CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE #2
The long tables were pushed to the sides, the hall opened for ceremony, and my court arranged itself in the careful clusters of people who wanted to observe without appearing to observe.
Kay stood near the door while Lance was at my shoulder, having appeared from nowhere at precisely the right moment, silent and reading the room with those eyes that missed nothing.
The doors opened, and Isolde walked in.
I’d been braced for it. Had given myself the walk from the Council Chamber to the Great Hall to prepare, to lock everything behind the usual fortifications. And yet it still landed.
She was wearing Corbenic’s green and gold. Her auburn hair was caught back from her face, not elaborately, not in the fashion that required a team of attendants to construct, but practically, with the ease of a woman who understood that her face didn’t need scaffolding.
She was just as beautiful as she always was, with a sort of regal loveliness that was rare. The freckles across her nose were still there. She’d never powdered them over. I’d noticed that the first time I met her and registered it as a certain type of confidence that required no performance.
She moved with the unhurried certainty of a woman who’d been trained to ride, hunt, and manage three hundred acres of working estate before she was sixteen.
This wasn’t court movement, which was a learned art of calculated grace, but this was actual movement, the kind that came from knowing what your body could do.
Her eyes found mine the moment she entered.
What passed between us in that half-second wasn’t diplomatic.
She knew that I was uncomfortable. The moment she saw my face, she was reading it, and she was finding things she hadn’t been sent to find.
Protocol said she should have crossed the hall to me, to her king. Yet, I was the one who stood and left the dais.
I was three steps down before I realized what I was doing. Kay’s expression flickered, just barely, the twitch of a man noticing a deviation. Lance said nothing. The court watched with the careful non-attention of people who were very much paying attention.
I kept walking.
We met in the middle of the hall, and I took her hand and bowed over it and said the words she no doubt expected me to say.
I welcomed her to Camelot, asked about the journey, her father’s health, Corbenic’s friendship, all of it.
Isolde received the dutiful conversation with the composure she always carried by smiling.
Then she responded with her own formal courtesies in the clear, measured voice she used for public occasions, and none of it said anything close to what either of us was actually thinking.
“Camelot is more beautiful than I remembered,” she said.
“Corbenic’s envoy does it considerable honor,” I answered.
Diplomatic language performing the function of a bridge. We were very good at it. We’d had practice.
I received her father’s envoy after: a thin, precise man named George who had been managing the Corbenic-Camelot relationship since before I was king and who treated every meeting like a document to be filed.
He was here to discuss the trade agreements, the grain tariff, the border clarifications along the northern reach where our territories met in a strip of contested farmland that both sides claimed and neither had the resources to fight over.
All of it was scheduled for this week, all of it now sitting in the middle of a crisis that had nothing to do with grain tariffs.
I told George the negotiations would begin tomorrow. He seemed satisfied. Kay walked him out.
The court thinned. Lance drifted away toward the training grounds.
I should have gone back to the council chamber or busied myself with Corvin’s interrogation or the resistance reports.
I could have busied myself with the hundred urgent things that were waiting for me.
Instead, I fell into step beside Isolde, who was being shown toward the west corridor and the guest quarters.
The steward glanced back at me, and I dismissed him with a look.
Isolde turned to look at me with a faint, private smile. “The king doesn’t personally escort visiting envoys to their rooms.”
“We both know you’re considerably more than a visiting envoy.”
She said nothing to that, but the smile remained.
We walked in silence for a time.
The upper corridor was quiet at this hour; servants were moving through the lower halls, the knights were at practice, and the court had dispersed to its various machinations.
Up here it was just the two of us and the sound of our footsteps on stone and the pale light coming through the narrow windows.
Isolde walked beside me. And it was so ordinary a thing, a person walking beside me, yet so rare in practice that I felt the absence of it in every other moment of my life.
“You look tired, Arthur.”
Not Your Grace. Just ‘Arthur’.
She’d used my name in private since that first evening in the garden.
I’d given her that permission without thinking about it, the way you give a thing away before you understand its value.
Hearing it now, in her soft voice, in that register she used when she was being direct with me rather than diplomatic, put a pressure behind my ribs that had nothing to do with the dragon.
I opened my mouth. The impulse to tell her everything was so strong it made my throat close.
I’m drowning. There’s a spy, my enemy, who my dragon has claimed and my sword responds to, and I can’t stop circling her, and I don’t know anymore whether what I feel is mine or the monster’s, and you deserve a man who is whole—
“It’s been a difficult week,” I said.
Isolde absorbed this. She didn’t push. Didn’t ask about the prisoner, though she knew.
Of course, she knew. Every court in Logres knew about the knight unmasked, the spy in the kingdom, by now.
Instead, she let the silence sit for three steps, and then she said, “The foal you wrote me about a few months ago… the chestnut. How is she?”
I almost laughed.
Almost laughed at the absurdity of it: the deliberate, generous absurdity of it, this woman standing in the wreckage of my week with a question about a horse we’d written about months ago, offering me something small, clean, and completely untangled from the catastrophe.
“She’s growing,” I answered. The words came easier than anything I’d said in days. “She has her mother’s temperament: she’s stubborn and fast. She threw a groom last Tuesday.” I paused. “And she bit Kay.”
Isolde’s smile broke open, full and unguarded, the smile I’d first seen in the garden that night when she told me she’d followed me because she was curious about a king who needed to escape his own banquet. Soon the smile became a laugh, and I laughed along with her.
“She sounds magnificent,” she said.
“She is,” I answered.
We reached the guest quarters. The door stood open, a servant inside arranging the room. I should have said good day and turned back toward the council chamber and all the things requiring my attention.
Instead, I lingered.
Isolde stood in the doorway and looked at me.
Her expression was the quiet, perceptive thing it always was.
She read my face with the attentiveness of a woman who’d spent enough time watching me that she’d learned my topography.
She knew. Not the specifics, of course, and nothing about the dragon, nor the sword, nor the terrible particular hunger that pulled toward a white-haired witch. But Isolde knew the shape of it.
She didn’t ask.
“I’m glad the foal is well,” she said.
She meant half a dozen other things but said none of them, and I loved her for the restraint and hated myself for requiring it.
“She’d like you,” I said. “Wouldn’t let anyone near her in the beginning. She was particular about who she trusted.”
“Good horses usually are.”
I nodded then stood another moment in the corridor like a man waiting for himself to do something.
“Isolde.” Her name came out lower than I’d intended.
“I want you to know—” I stopped. Started again.
“I don’t—” Another stop. The words were wrong.
All the words were wrong for what I was trying to say, which was: you have no idea what it costs me to see you.
You awaken something in me that is restful, good, and so far from what my life has become that it feels like a window in a sealed room.
“You have no idea how good it is to see you. What kind of quiet you bring with you.” I paused. “You always have.”
Something passed across her face, something that was brief, unguarded, and then very quickly collected.
“It’s good to see you too, Arthur.”
I walked back to the Council Chamber and once there, I sat down and put the first report in the long list of reports in front of me.
But I didn’t read it.
I pressed my fist against my chest in something that had become a habit now, the gesture I used when the dragon was moving and I needed the reminder of bone and flesh between me and it.
It pushed back against my knuckles with a slow, rhythmic surge.
Not Isolde. It had never roused for Isolde, not in the garden, not in the letters, not today in the corridor.
Isolde awoke the man, not the beast. And not for the first time today, I remembered the garden again.
The wanting that felt clean, proportionate, and like something a person could survive.
The dragon didn’t care about gardens.
It was pulling south. Down through the castle’s bones, to a white-haired woman with water magic pressed under her skin by Mordred’s binding.
I became livid.
Not at the dragon. The dragon was beyond negotiation.
No, I was livid with her. At the specific, infuriating fact of her existence, at the way she’d arrived in my life like a splinter under the skin, at the way the thing inside my chest had looked at her and said mine with a conviction it had never aimed at Isolde of Corbenic, who was warm, direct,
uncomplicated, and good.
Isolde deserved to be chosen. Isolde deserved a man whose first impulse toward her was his own and not a monster’s borrowed want.
Were it not for the fucking beast, that impulse would be there.
Fuck, it still was. Yet, the beast would never allow it.
The fury sat in my chest alongside the dragon, and neither of them moved.