CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
-ARTHUR-
I was already in the training yard before the kitchen fires were lit, sword in hand, working through forms I’d known since boyhood.
My arms and legs were already burning before the first hour was finished. Good. The burn kept the dragon quiet; it kept everything quiet.
But it didn’t last.
Guinevere arrived, just as I’d ordered, but instead of the guards at either side of her, she walked into the training yard with Tristan at her side like a shadow she’d collected somewhere.
The sight of them together did something ugly to my chest, something I didn’t care to fully consider.
And strangely, once again, the dragon was completely silent.
Tristan peeled away from her at the gate and then disappeared around a bend of trees until it was just Guinevere and me.
She’d been given proper training clothes, as our bouts in the yard were becoming commonplace now.
As such, I wasn’t surprised to see her in a linen tunic that was belted at the waist, with loose braies tucked into her boots below.
The outfit was both simple and functional, the kind of thing any young knight might wear on a cool morning to train.
There was nothing remarkable about it, except for the wind that kept catching the hem of her tunic and lifting it up, exposing her taut stomach underneath.
We must take her, for she is ours.
I turned away from her and drove my sword into the practice post, and the wood splintered. The impact traveled up my forearms, but I welcomed it.
“Arthur,” she said, calling me by my first name no matter how many fucking times I’d corrected her.
“Pick up a sword,” I growled in response.
She crossed to the rack without argument, but I didn’t watch her go.
I was sick to death of watching her in general.
Instead, I heard the scrape of steel, and when she returned, I realized she’d chosen the short blade she’d favored when she’d been Lioran.
It was lighter, faster, and more suited to her reach.
She’d learned the yard as much as she’d learned her own limits.
I hated that she had.
We circled one another, and she moved well, even now, even after everything Galahad had done to her.
Of course, I’d seen the bruises three days ago when she’d appeared in the yard: purple-yellow stains along her ribs and her upper arms.
And when Lance had looked at them, he’d lost his mind entirely, something I was still processing, truth be told.
Processing because part of me understood it: I hadn’t been able to look at the pain and cruelty she’d obviously suffered without something in me going very, very still.
And, of course, the dragon had responded with the absolute desire for blood, something I’d had a very difficult time controlling.
And yet... yet, I was also processing the truth of the fact, which was: why did Lance and I care?
She was my prisoner and my enemy. She was a spy, and she’d come here to undermine my rule.
Just based on those things alone, Lance and I should have laughed at the evidence of Galahad’s abuse. And yet... yet, we hadn’t.
Ours.
I pressed forward, and she parried. The impact rattled up her arm, but she absorbed it, stepped back, and reset her feet. There was a gap in her defense at the left shoulder that I was beginning to expect because she led with her right and forgot to protect the other side.
I didn’t exploit it, though. Not yet, anyway.
The wind moved through the yard, and her tunic lifted at the hem just as it had done a few minutes ago.
There was another flash of pale skin above the waistband of her braies, revealing the flat plane of her stomach as well as the curve of her side.
It was gone in a second, less than a second really, but that didn’t seem to matter.
A burst of desire began driving through me, up from my cock, which was already straining against the leather of my braies.
We must mate her.
I pressed forward harder than I meant to, and she stumbled back two steps, found her footing, and drove her blade up in a deflection that was pure instinct, no training in it at all.
“You’re dropping your left,” I growled.
“I know.”
“Fix it.”
“I’m trying.”
The dragon wasn’t quiet any longer. I wasn’t sure if it was owing to that flash of skin we’d both just witnessed, but it was now a slow and steady heat that had nothing to do with exertion. I recognized it, and I hated recognizing it.
I came at her from the right. She adjusted, caught my blade on a diagonal, turned her wrist, and created distance. She was getting better. What was more, her footwork was improving: she was beginning to anticipate rather than react.
It would have been easier if she’d been terrible at this.
“I want an update on Corvin,” she said.
“You are my prisoner, and therefore you have no room to want... anything.”
The name further incited me, and I drove at her again, faster this time.
She backpedaled hard, and her back foot caught a rut in the dirt that caused her to go down on one knee.
Her sword arm shot out for balance, and the tunic rode up entirely on that side, exposing her ribs, the indent of her waist, and the tuck of skin above the bone of her hip.
The dragon surged.
Closer. She is ours, yet we have never known her the way we should.
I stepped back, putting at least three feet between us, purely because I had to catch my breath, had to beat the dragon back down again.
Leave it up to the beast, and I would have torn off her clothes right here and fucked her into tomorrow.
Trying to reestablish my own control, I had to look away from her, so I turned to face the far wall.
The stone was wet, gray-green with lichen, and absolutely unremarkable.
I stared at it for a long moment and breathed through my nose.
She got to her feet without help.
“Again,” I said.
We went again and again after that. She was breathing hard now, her cheeks flushed with cold and effort, and there was a strand of white hair plastered to the side of her jaw. The tunic was untucked on one side, and the wind hadn’t stopped. It had never once fucking stopped.
We must know! We must know who took from her what was ours to take.
I stopped moving as the need to know the truth of who had taken her maidenhead completely overcame me once again. She pulled up short, obviously thrown off by my sudden stillness. Her guard stayed up, though. Where I was concerned, her guard was always up.
“Who was the man who first bedded you? I want a fucking answer.”
Because she always refused to give me an answer, I wasn’t certain why I thought this time might be different. Perhaps it was simply wishful thinking.
“This again?”
“I’m tired of asking.”
“I’m tired of refusing to answer.”
Her chin came up a fraction. And there it was: that particular economy of motion, the way she took up exactly as much space as she needed and not a breath more.
“You will give me a name this time.”
“Frederick.”
I frowned even as surprise echoed through me that she’d finally relented and given me the man’s name. “Frederick?”
She nodded. “Frederick.”
I racked my brain as I tried to put a face to a name, but I couldn’t recall a Frederick in my employ. Certainly, there was no Frederick among my guard. Perhaps a servant then? Someone who tended the gardens or the kitchen? “Who the fuck is Frederick?”
She shrugged. “I have no idea.” I felt my eyes narrowing as a blast of angry heat ignited from within me. She shrugged again. “You asked me for a name, and I gave you one.”
My eyes narrowed further. “You are exhausting my patience.”
“And you are exhausting mine.”
I couldn’t explain fully what happened then.
But something within me snapped, something that had been building up over these weeks that would now no longer be denied.
I didn’t know if it was impacted by the dragon’s own impatience or if it was purely my own, but there was something surging inside me that hadn’t been there earlier.
I crossed the yard in four strides. She saw me coming, but she didn’t step back. Her chin came up further instead, her violet eyes level with my own and completely steady, and something about that made the heat in my chest worse.
“My patience has reached its end,” I growled as I stopped close enough to see the flutter of her pulse at her throat. She didn’t back down.
“Then stop fucking asking me.”
“You think this is a game.”
“No.” Her tone was flat, almost quiet. “You have told me, in plain language, that you don’t care about me, so why does it matter who fucked me?”
The question hung in the cold air between us, but there was no good answer to it. That was the trap, and she’d walked me into it without even appearing to try. What was more, she was right; I had said it. I’d said those exact words deliberately because I’d wanted them to be true.
“It’s a matter of—”
“—you ordering me?” The corner of her mouth moved into something that wasn’t quite a smile, but it was close.
“Yes, that’s precisely the point of it.”
“Well, I will tell you, and hopefully for the last time, that I don’t care what you order me to say or to do.”
“You are alive merely because I have allowed it.”
She shifted forward then, rising up onto the very tips of her toes until her face was only inches from mine, close enough that I could feel the whisper of her breath across my face.
The scent of her wrapped around me, and my body tensed as her eyes locked onto mine, and I knew I wouldn’t like what was about to come from her mouth.
“I owe you nothing,” she hissed, each word sharp and deliberate.
“After everything I’ve endured, everything I’ve suffered, everything I’ve sacrificed in the name of Arthur Pendragon, in the name of this kingdom, this throne, this cursed crown, I don’t owe you one fucking thing. Not answers. Not obedience. Not one single breath of explanation.”
-GUIN-
One moment, Arthur was circling me, controlled the way he always was, and the next, the blade was in the ground and he was mere inches away from me, with nothing in his hands and everything in his eyes.
I backed up, or at least I tried to, but the stone wall was at my back, which meant there was nowhere left to go.