CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT #2
Measure her. Map whatever it was the sword had responded to (or hadn’t responded to) and determine whether she posed a genuine strategic threat.
Perhaps in the meantime, I could continue to attempt to gain more of an understanding of the threat Merlin posed against me.
Thus far, Guinevere hadn’t exactly been forthcoming with such information, but perhaps that was due to the fact that I wasn’t pushing hard enough.
That was what I told myself anyway as I walked back through the cold corridor with the dragon quiet and patient behind my ribs.
She calls to us, it said. We must answer her.
I did my best to ignore it.
-ARTHUR-
That night I sent for a woman. Fair-haired, not by any specific instruction from me, but because the chamberlain knew my tastes, or thought he did. She was pretty in a conventional way, bright-eyed and willing, of course. They were always beyond willing. She smelled of lavender and candle wax.
I was present for the fucking in the technical sense. That is to say that I was hard and took my enjoyment from her wet quim. But that was about all I could say for it.
The dragon went quiet the moment she entered the room.
It wasn’t unhappy, necessarily, just uninterested, bored even.
Like a hunting dog shown a piece of furniture it couldn’t care less about.
As I rutted and came, the dragon waited in the way it had learned to wait during these encounters: with a bored detachment.
Afterwards, it filled me with the understanding that this wasn’t the thing it was waiting for.
She was the thing it was waiting for.
Afterward, the woman whose name I couldn’t recall curled against my side, and I lay looking at the ceiling. There was a specific hollowness within me. It was the same feeling that follows any action taken to prove something and then failing to prove it.
The candle burned down. The woman slept. I wasn’t certain why I allowed her to. Usually, I kicked them out as soon as I was finished with them.
We burn for her. Only her.
I pressed my thumb against the tattoo on my right pectoral until the pressure built to pain.
“Then burn,” I said quietly, to the dark, to nothing.
It said nothing back.
And not for the first time this week, I thought about her maidenhead, or lack thereof.
I tried to picture which man of Camelot had taken it from her.
And I tried to imagine whether or not she had enjoyed it.
Had it only happened once or had this man enjoyed her body again?
And perhaps again after that? Furthermore, was this man in any way compromised by fucking her?
Had she turned any of my men against me?
I didn’t imagine that was the case, though, because I couldn’t bring to mind any examples of knights or guards who were acting in any way contrary to the ways they usually acted.
All the while, the dragon’s anger surfaced hot and powerful.
The creature was even more insistent than I was when it came to the subject of uncovering the man’s identity.
And when I wondered whether her heart had been involved, something I imagined must have been the case, given the fact that she wouldn’t give me a name, the dragon’s anger burned even fiercer.
She cannot love anyone but us, for she is our mate.
Love.
The word was so unfamiliar to me, so foreign and heavy, spreading its disturbance outward until it touched everything.
I’d heard the poets in court recite their verses about it.
Lisping, soft-handed men with ink-stained fingers and an entirely theoretical grasp of suffering.
They wrote about love the way the blind described color: with great confidence and no evidence.
Burning hearts, stolen breath, and the beloved’s face eclipsing the sun.
I’d listened to those verses and felt nothing except a mild contempt.
Love was a liability, a lever. The moment a man loved something, he handed his enemy the means to destroy him.
I’d learned that lesson before I’d learned how to shave.
I’d watched it unravel greater men than me, men with more natural gifts and better starts, men who possessed everything except the discipline to keep their hearts locked away behind something stronger than sentiment.
My father hadn’t loved my mother, as far as I knew. He’d wanted her badly enough to go to war over her, but that wasn’t the same thing. I understood want, desire. Want was clean. Want had an end. You satisfied it or you didn’t, and either way you moved on.
Love didn’t move. That was the problem with it: it installed itself and refused to be evicted.
I’d come close, once. Or I’d thought I had.
But then I’d realized a king had no use for love.
A king had use for alliances, for heirs, for loyalty purchased and maintained.
Affection, perhaps, if it didn’t impair judgment.
Desire, certainly, because desire was a function of the body and the body required management like any other part of the machinery.
But love. No.
The woman beside me shifted in her sleep and made a small sound. I continued to watch the ceiling.
The question wasn’t whether I could love.
The question was whether she had and whether she did still.
Whether somewhere in that guarded, infuriating mind of hers, beneath the silences, the half-answers, and the eyes that measured everything before they gave back nothing, there was someone who had gotten in.
Some man who’d seen the real shape of her and she’d let him, let him close enough to matter.
The thought turned in me like a blade finding the right angle to go deeper. And the dragon burned with the same fire. Both of us, angry at the thought that our prisoner could have loved the man who’d taken her innocence from her. And what of him? Had he loved her back? Did he love her still?
We will destroy whoever dares to love what belongs to us.
It wasn’t the act that bothered me, at least I’d told myself that several times now.
Strangely, it might actually have been partially true.
Men and women coupled, and they did so constantly: every second of every day.
It was unremarkable. I’d had more women than I could name and attached nothing permanent to any of them.
The act itself was the smallest part of what was eating at me.
What bothered me was the possibility of the other thing: that she’d looked at him the way she didn’t look at me.
The way she would never look at me. Of course, I knew she desired me.
That much was obvious. It was obvious in the way her pupils dilated whenever I was near, the way her breathing sped up, the way her cunt was always soaking wet. But that was desire; it wasn’t love.
Could she have been so unguarded with him, so undefended, that she’d let her mouth soften and her hands reach and her voice say things she’d never say to me? Had she given him something simply because she’d wanted to? Because he’d earned it somehow?
Only we deserve the love of our mate. We will destroy him as soon as he is named.
I pressed two fingers hard against my sternum and held the pressure there.
She is ours. She belongs to no other.
“She doesn’t belong to anyone,” I said, but my voice was barely a sound. The woman slept on.
She will.
That was the part I couldn’t argue with.
Not because I believed it the way the dragon believed it, with that hot, simple, animal certainty.
But because the alternative, the idea that she would remain in proximity to me and continue to belong to herself and to whatever ghost of a man still lived in her memory, was somehow worse than any threat I’d faced in a decade of ruling. And that didn’t make any fucking sense.
I wasn’t a man who wanted what he couldn’t have. I was a king. I took what I wanted. In fact, I wasn’t accustomed to wanting because I took whatever that thing was before I ever arrived at the stage of wanting it.
But this was different, and I was honest enough with myself, in the dark, in the small hours with a stranger asleep beside me, to admit I didn’t fully understand why.
I didn’t know what love felt like. I had no reliable measure for it.
But whatever this was, this grinding, low-burning irritation that had no tactical justification, this need to know the name of a man whose only offense was being wanted by a woman I had no legitimate claim to…
it didn’t feel like indifference. And indifference was the only thing I’d ever trusted myself to feel safely.
The candle guttered. The last of the light thinned to a thread.
I closed my eyes, but I didn’t sleep.
The dragon breathed low and steady in my chest.
Waiting. It was always waiting.
-GUIN-
The Boundless had seven gods, and I’d learned to hate every one of them.
Kaelthar’s Hour fell at midday, and Galahad called it The Watcher’s vigil.
As I watched him, his eyes were open, his hands folded before him, and his spine was straight.
He recited the litany in the same tone he used for Verath while the noon light pressed through the narrow window and turned the stone floor the color of old bone.
I’d been kneeling since the hour before dawn.
The Seven Hours of the Seven Gods didn’t pause for things like hunger, cold, or the particular exhaustion that comes from sleeping in fragments, always half-listening for footsteps.
My eyes closed before I knew what they were doing. I didn’t decide to close them; my body simply stopped asking permission.
My head dropped toward my chest, and I caught myself, jerked upright, hands tightening in my lap, but the damage was already done. Galahad stopped his intoning, and the room went very quiet. It was the kind of quiet that meant something had changed.
I didn’t look at him. I just pretended that it hadn’t happened, that I hadn’t fallen asleep for the split second that I had. Instead, I finished the litany, and I kept my voice level.
“The Watcher does not sleep. The Watcher does not turn. The Watcher holds the vigil that separates the faithful from the dark.”
The words came from memory because my mind had gone very still and cold, the way it did when I needed to assess a situation before reacting to it.
“Stop.”
I stopped.