I shudder at his closeness, at the sound of his voice in my mind. He is here now, truly here. A presence separate from my own, but inhabiting my skin simultaneously. Messy and full, like I’d felt when my grandmother Charles had possessed me.

Sixth-century king. Of course he’d take one look at me and call me a foreigner. Irritation hits me hard. It’s sharp enough to cut through my fear, my trembling hands. “You mean I don’t look like you? Well, you don’t look like me either.”

A long pause. When Arthur speaks again, I don’t need to translate. “And you are a woman.” I hear the surprise in his voice at this, as though my being a woman is the more shocking revelation.

I scowl at the shadows. “You just now figuring that out?”

“When we last fought together, I could not see you so clearly, daughter of sons.”

That phrasing reminds me of Vera’s “daughter of daughters.” I don’t like it. Don’t like how familiar that is, how familiar he’s being. “I have a name. Bree.”

“Bri?” A low laugh. “Of course that is your name. You are bri itself. Your own, and mine.”

“What does—” I shake my head, but again Arthur’s Old Welsh supplies the answer. “Bri,” to him, is a noun. Honor. Dignity. Authority. Power. I scoff. “I am not your bri. Call me Bree or Briana.”

He presses forward as if I never spoke. “You are my Scion. Your fight comes from mine, and the battles that I have won—and lost—are yours to know and use. My power, yours to wield. We are kin and kindred.”

“By force,” I spit. “Not by choice. One of your ‘kin’ was a monster.”

A pause. “It is only when I Call one of my Scions that I can bear witness to their lives, and Samuel Davis was never Called. It was when I Called you that I learned of his sin.” Another pause. “I wish it had not been committed.”

My confusion turns to anger. “You couldn’t have stopped him?”

“Even if I had been Awakened with him, he would not have known me, heard me as you do. You are the first Scion with whom I can commune, Briana. The first in fifteen centuries. Never in my dreams or Merlin’s could we have imagined that I could live and breathe alongside a descendant, the way that I lived and breathed and fought alongside you the night you allowed me to Call you.”

Arthur’s words feel infuriatingly true. I am a Medium. Of course the way he inhabits me is like no other Scion before. Of course the Spell of Eternity—and its caster, Merlin—had not accounted for me.

“You are unique, daughter.”

My jaw clenches. “At what cost?”

A third pause in the darkness. “An immense one.”