CHAPTER ELEVEN #3
He looked at me as something shifted in his eyes, some last careful restraint dissolving like frost off morning glass. He smiled and then shook his head. “I guess I was a fool.”
“Well, why don’t you make up for lost time then?”
“That sounds like the best idea I’ve heard all year,” he answered with a smile.
He moved over me slowly, one hand bracing beside my head, and I had one breath to register the weight of him above me before his mouth found mine.
The kiss wasn’t gentle. And it wasn’t the careful, tentative thing I’d imagined in the dark, in all the times I’d spent imagining this happening between us.
Instead, it was certain and deep, and it pulled the air straight from my lungs.
I made a sound against him, low and involuntary, swallowed immediately by the press of his mouth, and I felt him react to that sound.
I felt his breath change, and the kiss sharpen.
His hand moved into my hair as his fingers threaded through it slowly, drawing it back from my face, and then his mouth followed the line of my jaw, the curve of my throat.
I dug my fingers into the fabric at his shoulders as he came back to my mouth, and this time his tongue moved against mine, slow and searching, with the patience of a man who had no intention of rushing.
I wrapped my legs around him, and his breath hitched in a sharp, fractured sound he didn’t bother to contain. His hand tightened in my hair, and something that had been restrained in the kiss broke loose entirely, becoming deep and demanding, his body pressing mine down into the thin mattress.
I felt his cock against my stomach. And it was so hard, undeniably so, the evidence of everything unspoken between us that was finally being made real and solid.
He pulled back just enough to look at me, both hands framing my face, his eyes moving over it the way they had in the forest, like he was memorizing every line.
“Guin.” My name in his mouth sounded rough, stripped of anything performative.
“No more talking.”
-ARTHUR-
The dragon knew.
That was the thing I couldn’t say aloud. That was the thing I’d never say to any of them: not to Lance, not to Bedivere, the head of the Guard, a man who’d served me long enough to know when to stop asking questions.
The forest floor was soft with leaves, and Cabal moved through it without complaint, his hooves leaving dark impressions in the mud.
Around me, the riding party kept their distance.
They always did when I went quiet like this.
Twenty years of watching a king’s moods teaches a man things faster than any tutor can.
She runs. We must hunt her. We must find her. We must bring her back.
I pressed my heels in, and Cabal picked up his pace without protest.
The trees thickened, oak and ash crowding the path until it ceased to be a path at all and became instead just a suggestion of open space between trunks.
My knights and my guard filed in behind me, one after the other.
I heard the creak of armor, the soft jingle of bridle rings, and someone cleared his throat.
Once the road opened enough, Lance rode up alongside me just as he always did. He still hadn’t learned that some silences weren’t invitations.
“The trail’s gone cold,” he said.
I said nothing.
“‘Arthur.” His voice had dropped to that particular register he used when he wished to speak plainly without being seen to overstep. “How do you know where she went?”
The trees opened briefly onto a ridge. Below, the valley spread gray and green in the morning light, a river cutting through it like a scar. I could feel her; that’s how I knew. It was the dragon’s awareness of her, which had bled into mine over years of the creature’s slow occupation of my body.
Now it was simply a heat behind my chest, directional as a compass needle.
“I just... I just know.”
“That’s not—”
I turned to face him sharply. “—I fucking know, Lance. Leave it at that.”
He went quiet and fell back half a length.
It wasn’t usual for me to bark at him, but I wasn’t in the mood to explain myself.
Not to him, not to anyone. I heard Gawain murmur something behind us and Lance’s answering silence, which meant Lance was grinding his jaw and Gawain was wise enough to leave him to it.
The valley pulled at me, and in response, we descended.
She’d had help. That much I’d worked out before we’d even left the castle yard.
Mordred’s wards on the cell had disallowed her from using her magic, and beyond that, the lock on her cell had been opened from the outside.
The guard posted at the dungeon stair had been found asleep, and I’d had half a mind to kill him on the spot. But I hadn’t: too many witnesses.
I breathed out through my nose.
The pace slowed as the ground became softer near the river’s edge. Reeds swayed in the water, and a heron took flight from the shallows, flying across the pewter sky without apparent concern. My knights spread out without being ordered to, reading the ground like good soldiers.
Lance again appeared on my left, clearly not having given up on interrogating me.
“She was a prisoner,” he said. “In the dungeon which was protected with Mordred’s wards. Not to mention the guard posted.”
“Yes.”
“A guard you selected personally.”
“Also yes.”
“Then how...” He paused, took a breath, and began again. I could feel the calculation, the weighing of the words he chose. “She’s just a woman, Arthur. She had no weapons. No allies, at least, that we’re aware of. How does a woman with no—”
“—I don’t know.”
“—no resources simply walk out of a cell that twenty men couldn’t—”
“—I said I don’t know—”
“—and if she had allies, then an ally inside Camelot—”
I reined Cabal sharply and turned to face him. The riding party stopped, and all conversations ceased as every man went still. Even the horses seemed to understand that the quality of the air had changed.
Lance met my eyes. He was the only one who ever did.
“—I don’t fucking know how the fuck she escaped.”
My voice came out too loud for the morning.
It scattered the birds from the nearby brush.
“I also don’t know who the fuck helped her. And I don’t know how the fuck she managed it with a guard on the stair and a lock on the door. And Mordred’s fucking wards securing the dungeon. I know none of those fucking things! What I do know is that she’s gone, and I know she’s moving.”
I stopped and caught myself before I said too much, feeling the dragon stirring beneath my ribs.
It was pleased by the display, and I hated that.
“That’s what I know. So either help me find her or fall the fuck back and let someone else ride beside me.”
At that, there was nothing but silence. I wasn’t sure if I’d ever talked to Lance in such a manner before, and I definitely hadn’t in front of his men. The expression on his face revealed as much, but I didn’t regret my words. Sometimes he needed to know his place.
He held my gaze for two more seconds, then nodded and looked forward, his jaw set. He said nothing. Which was the closest he ever came to an apology.
I turned Cabal back toward the river.
Closer.
The needle in my chest was pointing east, towards a place where the water was bending around a group of willows.
I followed it without explaining myself, which was just as well because I was the fucking king, and as the fucking king, I didn’t need to explain myself.
Behind me, the sound of uncertainty had a texture, that careful not-quite-silence of men deciding how much they trusted the man they followed.
But they always followed me. And they always would.
The dragon knew that too, and it whispered its satisfaction which felt like what I imagined purring would feel like to a cat.
She is not much farther ahead.
The willow branches hung in the water, and the dragon pulled me east and then north, upwards along a rutted road that climbed out of the river valley and into a group of buildings that was barely large enough to call a village.
There was a mill, a smithy with a cold forge, and three or four cottages with their shutters closed against the cold morning air.
How the dragon knew where to find her, I had no fucking idea. But it did and that was all I was going to focus on.
Soon we reached a tavern. The sign over the door was so worn that I could barely read the name: The Old Goat Inn.
The heat within me surged so suddenly that I had to breathe through it.
Our mate is here.
I raised my fist, and the riding party stopped. No one spoke. Lance pulled up beside me as he read the building, read my face, and drew his sword without being asked. The sound of steel leaving a scabbard moved down the line like a sharp whisper.
I dismounted, and the others followed. Then I handed my reins to the nearest man, Percival.
“Four at the back,” I said quietly. “The rest with me.
”