CHAPTER FORTY-FIVE #3
Not old in the way men were old. But old in the way certain things were old. Stones. Rivers. The particular darkness at the bottom of very deep water.
Old like what, I thought.
But the dragon had gone still again, and I was left alone with the lavender smell bleeding through the wall and the sound of Mordred beginning the binding in the next room and the knowledge that, for the first time in as long as I could remember,
the dragon had watched a man touch what it called its own and had chosen to simply watch.
That terrified me more than anything it had ever demanded.
-ARTHUR-
I sent for Tristan at first light.
Not through a page. Not through Lance or Kay or the usual chain of command. I sent one of the King’s Guard directly to Tristan’s quarters with a single instruction: now. No title attached. No formality. Just the word, which was the point.
He arrived seven minutes later, which was fast enough to tell me he’d already been awake.
He was dressed but not armored, wearing a plain dark tunic, his curly hair still damp.
He came in without knocking; I’d left the door open, and he stopped in the center of the room and looked at me with that quality of attention he had, the one that was neither deferential nor challenging. Just present.
I didn’t invite him to sit.
I was standing at the window with my back to it so the light was behind me, which wasn’t accidental. I waited until the door clicked shut behind him. Then I turned to face him and said:
“What happened in Galahad’s bedchamber won’t happen again.” I cleared my throat. “I am your king, but you didn’t address me with the reverence I’m due.”
Tristan looked at me. He didn’t shift his weight. He didn’t reach for anything diplomatic. His face didn’t close or harden. He just received the comment, the way he received most things, as if it had come from a long distance and he was simply noting its arrival.
“I did what I did because it needed to be done,” he said. “Not to take anything from you.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“No,” he agreed. “It isn’t.”
The silence between us held for a moment. Outside, the training yard was already filling with sound: the clang of steel and the low commands of the drill master and the particular rhythm of morning at Camelot that went on regardless of what had happened the night before.
“She responded to you,” I said.
It wasn’t a question either, but it required an answer. He knew it.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He was quiet for long enough that I thought he was going to decline to answer, and I was already calculating what that refusal would cost him, when he said: “I don’t know.”
I looked at him.
“That’s the truth,” he said, without inflection. “I don’t know what I am to her. I only know that when I walked in, the magic recognized something and stopped. I didn’t plan it. I wouldn’t know how.”
“Your magic,” I said. “What is its relationship to hers?”
“I don’t know that it has one.”
“That’s not what I watched happen.”
He was quiet again for the span of a few heartbeats. When he spoke, his voice was lower than it had been.
“Death and water,” he said finally. “I’ve never heard of them being sympathetic. I’m not claiming they are.” He paused. “I’m only saying that when I walked in, she was somewhere else entirely. And then she wasn’t.” He looked up at me. “I don’t know what I did. I’m not sure I did anything.”
I didn’t know what to make of that, so I didn’t make anything of it. Instead, I thought of the arrangement I had with Tristan. I still believed it was necessary. On the front of it, it was sensible. Wise.
What was standing across from me now wasn’t sensible. A man who had walked into a room full of ice and uncontrolled magic and hadn’t been afraid, and couldn’t explain why, and wasn’t pretending otherwise… was something I couldn’t work with.
Everything else I’d managed by understanding it first.
The dragon, I understood. Feared it, yes, and hated it, but I understood its logic.
Merlin I understood. Guinevere I was beginning to understand, which was its own particular problem.
But this: whatever existed between her power and his, whatever instinct had moved him through that door without hesitation, this had no explanation I could reach.
And if I couldn’t reach it, I couldn’t control it.
Tristan was watching me. Not nervously. That was also worth noting.
“The arrangement stands,” I said. He nodded as I continued. “Last night. In the corridor. You told me some things recognize their own.”
“Yes.”
“What does that mean?”
Another silence. This time he was choosing something: not whether to lie, I didn’t think he was built for lying, but how much of the truth was actually his to give.
“It means that what she carries is very old,” he said. “And some of what I carry is older still. That’s all I can tell you because that’s all I know.”
“Your childhood,” I said. “Tell me about it.”
There was a shift behind his eyes, something close to surprise that I’d asked directly, which told me he’d been expecting to be dismissed.
“What would you like to know?”
“Whatever you’d tell a king who was asking.”
The corner of his mouth moved into something that wasn’t quite a smile. “If you’re asking about my magic—”
“—tell me about your bloodline, whether death magic runs through it.”
His chin lifted slightly. Just slightly.
“In some families, magic runs through bloodlines.
Though not all. Mine runs back to a line of — “ He paused and considered his next words.
“—bone-speakers, you might call them. Men who could speak to death. It didn’t always skip generations. Sometimes it did.”
“And yours didn’t skip.”
“No.” I paused. “I can’t tell you much more than that.”
“Can’t or won’t?”
“Can’t. I don’t know much about my lineage other than what I told you. I wasn’t born to a noble family who can document their lineage through generations.”
There was silence between us for a few seconds, before I broke it.
“She’s my prisoner,” I said, wanting to get to the gist of what mattered. “She sleeps beside my chamber, she trains at my direction, she eats at my table when I allow it. She is not yours to carry or comfort or make decisions for. Am I understood?”
“Yes,” he said. “My lord.”
The title was entirely correct. The tone of it was also entirely correct. And yet I stood there after he’d said the words with the unsettled feeling that the conversation had resolved absolutely nothing.
He left the way he’d come in. Unhurried.
I turned back to the window and looked out at the training yard for a long time. The dragon sat very quiet in my chest, and I couldn’t tell whether its silence meant it was satisfied or whether it was simply waiting to see what I did next.
That was the problem with the dragon. Even after all these years, I still couldn’t always tell the difference.