CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE #2
The footsteps moved out of range, and I stood at the door with my hands flat against the bars and my forehead against the iron. I allowed myself one moment, one single moment of the terrible ache that was already consuming me. Gods, let her be alright.
Then I breathed.
She was alive: I knew because the magic had told me as much.
An eruption of that magnitude didn’t come from someone defeated.
It came from someone who was still fighting.
The binding had shattered because she needed it to shatter, because the force of the threat had exceeded the force of the cage, and the cage had given.
Galahad was bleeding: only because he must have accosted her and she’d protected herself.
What was more, the guards were describing ice rather than a dead body, and that meant she’d succeeded. She’d succeeded in protecting herself against him.
“That’s my girl,” I whispered to the empty cell.
The corridor chaos took roughly an hour to resolve.
I tracked it through the diminishing traffic, the voices migrating upward rather than downward, and in the long settling silence that followed the initial response.
At some point, the ice on my bars stopped spreading.
The formations remained: pale and geometric, catching the guttered light of the runes.
Her magic was still in the stones, and it was still reverberating, but it was slowing.
I looked at the light-runes once more and realized they’d stabilized.
The flickering had stopped when her magic stopped, the wards reasserting themselves the way a membrane seals after a puncture.
But they’d failed; I knew they had. Not completely and not long enough for me to do anything useful about it, but they’d failed.
I filed that.
Mordred would come to assess the damage: of that, I was certain. Maybe in a few minutes, maybe in hours. However long it took him, I intended to learn everything the crack had to teach me before it was sealed.
-ARTHUR-
The doorframe held me up.
That was the truth of it: I had both hands braced against the wood, and the stone was cold at my back.
The room in front of me was half-destroyed: iced walls, a shattered basin, pieces of furniture and Galahad’s religious icons, water still spreading across the floor tiles in slow, dark fingers.
And in the center of all that wreckage, Tristan was holding Guinevere against his chest like she was something he’d been waiting to pick up.
Her head was against his shoulder, and her eyes were closed. And the dragon was completely silent, something which made no sense.
But what did make sense: the fact that she’d done this. All of it. Not only was she responsible for it, but she’d done it through Mordred’s binding, which should have been impossible. The room smelled of ozone, broken ice, and under that, faintly, blood. Galahad’s.
I watched Tristan and thought about the fact that I’d watched him walk into that room while the ice was still forming, she was still screaming, and the magic had parted around him like water around a stone.
It had parted for him as if it knew him, as if somewhere below the level of language, it had agreed to let him pass.
I was fairly sure that had anyone else tried to step into that room, they would have been run through by an ice blade. And yet she hadn’t attacked Tristan.
Inside my chest, the dragon watched.
It didn’t move. It didn’t push. It simply... attended with the focused, unblinking quality of an apex predator encountering something it could not immediately classify. Not prey. Not enemy. Something it was still in the process of calculating.
That was the most unsettling thing that had happened all night, and the night had included a woman shattering a warded chamber with magic that should have been impossible.
What is he, I thought, but I wasn’t sure if I was asking myself or the dragon.
The dragon didn’t answer. It just kept watching.
As soon as he’d touched her, as soon as he’d spoken to her, the chaos had died. The tempest had quit because he’d spoken her name, offered his hand, then taken her in his arms.
I breathed through my nose slowly, counted the seconds of the exhale.
As though he could feel my eyes on him, Tristan looked up. He found me in the doorway without searching, and his expression was calm. He walked two paces towards me, and when he spoke, his expression was determined.
“She stays with me tonight,” he said.
He didn’t ask; that was the first thought that occurred to me. And by the fact that the entire corridor behind me went very quiet, I wasn’t the only one who noticed as much.
My body moved before I’d decided anything.
I straightened off the door frame and filled the doorway between us, though neither of us spoke.
He stood with Guinevere in his arms, and I stood between him and the rest of Camelot.
The silence between us wasn’t political; it had nothing to do with titles, fealty, or the crown I wasn’t currently wearing. It was something different.
Just as I was about to speak, about to tell him he was not the one who gave orders, Galahad’s voice from across the room interrupted.
“The witch remains in my custody.”
Galahad’s tone was both flat and certain.
He’d straightened fully, blood running unchecked from his temple and from his cheek.
Yet, there was nothing broken in his face.
If anything, he looked clarified, as if the violence had stripped him down to something essential, and the essential thing was righteous.
“The king’s order still stands,” he continued.
“The witch is my charge. What happened tonight is proof of the demon within her.”
He paused to let that settle as he then turned to look at the cracked walls and the ice-rimed floor.
“The demon was freed. It nearly killed us all. Mordred must reapply the suppression immediately.”
Tristan turned and looked at him. I couldn’t see Tristan’s expression from where I stood, but I saw the effect. Two of my own guards stepped backward, just a half-step each, their weight shifting as their bodies made a decision their minds hadn’t caught up to.
Whatever was in that look, I filed it. And I also filed the fact that now everyone was turning to face me.
That was the moment. The room full of my knights, my guards, a bleeding man of God, and another man holding a half-conscious woman who had just shattered a warded chamber with magic that should have been suppressed. All of them were waiting on my verdict.
“Galahad.” My voice came out just right, the king’s voice. It was even, absolute, and carrying without effort. “Your custody ends tonight.”
He went very still.
“She nearly killed you,” I continued. “I have no interest in giving her a second opportunity.”
“My lord—”
“—I’m not finished.” I looked at him until he closed his mouth. “You were correct in what you said: the demon is too strong. Thus, I don’t trust her with any other man in this castle.”
I was looking at Tristan when I said that last bit, and he held my gaze, neither of us looking away.
The look I gave him said: I know what you want. I know why you want it. She is not yours.
He didn’t flinch. He also didn’t put her down.
“Guinevere will be taken to a guarded chamber,” I continued.
“Not anyone’s quarters as I do not trust her. After what happened here, she is much... stronger than we gave her credit for. As such, I will see to it that Mordred reapplies the binding on her magic and makes it stronger than it was.”
I looked at Galahad again. “No man will enter her bedchamber until I decide what happens next.”
The silence in the room held for a beat.
Then Tristan said, “Which chamber?”
“The one beside mine.”
The room absorbed that. I watched it land on Galahad’s face: there was a compression around his mouth. I hoped he didn’t feel as if he’d failed me. He hadn’t.
Tristan shifted Guinevere’s weight in his arms and moved toward the door.
Ours, the dragon said.
Quiet, I thought back.
Tristan carried her out. I followed. The dragon tracked him through the corridor with that same terrible stillness, that same focused quiet that was starting to feel worse than its rage had ever felt. At least rage was legible. At least rage was something I knew how to manage, to redirect.
This, I didn’t know what to do with.
He laid her on the bed in the chamber beside mine, then pulled the coverlet over her shoulder. He touched her hair: one pass, brief and careful, his fingers moving through the white of it, and I stood in the doorway and waited for the dragon to tear through me like a fire through dry grass.
It didn’t.
It just watched.
Then Tristan turned to walk out of the room. I stopped him in the corridor because I needed an answer, and because the dragon’s silence had been going on long enough that I needed to understand what it meant.
“You walked into that room like the magic couldn’t touch you.”
“It couldn’t,” he said.
“Why?”
He looked at me. The accent was there, that eastern lilt, and whatever he read on my face he apparently decided warranted honesty.
“Some things recognize their own.”
Then he was gone, and I was standing there with a dragon in my chest that had just watched another man touch her and said absolutely nothing.
I went to my own chamber. Closed the door. Stood in the dark with my back against it, breathing.
The dragon was still quiet. Still watching something I couldn’t see.
In years of carrying this thing, I’d learned its patterns. I knew its hunger and its fury and its territorial obsession and the specific texture of its jealousy. I knew what it felt like when it wanted something destroyed. I knew what it felt like when it was simply waiting.
This was neither.
This was the dragon looking at Tristan with a kind of wary acknowledgment. As if whatever Tristan was, the dragon had encountered its like before. In some other age. In some other war.
I pressed the heel of my hand against my chest.
What is he, I asked again.
The dragon stirred, finally, but only to offer something that was not quite words and not quite feeling. The closest I could translate it was “old.”