CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
-ARTHUR-
The dragon woke before I did.
That had started three days ago. I’d opened my eyes in the dark, and it was already there, pressing against my ribs from the inside. Not yet demanding. Just awake and aware. Pointed like a compass needle towards the lower reaches of the tower where Galahad kept his ward.
I lay still and waited for it to settle.
It didn’t settle.
She stirs the ancient hunger. We must go to her.
“Quiet,” I said to the ceiling.
-ARTHUR-
Lance was already in the yard when I arrived.
He was working through forms with the ease of a man who was moving through memory that came from having done the same thing ten thousand times.
He didn’t look up when I crossed the cobblestones.
The morning was cold, the sky a flat gray, frost still edging the stones near the stable wall.
“You’re late,” he said.
“I’m the king.”
“You’re still late.”
I picked up a practice sword from the rack but didn’t bother with a shield.
We fell into it without ceremony: that was the thing about Lance; there was never any ceremony between us in the yard.
Every other man in Camelot softened their blows when they faced me.
Lance hit me like he was trying to kill me, and I’d told him once that if he ever stopped, I’d replace him.
He hadn’t stopped.
For a while, there was just the sound of steel on steel, boots on frozen ground, and my own breathing.
My arms ached. My shoulder had been bad since the week before, some old injury from the Saxony campaign that came back every winter like an unwanted houseguest.
I pushed through it. The pain was useful.
Pain required attention, and attention was something I needed to spend carefully right now.
Closer.
I drove forward. Lance retreated two steps, absorbed the pressure, redirected. I felt the blade glance off my forearm, and the sting of it ran up to my elbow. Good. I reset. I came again.
We went on like this for an hour.
By the end of it, Lance’s breathing was elevated. Mine wasn’t. That was new.
And he noticed. He lowered his sword and looked at me with the particular expression he reserved for things that troubled him.
“Your shoulder was bothering you twenty minutes ago,” he said.
“It still is.”
“You’re not moving like it is.”
I set the practice sword against the rack and noticed how steady my hands were.
Not only that, but my pulse, if I concentrated, was barely elevated.
A month ago, this session would have left me winded and pleasantly exhausted.
Now I felt the same as when I’d started: still overcome with an energy that needed to be extinguished as the dragon pressed against the inside of my chest like it was looking for a seam.
“Galahad had a conversation with me yesterday, and it’s still on my mind,” I said because I needed to say something that wasn’t about my pulse rate.
Lance came and stood beside me at the rack. “What did he say?”
“That he wanted more time with the prisoner.” I almost smiled. Almost. “He said he needed another few days to instill within her the good and pure way.”
Lance said nothing for a moment. Then: “And you agreed.”
“I told him religion was good for her.”
The silence stretched. I could feel Lance deciding whether to push.
“She tried to flood your dungeon,” he said finally.
“I wouldn’t say she tried to flood it.”
“That’s what the guards said.”
I shrugged. “The guards are notorious for their exaggerations.” I paused. “What does her flooding or not flooding the dungeon have to do with Galahad?”
“Just that she’s dangerous and unpredictable, and Galahad is one of the most powerful, most able knights of the Round Table.”
“Exactly, so he can handle her.”
“But if he can’t or doesn’t… we could lose him.”
I shook my head. “I’m not worried about Galahad. Besides, her magic is contained. Mordred saw to that.”
He nodded and paused for a few seconds before his eyes met mine once more. “Mordred bound her two weeks ago, and you’ve been in this yard every morning since before dawn.” He picked up a cloth from the rack and wiped down his blade. His voice was very even. “Arthur, is everything okay?”
I turned and looked at him. “Of course. I’m fine.”
His eyes moved from my face down to my hands and back. Then he did the thing he almost never did. He held my gaze and kept it.
“Your eyes went black twice in the last hour.”
I said nothing.
“Not only that, but you hit through my guard on the third exchange. Not around it. Through it.” He paused. “I’m good enough that no one goes through my guard.”
The wind moved across the yard and scattered a handful of dead leaves across the cobblestones.
“Lance—”
“—I’m not going to pretend I didn’t see it.”
His voice was still even, still flat. Even though I permitted him to speak his mind with me, sometimes I regretted giving him that freedom.
Especially because Lance didn’t frighten easily, and he didn’t dress things up in softer words to spare either of us the shape of them.
“Whatever is going on with Guinevere, it’s running back up the chain to you. You’re not leashing the dragon. You’re feeding it.”
“I’m aware of the situation.”
“Then be better at concealing yourself before someone other than myself begins to tally the number of times your eyes go black and how many times there is smoke on your breath.”
He took his leave without any formality, and I hadn’t bid him goodbye. He was the only man I allowed such casualness, and I was left standing there, wondering why I permitted him what I did.
I stood in the empty yard for a long moment. Above me, the north tower’s high narrow windows, seemed to peer down at us. The dragon pressed its nose against my ribcage and purred.
-ARTHUR-
The Hall of Lineages was cold at midday.
But that was no surprise; it was always cold.
The stone held winter the way old bones do: like it was deep and permanent, resistant to any fire lit in the corridor sconces.
The Pendragon tombs ran the full length of the eastern wall, carved effigies lying with their hands folded and their stone faces smoothed into expressions of serene authority that no living Pendragon had ever actually worn.
I walked the row slowly.
There lay my grandfather, then his father before him.
The line reached back further than reliable record, the older tombs worn to near-featureless slabs by time and damp.
All of them were kings, all of them buried with the confidence of men who had never once questioned whether the crown had been rightfully theirs.
I stopped at the far end of the line, where the wall was bare.
My tomb would go there, in that empty spot. Eventually. I’d had it measured and the stone selected three years ago in a moment of cold pragmatic clarity. It had seemed the sensible thing to do at the time. I supposed it still did.
I stood and looked at the empty space and thought about the sword.
When I’d drawn Excalibur from the stone, it had been in the presence of a hundred witnesses.
I’d been just fifteen at the time, with Merlin by my side.
I remembered the way the light had changed when the sword came free, the way the crowd had gone silent, the way the hilt had felt solid and right in my hand like something that had always been mine and had only been waiting for me to claim it.
I remembered the sound they made: that crowd of lords, soldiers, and common people.
It was a sound like one shared breath being released all at once.
I’d built the rest of my life on the memory of that sound.
And then a woman with white hair and violet eyes had answered the call from the Lady of the Lake, and in the dark, the sword had come to her.
I’d told myself it was a trick. Merlin’s work.
A manipulation designed to destabilize me.
I’d told myself the same thing so many times, I’d lost count.
And every time I tried to rationalize Guinevere pulling the sword, I reminded myself that the sword recognized bloodlines and intention.
Perhaps Merlin had prepared her to pull it with some enchantment, some false signal to fool the sword, to make it believe that she was capable and right.
That was a reasonable consideration. In truth, it was the only explanation that left everything else standing.
The sword doesn’t choose tyrants.
Merlin had said as much. Years ago, in a different life, when I still listened to him, when he still offered his advice. His voice had been level and pedagogical, the way it always was when he said things he knew would take years to land.
I pressed my hand flat against the cold stone of the empty tomb space and held it there.
If the sword had genuinely chosen her, then everything the sword’s choosing had ever meant was either meaningless or damning.
Either it chose at random, something which collapsed the entire architecture of divine right that underpinned my rule, or it chose correctly, and what it had chosen was a twenty-three-year-old witch over a king who had bled, sacrificed, and ground himself down to nothing in service of this kingdom.
I didn’t toy with either thought for very long, which wasn’t much of a surprise because I was good at avoiding things I couldn’t afford to toy with. Yet I held onto the slab of stone longer than I meant to.
On the way back from the Hall of Lineages, I made up my mind.
I told myself it was nothing more than intelligence.
That she was Merlin’s weapon: his child, his agent, his instrument.
That understanding her capabilities meant understanding his strategy.
If she had some connection to Excalibur, I needed to know the true nature of that connection, including its limitations, and whether it could be exploited or countered.
Keeping her isolated in Galahad’s custody told me nothing useful.
Yes, I found it amusing to know he was browbeating her with his onerous religious views, but beyond that, what intelligence was I really gaining?
Nothing. At this point, Galahad was really nothing more than a sitter, just keeping an eye on her.
And I supposed that was important as well, because if I removed her from his watch, what would I do with her? Who would keep track of her?
Regardless, I felt the need to be more involved, to observe her.