CHAPTER NINETEEN #2
“True, true,” I answered and watched as he moved away from the window. He crossed to the fireplace, which was cold, not yet lit, and stood with both forearms braced on the mantle and his head bowed. “Or perhaps he had other reasons. I suppose we will never know.”
The dragon tattoo shifted again across his back beneath the linen of his tunic, subtle as breathing.
“Why did you come here?”
“I came here to tell you that you have one person in this castle who knows your secret but has done nothing with it.” I let that settle. “I came here to remind you what that’s worth.”
He lifted his head and looked at me over his shoulder, and I held his gaze.
Then Arthur turned to face me fully. When I met it, his expression was impossible to read, which was rare; usually, I could find the shape of what a person was thinking behind their eyes.
With Arthur, it occasionally went opaque in a way that reminded me the dragon was in there too, and the dragon didn’t have expressions I recognized.
“There is more on your mind,” he said.
“I have an offer.” I kept my voice level.
“An offer for what?”
“Let me watch. That’s all. You have Mordred for magic. You have Lance for warfare.” Something flickered briefly in his eyes at the name. “You could have me for this: for the quiet work, the observation. You could have me for the things people say when they think no one important is listening.”
I waited.
“You’ve always been good at that,” he said.
“Yes.”
Another silence. Longer this time. “And in exchange?”
“Nothing.” I met his eyes. “We’ve been brothers since we were seven years old, Arthur. I don’t want an exchange. I want you not to fall.”
A clean lie. My best kind.
Arthur studied me, and the scrutiny lasted long enough that a less practiced man might have shifted, or added something, or tried to fill the space. I didn’t move, didn’t even blink at a rate that wasn’t natural.
Finally, something in his face settled.
Not trust, exactly. Arthur didn’t have trust left, not the uncomplicated kind anyway. But this was something adjacent to it, something that looked like a man who’d been standing alone too long and was too tired to keep refusing the company.
“Watch then,” he said.
He turned back to the cold fireplace.
I took that as my dismissal and moved for the door.
“Kay.”
I stopped.
“If you’re playing me,” he said, without turning, “I’ll know.”
“Of course you will,” I said. “You always have.”
I left.
The corridor outside was still dark and still cold. The young guard with the ill-fitting armor didn’t meet my eyes as I passed. Alexander did, briefly, professionally, and I gave him a nod that meant nothing except what he wanted it to mean.
I walked back toward my own chambers at the same measured pace I’d used coming.
The throne room lay at the far end of the eastern corridor. I didn’t look at it as I passed. There was no point in looking at things you intended to have. Such things made men sentimental, and sentiment was the rust that seized the gears of a well-made plan.
Arthur would fall.
Not today. Perhaps not this year. Perhaps not even next.
The timeline was flexible; it depended on variables I was still tracking: the girl, Lance, the thing inside Arthur’s chest that he couldn’t fully control and that was, from what I’d now observed at close range, getting harder to contain rather than easier.
And when he fell, there needed to be someone standing in the right place. Not someone who’d grabbed for the throne, but someone it simply fell to.
I turned the corner and let the darkness of the corridor close behind me, and the throne room disappeared from sight, and I kept walking.
Patient as I’d always been.
Patient as I’d always have to be.
-GUIN-
The guards arrived unannounced.
There were two of them, and the sound of their heavy boots pounded on the stone flooring as a swinging torch illuminated the path before them. The locks clicked, and the door opened, revealing a burly guard with a lantern, whose jaw was the same shape.
“The king’s called for ye,” he declared.
I was on my feet before he finished the sentence. Not because I was eager to see Arthur; far from it. More because sitting still and alone in the cell for as long as I’d been here had started to feel like rehearsing for burial.
The corridor outside the cell was narrow, low-ceilinged, and smelled of mold, sweat, grime, and filth. But I didn’t care. I was just glad to stretch my legs, which were beyond stiff.
We turned a corner, and the passage widened slightly, the ceiling lifting.
A long window opened in the far wall. It was more of an archer’s slit, really, but it was still wide enough to see through.
The guards stopped just short of it. Some disagreement had broken out between them, and now they were loudly arguing: something about which route the king had specified.
The square-faced one was certain it was the east corridor.
The other was equally certain he was wrong.
I opted for whichever route would take the longest: let the king wait for his prisoner. I was in no hurry to see him.
As the guards continued to argue, I inched toward the window, catching the sounds drifting in from outside.
The courtyard below was alive with movement.
As far as I could see from the very narrow slit, a procession was moving through the main gates.
Not a military procession, but a more...
curated one, something more refined. This was a group of riders in silk livery, their horses groomed until they shone, pennants flying in colors I didn’t recognize.
Someone important must have been arriving.
Just behind the riders was a carriage. But not just any carriage: with its white wood and gold accents, this one screamed expense.
And then she stepped out of it.
The woman who descended from the carriage moved like she’d been practicing this entrance her whole life.
She was tall in a regal sort of way, with dark auburn hair that contrasted beautifully against a gown of deep blue silk, which caught the light and held it.
Her posture was the kind that gets drilled into daughters of noble houses before they can properly walk: head up, shoulders back, and chin at an angle that implied she was perpetually looking at something that was slightly above the horizon.
The court moved for her, that was really the only way to describe it: knights straightened, servants stepped aside, and the whole crowd in the courtyard seemed to exhale and reorganize itself around her passage.
Two knights bowed. I couldn’t tell which ones because their armor hid them.
But the bows they gave her weren’t the half-nod they’d given me when I’d been Lioran, which was courteous but brisk, simply the acknowledgment of a peer.
These were full, sweeping bows. The kind that meant we know exactly who you are.
And we know exactly how important you are.
The woman smiled at them, and her expression was gracious, warm, and practiced. It was then that I recognized her: Lady Isolde of Corbenic.
The first time I’d seen her was during the early days of the Shadow Trials.
She’d appeared in the Great Hall during a feast, and I’d immediately noticed her ease with Arthur.
I could remember how she’d leaned over to congratulate him on something or other and how he’d smiled up at her, as though she mattered.
But then he’d turned that icy manner of his on her, and she’d left the room, clearly disappointed.
So, why had she returned?
I pressed my palm flat against the cold stone of the wall and peered in closer.
A woman near the carriage, a handmaiden from the look of her, leaned in to arrange a fold of Isolde’s blue gown, and Isolde touched her arm briefly in response, almost fondly: as though she knew the girl’s name and had for years.
The servants around Isolde were smiling, the genuine kind. I’d spent weeks in Camelot as Lioran, and I couldn’t have named a single servant who’d smiled at anyone here like that.
I didn’t know much about Lady Isolde of Corbenic beyond the outline: she was Arthur’s former betrothed.
According to Percival, Isolde had been more than just a flitting interest for Arthur.
Percival had said that perhaps Arthur had even loved her once upon a time.
I could only assume the reason Arthur had broken off their courtship had something to do with the dragon.
It seemed a fairly good reason to break an engagement when the beast within you might turn your beloved into embers.
Regardless, the question still remained: why was Isolde here now?
I watched her cross the courtyard and couldn’t help but notice that she moved like she belonged here, like Camelot recognized her and was glad she’d returned.
Behind me, the guards had resolved their argument, or so it seemed, because they’d stopped their bickering.
Now Lantern-jaw was clearing his throat.
“Move along.”
I moved, and I was grateful for it because I couldn’t say I was happy at seeing Isolde, something that made little sense as she was nothing and no one to me. So, why did I care?
I told myself I didn’t care why she was here. I told myself it was irrelevant to anything that mattered. And I was almost convincing.
-GUIN-
The guards led me to the newly appointed chambers of the Knights of the Round Table. Rather than the eastern tower, where we’d been located previously, the knights were now in the King’s tower, but his chambers were at the highest level of the tower, and these were a few floors beneath.
We paused in front of a door, and Lantern-jaw knocked once. The door immediately opened to reveal a dour-faced Galahad. As to what I was doing outside Galahad’s chamber? That was anyone’s guess.
“The king said we were to bring ‘er here,” Lantern-jaw said.
Galahad just nodded, and the guards released me, then turned around and left. I didn’t make any motion to do anything but just stood there, probably stupidly.
“Why am I—”
“—I’m to be your warden.”
Then Galahad pushed his door open even further, inviting me inside a space that seemed like its own form of trial.
I didn’t even realize I’d moved until I was standing in the middle of the room and Galahad had closed the door around me.