CHAPTER FORTY-THREE
-LANCE-
The council chamber emptied the way it always did after a difficult session: slowly, men finding reasons to linger, to catch the king’s eye, to position themselves near the door where Arthur would inevitably pause before leaving.
I didn’t linger. I’d learned years ago that the men who crowded Arthur after meetings were the men Arthur trusted least.
I was already in the corridor when I heard Kay behind me.
Not following me because Kay didn’t follow. He simply existed in the same direction of travel, which was different enough that a man watching wouldn’t have noted anything.
“Lance.”
I slowed without stopping, and he fell into step beside me.
“The king seemed agitated after the morning patrol briefing,” Kay said. His voice was pleasant, conversational even. “Something in the northeastern report, I thought. Did you notice?”
I kept my eyes forward.
The flagstones were uneven here, just past the second arch. I’d known that for fifteen years. As such, my boot found each dip without thought.
Kay already knew. That was the thing that made the back of my neck tighten beneath my collar. He wasn’t asking because he lacked information; he was asking because he wanted confirmation that I would give it.
“Arthur has a lot on his mind,” I said.
Kay nodded, and it was a small, considered nod, the nod of a man who had just received exactly what he’d come for.
Kay had asked a question that had a simple, innocent answer available to any knight who wasn’t paying special attention.
But I’d instead given an answer that agreed with what Kay was saying, simply because I hadn’t argued the point.
“Of course,” he said. “These are complicated days.”
And then he peeled away at the next branching corridor. No parting remark. No acknowledgment of what had just occurred. Just the sound of his footsteps going quiet in the opposite direction.
I kept walking.
My pace didn’t change. My expression didn’t change. A knight passing me in the hall would have seen nothing: just Lancelot du Lac moving through a castle he’d lived in most of his life, jaw set, eyes forward, the same as always.
But something had shifted. Something small, the way a single stone displaced from a wall looks like nothing until the water gets in.
I’d given Kay the confirmation he wanted. I’d done it reflexively, without drama, without any of the moral theater I’d been running privately in my head for days. I’d just opened my mouth and handed him a piece of Arthur, and it had cost me nothing visible.
I stopped at a window. The courtyard below was midmorning quiet: stable hands crossing with buckets, a pair of hounds sleeping against the warm stone. Ordinary.
I pressed my thumb against the edge of the windowsill until the stone bit back.
The thing Kay was good at, the thing I hadn’t properly accounted for, was that he never asked for much.
Each individual request was defensible. Arthur seemed agitated.
Arthur has a lot on his mind. Nothing there that would condemn me if I’d been overheard.
Nothing that would read as betrayal in a court of law or a court of honor.
But that was the mechanism. That was exactly the mechanism.
I’d spent my life being precise about what I would and wouldn’t do.
I had lines I didn’t cross. I had a sense of myself as a man who understood the difference between political maneuvering, which every man at court engaged in, and genuine betrayal.
I’d been certain of that distinction for so long I’d stopped questioning it.
But Kay had just shown me the distinction was softer than I thought.
Below, one of the hounds lifted its head, looked at nothing, and settled back down.
I pushed off the window and kept moving.
-ARTHUR-
The afternoon council didn’t happen.
Kay had taken the northern raid reports.
Mordred was somewhere in the lower halls, still picking apart what had occurred the evening before in the Great Hall when the candles had extinguished themselves, and there had followed a sense of too many people in the room.
Some people had seen ghosts (I, for one), but most hadn’t seen anything other than the candles going out for no apparent reason.
Mordred had first approached Tristan, since he was the most obvious place to start, but once Tristan had convinced Mordred of his innocence, Mordred had turned to other possibilities.
I’d left the subject of just what had occurred with Mordred because I had no better option. Mordred understood things I didn’t, which was one of his virtues and his greatest leverage, and he knew both.
Lance had taken the knights to the training fields, no doubt to work through whatever each of them thought and felt regarding the events of the evening before.
Now, I stood in my chambers for a full minute, not knowing what to do with myself.
The dragon was quiet. Not absent; it was never absent, but it was subdued. Strangely, it hadn’t reacted during the shock of the evening before. And now it just felt like a low pressure behind the tattoo on my chest rather than the usual clawing.
And that meant I could think. The clarity was almost disorienting. I’d grown so accustomed to fighting the creature for possession of my own thoughts that the absence of the fight now felt like a missing tooth: the tongue keeps finding the gap.
I didn’t plan to go to the east gardens, and yet my feet decided on that exact location without consulting me.
Perhaps it was because the east gardens were Camelot’s only honest space, or at least I thought of them as such.
They were comprised of three walls of old stone, weathered past the stage of wanting to repair them.
On the fourth side, there was nothing but open air and a long drop to the river valley below.
Beyond that, the hills rolled green and brown toward the horizon, indifferent to ghosts, violet eyes and white hair.
The gardener was a man named Gruben who was old enough to remember Uther and deaf enough not to care about Arthur, and the two of us had maintained an unspoken arrangement for years: I didn’t ask him to bow, and he didn’t ask me why I kept coming here.
When I arrived, Isolde was already there, and I was pleased. I’d hoped she would be. Perhaps it was why I’d come?
She sat on the low stone wall at the garden’s edge, her legs hanging over the drop, a book open in her lap that she wasn’t reading.
Instead, her eyes were on the river below.
The morning light caught her hair and turned it copper at the ends, something I found quite beautiful, mostly because it wasn’t white.
She didn’t hear me walking towards her because she was entirely somewhere else. I could tell by the expression on her face, an expression that was unguarded, and her shoulders were easy. Just a woman watching water move.
I let myself watch her watching the river. It was just a few seconds, just one private moment before she knew I was there.
She was beautiful. Not the way Guinevere was beautiful, not that arresting winter sharpness that made something inside me snarl and strain, that dangerous brightness that the dragon tracked like fire tracks oxygen.
This was a different type of beauty. It was quieter.
The kind of beauty that asked nothing from you in return, the type of beauty that invited rather than demanded.
Guinevere’s type of beauty was the kind that slammed you over the head, then kicked you when you were down.
I thought, standing in the garden entrance: a man could live beside this type of woman without burning.
My footsteps landed on the gravel, and Isolde turned to face me.
Her expression did that thing it always did, an unguarded brightening that arrived before she could compose it.
She was caught off guard, and she looked it: legs dangling, book forgotten, expression open.
Sitting as she was now, she appeared younger than the woman who navigated my court with such practiced fluency.
“The council ran short?” she asked, shifting on the wall to make room beside her.
I sat, and because the wall was narrow, our shoulders touched, but neither of us remarked on it.
“The council didn’t happen,” I answered.
“Because of what happened last night?”
I was surprised she’d brought it up, but then I thought about what I knew of Isolde, and then I wasn’t surprised.
“If I said ‘no,’ would you believe me?”
She laughed as I faced her. “No.”
I nodded.
“What did happen last night?” she continued as she looked up at me.
I shook my head. “I don’t have a bloody idea.”
“Everyone seems happy to accept the explanation of drafts.”
I looked at her. “Do you believe it was a draft?”
She shook her head and laughed again. “No. Do you?”
“No.”
And that was all we said about it, which pleased me because I didn’t have a thought in my mind that could explain what in the hell had happened in the Great Hall the previous evening.
In an obvious attempt to change the subject, Isolde held up the book in her lap, allowing me to read the title. On the Breeding and Keeping of Horses in the Southern Territories, it read, by some scholar from Corbenic whose name I didn’t catch before she tucked it under her arm.
“Your stable master,” she said, with the mild disapproval of a woman who had found a problem and was already solving it, “keeps his records in his head.”
“Has done so for thirty years.”
“And when he retires or dies? A generation of breeding knowledge will be lost because no one thought to write it down.” She tapped the spine of the book against her knee. “I’ve been making notes for him.”
“Have you?” I laughed.
She nodded. “I have.”
“And how does he feel about this little undertaking of yours?”
She cocked her head to the side. “He tolerates it and me because I bring the horses apples.”
I looked at her. “You’re reorganizing my stables.”
She looked back at me. “Someone should.”
No apology. No request for permission. Just the same directness that had dismantled something in me years ago in another garden. Something in my chest loosened.
We talked.