came rough, resistant. “I don’t… I don’t want to talk about it.” He pushed damp hair from his brow, eyes flicking away. “Just—take me to Merlin. Please.”
But Lancelot was not so easily dissuaded. He leaned closer, his tone softened but persistent. “You saw something, I know it. What was it?”
Will exhaled sharply, frustration laced into weariness. “Nothing remarkable.” His mouth twisted, half lie, half shield. “I saw a table. A few knights. That’s all.”
It was not, and both men knew it. But Lancelot studied him a moment longer, then inclined his head, accepting the deflection for what it was. There was no forcing truth from a man who saw too much of it already.
“Very well, Will-not-Galahad,” he said at last, his voice lighter again, though his eyes still carried the flicker of wonder. “I’ll bring you to Merlin. And to Arthur. The king will want to see you himself.”
Will’s shoulders tightened, his gaze dark as the storm above them. He gave no answer beyond the smallest nod. And as Lancelot turned toward the keep, leading him beneath the stone arches, Will followed — a man already burdened with every soul he touched, walking deeper into a place that would demand even more of him.
They moved beneath the arch and into the arteries of the fortress, where the rain steamed gently off warm stone and the breath of Camelot came and went like the tide. The outer ward opened before them: a courtyard of slick cobbles, wagon ruts brimming with water, a smithy shouldering up to a bakehouse, both breathing their separate heats into the damp air—iron and yeast, sparks and crust. Above, galleries ran like ribs along the inner wall; below, gulleys chattered with runoff, and somewhere unseen a dog barked at a goose that refused to be impressed.
Lancelot set an easy pace, his stride deliberate without ever seeming slow, the rhythm of a man who knew every threshold by heart and understood that power did not require haste. Will fell in beside him, tugging his cloak tighter at the throat, curls drying into errant spirals that shadowed his eyes. The dizziness from the vision thinned by degrees—a last shiver leaving his fingers—and with its departure a familiar sharpness returned, that restless intelligence like a blade that never quite sheathed.
“You’re calmer,” Lancelot observed, glancing sidelong with professional courtesy and the first dregs of unsatisfied curiosity. “Good. I’d hate to deliver you to the king looking as if I’d already run you through.”
“I’d hate that, too,” Will said, dry. “Blood’s hard to get out of wool.”
A little smile touched Lancelot’s mouth. “You’re not from the city.”
“No one is,” Will answered, and when Lancelot only lifted a brow, he added, “Border country. Far enough that the Roman roads are rumors and the priests don’t agree which saint owns the river. That precise enough for your ledger?”
“For now,” Lancelot said, amused. “How old?”
“Old enough to know better. Not old enough to have learned it.”
The knight’s teeth flashed. “And when did you learn what you are?”
Will’s gaze tracked a pair of squires jogging past with bundles of javelins, the boys’ laughter piping high under the rain. “I didn’t learn it. It never stopped. There wasn’t a before and after. Just a loud world, and me in the middle of it.” He pushed damp curls back with impatient fingers. “Sometimes touch makes it shout.”
They passed beneath another arch into the training yard. The sound changed at once: steel on steel, breath like bellows, the bark of a sergeant drilling men-at-arms. Mud lay churned to a brown mirror, broken by prints and the scar of dragging boots. A line of targets slouched at the far wall—wicker men with rags for faces, shields pocked and bowed. Archers at the near end loosed in steady cadence, arrows rising like a gray flock and landing with a meat-thick thrum. Will’s eyes lingered, hunger and competence flaring and then shuttered.
“You shoot?” Lancelot asked, following the look.
“Well,” Will said. After a heartbeat, as if it cost him nothing and everything, “Better than I swing.”
“Most men do,” Lancelot returned, unoffended. He gestured on. “Come. Kitchens to the left, chapel ahead, the treasury through that guarded door you will never try. Merlin’s tower is beyond the inner ward, near the north curtain. He prefers the draughts.”
“Of course he does,” Will muttered. “Anything to make a dramatic entrance.”
They crossed into the cloister walk: a run of carved pillars slick with rain, saints and monsters sharing lintels in the usual uneasy truce. Herbs steamed in raised beds—rue, tansy, sage—their scents clean and bitter in the damp. A novice hurried past with a covered bowl, eyes down, lips moving over a prayer as if speed alone could please heaven. Will’s gaze followed him a moment, then slipped away, scanning everything: the wear on a step that told of a favored shortcut, a patched section of wall where fire had licked years ago, the way two guards stood too straight for men who had not slept.
“You’re counting,” Lancelot said lightly.
“Nothing so harmless,” Will replied. “I’m recognizing.”
They came out again into a broader court where the keep’s main face stood: a curtain of pale stone, windows like hooded eyes, banners heavy with water yet refusing to fall. At its foot, under a jut of roof kept almost dry, a knot of townsfolk waited with petitions in hand—splintered cart-wheel, a parcel of torn cloth, a chicken tucked like a baby beneath an old woman’s arm. A chamberlain in a wet velvet cap paced before them, trying to look kind and important at once, and failing at both.
“Camelot,” Lancelot said, with a gentleness that made the word larger. “Not perfect. Better than before.”
Will said nothing to that. His gaze had snagged on a small scene at the edge of vision: a girl of twelve, perhaps, cheeks scabbed with cold, showing a stableboy her palm. When the boy took it in both hands, Will felt the old instinct draw up like a hound on scent—touch, and it opens—and he looked away, jaw tight, as if denying himself was its own small victory.
“Tell me about the Round Table,” he said, as much a command as a request.
Lancelot’s smile tilted. “Impatient?”
“Curious,” Will corrected. “I saw—” He cut himself off, mouth folding on the admission. “I’d like to know who I am meant to call comrade.”
“Or opponent?” Lancelot offered, amiably cynical. He slowed beneath a covered passage where rain hammered the tiles just an arm’s length away. “Very well. The Table is not merely furniture. It is a discipline. Men sit where they do not tower over one another, and it reminds them not to mistake noise for authority.”
“That working out?” Will asked.
“On alternate days,” Lancelot said, dry as bone. “Gawain is strength given legs: he laughs too loud, fights too soon, forgives after the ale runs out. He is better than he thinks and worse than he fears. Kay is Arthur’s foster-brother and will savage you with wit because he respects you; if he ignores you, you have truly failed. Dinadan makes a joke of everything until the moment for joking ends, and then he surprises you. Percival could carry you and your horse at once and will ask afterward if he hurt you. Bors is a wall. Pray you are on the inside of it when arrows fall. Mordred—” Lancelot’s tone thinned— “is a clever man who prefers shadows to sunlight; he smiles when other men count knives. Do not turn your back on him if you can help it.”
“And Arthur?” Will said, too quickly.
Lancelot’s face altered in the smallest ways, all of them controlled. “Arthur is a good king,” he said, formal in the way of a man repeating a fact he has carved into himself. “He is better than the world deserves and not as naïve as the world supposes. He listens. He forgives. He remembers. He is—” A breath, then a resettling of armor no one else could hear. “He is Arthur.”
“Useful,” Will said, but his eyes were softer than the word.
Lancelot accepted the barb with a courteous tilt of head. “You asked for truth, not gossip.”
“I asked for the Table,” Will said. “You left one chair for last.”
“Did I?” Lancelot’s smile acknowledged the point. “Tristan.”
The name fell like a coin on stone. It rang, kept ringing. Will did not blink.
“Here he is called Hannibal,” Lancelot went on, and for the first time there was a hesitation—as if even speaking the name required a certain posture. “He is not loud, nor often kind, nor ever uncertain. Arthur trusts him with what must be done and with what must not be spoken of afterward. If a thing must be cut, he cuts it once. If a man must be warned, one word is enough. He arrives when he pleases and accomplishes what he wills, and the two facts seem to forgive one another.”
“Is he beloved?” Will asked, the question too quick to have been edited, the edge of it too honest.
“By some,” Lancelot said. “By those who prefer results to songs. Feared, more often. Respected, always—if a man knows the difference between fear and respect.” He glanced sidelong. “You look as though you’ve already met him.”
“I haven’t,” Will said, and let the lie stand under his own breath. He watched the rain feather off the lip of a stone gutter, watched it catch like silver on the edges of Lancelot’s greaves. “I saw the Table. Faces. The room breathed. There was one I couldn’t see.” His mouth twisted, troubled by a failure he did not understand. “That’s new.”
“Some men make a habit of it,” Lancelot said softly. “Not being seen.”
“Some men hide,” Will returned. “Others blur the world around them.”
“And which is he?” Lancelot asked.
“I’ll tell you when I’ve met him,” Will said. “Or I won’t.”
They had come now to a narrow stair that rose between two sloping walls, the steps worn concave by centuries of boots. The rain became a consistent rattle overhead; somewhere a bell sounded the hour, a round, patient tone that seemed to approve of nothing and condemn nothing. Below, the courtyards collected their evening lamps: here a pool of yellow in a doorway, there a blue foxfire glint off wet helm and mail; the fortress-sea settling before the next storm.
“Merlin first,” Lancelot said, pausing at the foot of the stair and turning to take Will in again—from the stubborn set of his mouth to the bow’s easy weight across his back to the watchful eyes that seemed to count a room faster than most men could name it. Curiosity still tugged at him. “Whatever you saw when you touched me—”
“I didn’t touch you,” Will said, perfectly insolent. “You touched me.”
A blink, then a flash of laughing teeth. “Very well. Whatever happened will keep. You may tell the king as much or as little as your temper allows.” He tipped his head toward the stair. “But a word of courtesy, Will-not-Galahad: Camelot is a hall with long memories. We prefer our truths clean and our lies at least well dressed.”
“Then have your tailor ready,” Will said, stepping past him onto the first riser. “I ruin everything I wear.”
Lancelot huffed a laugh and followed, the two of them rising into the throat of the keep, toward the tower where a sorcerer liked his wind cold and his view long. Behind them the fortress breathed; ahead, the day narrowed to a door of old oak and iron. Somewhere far inside, a circle of men waited for a name they did not yet know how to carry. And somewhere at the edge of Will’s mind, in the place where visions left their bruise, the blurred figure waited, too—weight without face, gravity without star—already pulling.
The stair coiled upward, narrow and steep, each stone worn to a shallow curve by centuries of boots and robes. Rain pressed against arrow slits, dripping in rivulets that shivered down the walls, and the air grew colder as they climbed, thinner, charged with the faint hum of something Will could not name. By the time they reached the final landing, his pulse had quickened in spite of himself, not from exertion but from that strange, invisible weight that thickened the very air.
At the top of the stair stood a heavy oak door banded with black iron. Lancelot paused, lifted his gauntleted hand, and knocked—three even raps, solid as any command. Silence answered. He knocked again, with the patience of a man long accustomed to such indifference.
“Does he ever open when you knock?” Will asked, voice pitched low and dry.
“No,” Lancelot admitted.
“Then why bother?”
“Courtesy.”
Will snorted. “Courtesy to a door. Interesting custom.”
He set his palm flat against the wood, meaning only to steady himself, and at once the vision shuddered through him—not the clear knife-edge of another man’s memory, but a surge of raw energy that made his breath catch. The oak itself seemed to pulse under his hand, warm and thrumming, as though every book, every candle, every shard of knowledge stacked behind it pressed forward, whispering in tongues too quick to follow. He pulled back with a hiss, fingers flexing.
Lancelot gave him a sharp look. “Another vision?”
“Not exactly,” Will muttered, eyes narrowing at the door. “More like sticking your hand in a stormcloud.”
Without further ceremony, Lancelot pushed the door open.
The chamber beyond was a chaos of brilliance. Shelves groaned beneath books in languages Will did not recognize, rolls of parchment teetered in tottering towers, jars of powders and dried herbs lined the sills. Candles burned in profusion, their wax spilling in rivulets down iron holders, and above it all the beams of the roof creaked, hung with astrolabes, chains, and the skeletal wings of a broken kite contraption. The air smelled of ink and thyme, of charred paper and damp wool.
And in the center of it all sat Merlin.
The wizard looked up from his desk, where half a dozen scrolls had been unrolled at once and scribbled over in several different hands. His hair, silver, curled untidily at his temples; his eyes were black, sharp as obsidian, but his smile, when it came, was warm as sunlight.
“Ah,” he said, rising so abruptly that the desk jolted and three entire stacks of parchment slid to the floor in a sighing avalanche. “There you are. We have been expecting you.”
Will stepped inside, boots sinking into layers of discarded vellum. His gaze swept the room: the towering shelves, the dust-furred globes, the neat disorder that spoke of a mind moving faster than its hands. He let his fingers trail along the edge of a table stacked with open folios, parchment inked in curling lines that shifted like rivers. None of it made sense to him—letters from alphabets he did not know, diagrams of stars that seemed half real and half imagined.
“Do you actually read any of this,” Will asked, “or is it all just set dressing?”
Merlin’s laughter rang deep, startlingly youthful for his age. “Every word, Will. Every word, and twice the ones you would wish I hadn’t.”
Lancelot cleared his throat. “Merlin. I found him at the gate. He asked for you. He is—” He hesitated, not out of doubt but out of wonder. “He is exactly as you said. I saw it myself. He touched me and fell into a vision. The kind I have never seen, not even at your hand.”
“Did he now?” Merlin tilted his head, eyes gleaming. “Well, that was impolite of him.”
Will straightened, bristling. “I didn’t choose it. Believe me, I’d rather not know who you kissed last.”
Lancelot sputtered a laugh, unable to disguise it. Merlin, however, only smiled wider. “Sharp tongue. Good. You’ll need it here.” He leaned closer, studying Will with a precision that was neither unkind nor indulgent. “I can be read, yes, but not entirely. A trick of age. You will find me clearer than most men, and that will irritate you. It irritates everyone.”
Will rolled his eyes, though the corner of his mouth twitched. “You’re very sure of yourself.”
“And you,” Merlin said, “are very sure of others. An exhausting gift, isn’t it? To see whether a man is honest before he speaks, to know if he is cruel before he lifts a hand, to taste his cowardice before he even flees. To carry all of it as if it were your own.”
Will’s throat worked, but he said nothing.
Merlin clapped his hands together, as though to scatter the moment like dust. “Enough of that. You’re here now. Camelot is unkind to dreamers, but it pays its debts to seers. Sit, eat something, try not to fall over. We’ll let Arthur decide how best to test you.”
A roll of parchment slid from the desk and unspooled across the floor, scattering diagrams of stars and half-finished translations of Greek. Will bent, caught the edge, and studied the script a moment before shaking his head.
“Not English. Not Latin. Not French.” He glanced up at Merlin. “You making things up as you go?”
“Always,” Merlin said cheerfully. “It’s the only way to stay ahead of history.”
Lancelot sighed, though his eyes were fond. “This is what you wanted, Merlin. I’ll take him to Arthur when you’re finished with your tricks.”
Merlin’s smile sharpened, kind and mischievous all at once. “Oh, I’ve barely begun.”
The tower chamber seemed to breathe around them, its shadows swaying with the candlelight as though the room itself listened. The fall of parchment still whispered across the floor where Merlin had dislodged half a library, and yet he remained composed, as though chaos were merely another servant in his employ. Will stood stiff against the desk, curls damp and stubborn in his eyes, his hands restless, forever dragging across the edges of books and scrolls as if touch alone might anchor him.
“Well,” Will said at last, voice cutting through the hush with a blade’s edge. “That was charming. But tell me something, Merlin—why?” He turned sharply now, gaze hard, the air about him taut as drawn bowstring. “Why does Arthur need to test me? You’ve already seen what I am. You dragged me here because of it. Lancelot has seen it too. If either of you need proof, I can show you again. I can show you now.” His hand lifted, as though in warning, as though he might seize another truth without permission. “So why him?”
The question struck the chamber with a weight beyond its words. Even the banners nailed to the beams stirred faintly, as though some unseen current had entered with his demand.
Merlin folded his hands before him, his face as calm as stone in a river. “Because he is the king,” he said softly, with that dangerous clarity that needed no force to compel. “Because Camelot does not open its gates at the whim of sorcerers, nor at the visions of wanderers, nor at the courtesy of knights. It bends to Arthur. Always to Arthur. If you are to sit at his Table, if you are to call yourself his knight, then he must see you. He must know you. That is his right, and yours to endure.”
Will laughed, a low sound edged with scorn, though there was little mirth in it. “Endure? That’s the word we’re using? I’ve been enduring my whole damned life. Enduring towns that turned me out because they didn’t want a boy who knew what their hands had done when no one was looking. Enduring men who smiled while I bled their secrets into the dirt. Enduring priests who told me my visions were blasphemy and healers who told me they were madness. And now you want me to stand before a table full of men for a test?”
Lancelot shifted uneasily, though his eyes never left Will’s face. “It is no small thing you carry,” he said, almost gently.
“No small thing?” Will snapped. “It’s never small. It’s endless. I see more in a man’s glance than most see in a lifetime, and I can’t shut it off. Honesty or deceit, kindness or cruelty, all of it written across them like a ledger. Do you know what it’s like to feel every cowardice before it even acts? To smell betrayal like smoke before it burns? To drown in all of them, over and over, and never once find silence?” His voice broke sharp on the last word, though his face remained set in defiance.
Merlin regarded him with steady eyes, not pitying, not shaken. “Yes,” he said simply. “I do.”
The words landed like a stone cast into deep water, ripples widening through the chamber. Even Will faltered, his mouth pressing shut, suspicion dark in his gaze.
Merlin went on, tone quiet but absolute. “And still I tell you: it must be Arthur. Not because you have not shown enough. Not because I doubt you. But because the throne must see what you are, and you must stand before it. That is the law of this place. If you are to belong, it will not be because I vouched for you. It will be because the king himself has weighed you and found you fit to sit among his knights.”
Will’s laugh came bitter again, softer this time, frayed at the edges. “And how does he plan to weigh me? Shall he toss a coin and see if I tell him where it lands? Or stare at the stars until I recite the constellations backward? Or perhaps I’ll just shake his hand and ruin his illusions about his perfect queen—would that do?”
Lancelot’s eyes widened a fraction, but Merlin’s expression did not shift. He only shrugged, the motion deceptively careless, like a hawk ruffling its feathers. “We shall see.”
“That’s not an answer.”
Will exhaled sharply, the sound more growl than sigh. He turned from them, stalking toward the shelves, dragging his hand across the row of ancient spines, fingertips trembling faintly with the energy that bled through the bindings. He stopped, pressing his palm flat against one book as though he might still the storm inside him, then looked back, his voice harsher, rawer.
At last Merlin clapped his hands, brisk, scattering tension like dust from a cloak. “Enough for now. The hour grows late. You are tired, wet, and half-mad with your own fury. Rest, eat, change your clothes before they mildew. Lancelot will take you to your chamber. At the hour of six, the Table gathers. Before the others come, Arthur will greet you. And then—” he spread his hands, palms open, eyes glittering with certainty “—you will do what only you can. You will read them. All of them.”
The words landed heavy, like iron dropped on stone.
Lancelot stiffened, composure faltering, eyes wide with sudden alarm. “No,” he said sharply. “You cannot demand that. Not before the king, not before them all. It would expose—” His voice broke off, and he glanced away, jaw clenched tight. “It would ruin more than it proves.”
Merlin’s gaze did not waver. “It will prove him,” he said simply.
Will cut in, voice flaring with anger, his whole body taut.
“You want me to tear them open in front of each other. To lay bare what they’ve spent years hiding. You think they’ll thank me for that? You think they’ll call me brother when I’ve stripped them naked in their king’s hall?”
His fury fixed on Merlin alone, ignoring Lancelot’s protest as if it were nothing but smoke.
Merlin’s smile curved, small and knowing. “No. They will not thank you. Some will hate you for it. Others will fear you. A few will understand. And one, perhaps, will see you for what you are.”
The words hung, strange and quiet, almost too gentle to have weight.
Will’s mouth twisted, but no reply came. His silence was louder than his scorn.
“That will not make him welcome.” Lancelot cut in, sharper than before, the control in his voice strained now, like steel beginning to groan under too much weight. His words struck the chamber as if they could bar the very future from arriving
Merlin did not flinch. He stood where the shadows of the high rafters cut his shoulders into light and dark, his black eyes steady, his voice quiet but resonant as water echoing through stone. “Welcome is a courtesy. Seen is a truth. And truth, however unwelcome, carries its own power.”
Lancelot’s mouth tightened, his protest poised again but caught on the edge of his teeth. For him, the idea was no abstraction—it was a blade already grazing his skin. He knew what it meant to be seen, truly seen, and his silence was louder than argument.
Merlin turned his gaze back to Will, whose fury had not abated, whose eyes burned even as his body sagged with the exhaustion of the day. “It will make you seen,” Merlin repeated, softer this time, as if to Will alone. “And that, here in Camelot, is the beginning of belonging. Even if belonging feels like a wound.”
For the first time, Will faltered—not softened, not soothed, but unsettled by the sheer clarity in the wizard’s tone. He turned away sharply, tugging his cloak around him as though to hide the betrayal of his stillness.
Merlin smiled faintly, almost tender. “Go. Let Lancelot show you the halls. Tonight will come soon enough.”
Will’s mouth tightened, a storm gathered cleanly into the single hard line of his lips; whatever remained to be said was strangled at birth, and he turned on his heel, cloak flaring in a wet arc that caught candlelight and threw it in shards across the littered floor. He did not bow; he did not soften; he did not even blink as he cut past the door—only that flensing glance he gave Merlin, the kind that promised a long memory and no forgiveness, and then he was in the stair, his bootheels already striking the stone with a quick, angry cadence.
Merlin remained standing amid his tumbling towers of parchment and jars of herbs, a still point in a spinning room, the hem of his robe brushing vellum and dust. He watched Will go with the composed attention of a man who had seen tempests before and knew precisely how long they lasted. The tower listened with him: the thready hiss of candles, the tick of cooling iron, the fine-hair tremor of energy that always lingered where his work lay open. For a breath he said nothing. Then he lifted one hand and snapped his fingers—a clean, bright sound that cut through wax and smoke like a needle through cloth—and with the same hand he made a small, unmistakable summoning gesture toward the stair.
“After him,” Merlin said, voice even, eyes never losing their depth. “Show him his chambers. Leave him in peace. Do not linger. And—” the slightest narrowing of those precise eyes—“pull yourself together.”
The last phrase bit without breaking the skin. Lancelot felt it all the same. Something in his careful composure slipped a fraction, a muscle along the jaw knotting before obedience smoothed it again. Pull yourself together, which in Merlin’s unadorned lexicon meant: Will has already brushed the truth you carry like a brand beneath your armor; he has tasted what you’d die to keep unspoken; and still the king trusts you—so master yourself. And, because Merlin was not cruel, there was the ghost of a second meaning beneath it: Where love falls, it falls; now stand to your duty.
Lancelot bowed—short, crisp, the salute of a man who took orders as naturally as breath—and strode into the stairwell. The tower’s spiral throat swallowed him at once; it was narrow and slick, hung with damp and echo, torchlight taking the steps two at a time before his feet did. He caught sight of Will only a turn below—dark curls, dark cloak, the quick, furious economy of a man who had made a life of leaving.
“Wait!” Lancelot called, voice pitched to carry, authority wrapped in courtesy. “You don’t even know where you’re going.”
“Doesn’t matter,” Will threw back without slowing. “Anywhere that isn’t a lecture hall with a wizard in it.”
“Anywhere,” Lancelot said, lengthening his stride, “will drop you in the buttery or the latrines, and neither keeps a decent fire. Your chamber does.”
Will’s laugh was small and sharp, a spark struck off flint. “A bed and a test. Camelot’s hospitality is overwhelming.”
“Hospitality is a two-door thing,” Lancelot replied, coming level with him for three steps before the stair tightened again. “We open one; you might consider opening the other.”
Will pivoted half a turn while still moving, walking backward with reckless balance, the torchlight cutting blue into his eyes. “I open doors too easily. That’s the problem, Sir Polished. I touch and everything swings wide.”
“Enough,” Lancelot said, and in the next curve of the spiral he slipped ahead, then stopped cleanly, a wall of gleaming mail and controlled breath. His palm came up and set to Will’s chest—not hard, not a shove, just that precise, braced pressure a master-at-arms uses to halt a charging student without breaking him. The contact was brief, careful, angled; his fingers did not spread.
Will looked down at the hand, then up, the corner of his mouth rising into a wicked, amused line. “Careful,” he said, voice low as a drawn bowstring, “or I might learn your favorite sin and your least favorite prayer.”
Lancelot withdrew as if the skin beneath his glove had found a coal. “Then let me spare us both. Walk. I’ll point. You don’t touch anyone else on the way.”
“Afraid I’ll spoil your afternoon with another handshake?” Will asked, turning forward again and letting Lancelot set the pace. “You people are very touchy for men in iron.”
“Men in iron,” Lancelot returned, “get accustomed to choosing how much they feel and when. Some of us are slower learners than others.”
“Some of you learn to hide,” Will said. “Others learn to blur.”
“And which am I?” Lancelot asked, not taking the bait, not quite.
“I’ve been in your head once today,” Will said. “You don’t get a second free.”
They went down two flights and out into a gallery that ran like a vein along the inner wall: open arches to the left framing rain-heavy air, hammered tapestries to the right depicting saints scowling at dragons and dragons yawning at saints. The floor shone with long seasons of sand and boot-leather; rushes in copper pans sweetened the wet, a sacrament of rosemary and mint losing a brave fight against horse and human. Servants ghosted past with practised invisibility, a scribe clutched a basket of folded letters like a life preserver, a cat blinked as if ownership of the corridor had passed to it by ancient grant.
“Left,” Lancelot said, not unkindly, with a glance to make sure Will followed. “Those stairs lead to the chapel and the treasury. Ignore both. The king likes piety, and the treasurer likes locks.”
“And wizards like tests,” Will muttered.
“Wizards like certainty,” Lancelot corrected. “Arthur likes justice. They meet in the middle more often than you’d think.”
Will huffed. “I’m a poor fit for the middle.”
“So I gathered,” Lancelot said, and then, after a beat that admitted more than most men would have: “But I’ve seen men forged to fit worse places.”
They turned beneath a ribbed vault where torches hissed and threw smoke up into webs of stone. Will’s shoulders, drawn tight since he’d fled the tower, eased a fraction; the edges of him were still knives, but the hand that had been making a restless fist now opened and closed without violence.
A pair of squires came haring around a corner and skidded to a halt at the sight of them; one dropped a bundle of javelins and went scarlet, the other bowed so low he nearly butted his own knees. Lancelot spared them a glance that forgave and corrected in the same breath; Will, catching the raw blush, looked away before the boy’s embarrassment could write itself into him.
They crossed a small court where rain quilted the surface of a stone cistern into a thousand traveling circles. A cook darted under a hooded passage with a tray of sugared quince, two guards traded a dice throw and the kind of laughter men use in place of sleep, a falcon on a perch clicked its beak at nothing like a nobleman agreeing with himself.
“Here,” Lancelot said at last, stopping before an oaken door banded in iron, the wood burnished by years of hands. He set his palm to the latch—off to the side, the same careful angle, as if he had learned even a handle could carry memory—and pushed it inward. “Your chamber.”
The room breathed warm on them: a hearth already laid and bright, a bed broad enough to call a field by the standards of the poor, a coffer, a stand for weapons, a high, narrow window showing a slit of wet sky and the black script of ravens written against it. Someone had left a folded tunic and hose on the chair by the fire, a towel, a small jar of oil that smelled faintly of juniper. A tray waited on the table—bread, cheese, dried figs, a plate of cold roast, a jug beaded with damp.
Will stood just inside the threshold and took it in the way he took everything: not as a gift, not as a promise, but as a set of facts; beautiful, useful, temporary. His gaze slid once to the hearth—the idea of heat, the idea of stillness—and then to Lancelot’s hand still on the latch.
“You can go,” Will said.
“That,” Lancelot answered, half a bow already forming, “was the plan.”
He didn’t move. For one breath, then two, the old discipline fought the new caution in him; at last he inclined his head fully, composure buckled back into place. “Six o’clock. The Round Table. Someone will fetch you. Eat. Change. If you sleep, set a hand on the bed first.” He caught himself, smiled a fraction at the absurdity of the advice. “It’s yours. It won’t bite.”
He stepped back into the corridor, but Will spoke again, and the knight halted.
“You were right,” Will said, eyes on the fire now, the light licking gold along his lashes. “About hospitality. Doors both ways.”
Lancelot waited.
“I’ll try not to open any more of yours,” Will finished, and this time the wickedness in his mouth gentled—no apology, never that, but an accord made between dangerous men.
“Try not to open your own veins either,” Lancelot said quietly. “The Table can be generous. It can also be cruel. Don’t hand it a knife.”
And with that Lancelot inclined his head once, soldier to soldier, and withdrew. The door settled. The latch clicked. The rain kept writing its long letter on the stones outside, and in the warm, unfamiliar room Will stood a moment longer without moving, the day roaring in his bones, the tower’s charge still sparking along his skin. Then he crossed to the fire and set his palm above it, not touching, feeling the heat rise—learning, just for a breath, how to be warmed by something without letting it burn.
The chamber received him with warmth and silence, as if Camelot itself meant to soothe his raw edges, but Will did not trust it. He stood a moment by the hearth, boots leaving dark crescents on the rushes, eyes fixed on the garments neatly folded on the chair: a tunic of deep blue trimmed in gold, hose spun fine enough to mock the rough wool he had worn on the road, a mantle lined with fur against the draught. It was too careful, too generous, as though the castle had known the measure of him before he arrived.
With a tired breath he pulled free the soaked linen clinging to his back, dragging it over his head and tossing it across the chest. Steam rose faintly from his skin as the fire caught at the damp. His body was wiry, marked by travel, but there was a restless grace in the way he moved, as though stillness was foreign to him. He tugged on the new hose, smoothed the tunic over his shoulders, fastened the mantle. The cloth was heavy, honest, and for a heartbeat it disarmed him—warmth was a dangerous kindness.
But his mind refused stillness.
The day had ground him down to the bone: Merlin’s calm riddles, Lancelot’s startled panic, the tower thick with knowledge like smoke. Yet none of that clung to him with the weight of what he had seen—or rather, what he had not.
For as long as he could remember, his visions had obeyed him, however reluctantly. Every man he touched split open: cowardice laid bare, cruelty tasted, honesty or deceit written in the pulse. Some clearer than others, yes; Merlin himself had been like reading through glass clouded with frost, but still Will had read him, had glimpsed something real beneath the veil. Always, if he pressed hard enough, he could pry. Always, if he reached deep enough, the marrow answered.
But today—today something had been different.
That blurred figure at the Round Table. That presence immense and magnetic, and yet impossible to seize. He had strained for it, clawed through Lancelot’s memory until his temples burned, and still the face slipped from him, refusing to resolve. Not hidden, not faint, but utterly beyond. It had been like reaching for the sun and finding only blindness.
And that unsettled him more than cruelty, more than betrayal, more than all the filth of men’s secrets he had dragged with him across half a life. Because this—this was new. This was the axis of the world tilting under his feet.
He sank onto the edge of the bed, elbows braced on his knees, fingers pressed to his brow as though he might push the memory back into focus. Who was it? Which of them had cast that shadow in the vision? Which knight sat among the others and yet did not yield to him, did not bleed truth into his hand?
And why?
The questions circled him like hounds, relentless. The fire snapped in the hearth; the chamber hummed its false promise of comfort; the mantle weighed familiar on his shoulders. But beneath all of it, Will’s mind returned again and again to that blurred figure—unknown, unreadable, a darkness not of absence but of depth.
And for the first time in years, Will Graham felt not only suspicion, not only anger, but awe