CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE #2
At the sound of voices, I turned to see Agravaine, Percival, and Gareth, who had entered the training yard and were headed for the practice blades.
Close on their heels were Lance and Gawain.
Lance looked at me once, then his gaze moved to Arthur before it dropped back to the ground.
I couldn’t read the emotion in his eyes, but it was there. Something was there.
“You forget yourself and you forget your fucking place in this court,” Arthur snarled at me, pulling my attention back to him.
I’d sparred with this man for weeks, taken hits from him, and given them back. I’d stood my ground against him when my legs were shaking and my ribs were bruised, and not once had I felt what I felt now, which was the clean animal certainty that I needed to be somewhere else.
Even with my back to the wall, he moved in even closer.
The stone was cold through the thin linen of my practice tunic, and the heat coming off him was like standing too close to a forge.
I had a feeling it was the dragon. My chin came up on reflex, or pride, my usual armor, but it put my face close to his throat, close enough that I could see the pulse there, the way it jumped and raced.
Something in my chest answered it, and I hated it.
Gods, I hated it, with a specific and exhausted fury that was directed entirely at myself.
My fingers curled against the stone wall behind me, but I didn’t touch him.
I also didn’t close that last terrible inch of distance, even though something nameless and stupid in me was screaming to.
This was the power he had over me, something that ate at me, no matter how much I pretended it was otherwise. There was just something about this man that sang to something inside me, and whatever was inside me answered whatever was inside him.
His eyes were wrong, but they weren’t wrong with anger.
Angry Arthur I knew; in fact, it seemed the angry version of Arthur was the only version I knew.
And when he was angry, he was cold and surgical, almost bored.
But this was something else, something much more concerning.
The gold in his eyes had swallowed the blue and was now swimming with red.
He looked at me like I was something he’d lost, just now recovered and never intended to misplace again.
My breath came out uneven, and my heart started pounding in earnest. I was sure he heard both because I watched him hear both. As he studied me, it wasn’t with the eyes of a man. It was with the eyes of the beast within him, and they were both cold and calculating.
“You will tell me the truth.”
His voice came out wrong. It was so much deeper, with more of a pronounced growl than any human voice could ever hope to be. As he said the words, one hand slipped around my throat and tightened just enough to prove that he could be deadly if he wanted to be.
“I will tell you nothing,” I managed.
Whatever was in his expression blanched, and the red of his eyes began to deepen. He stepped back as my heart thundered. One step. Two. He turned to face the training yard with his shoulders squared and his jaw set. His voice, when he spoke, came out like gravel dragged over iron.
“I want to know who the fuck touched her!” he yelled out to all the knights assembled.
Everyone stopped what they were doing, and the yard went completely quiet as every set of eyes moved to him.
“Which of you.” There was a subtle growl in the undertones of his voice that sent a shudder through me. “Which one of you took what was mine?”
It was no longer the voice of the man; it had been entirely usurped by that of the beast, of the dragon, and within the deep register was the sound of possession, of something territorial, something that was furious.
I stood by the wall, my heart pounding in my ears as all the knights in that yard went still.
Now it was only Galahad who was missing, because his early morning hours were reserved for his chapel.
But the rest were here, and they were all staring.
Maybe it wasn’t a surprise that my gaze found only one of them.
Lance. He was standing on the other side of the yard, having gone absolutely still, wearing his expression like a mask of blank wariness.
Arthur’s gaze moved across all of them like a blade looking for the seam, and all I could feel towards him was complete and total disgust because he was talking about me like I was a stolen horse, like I was something he owned.
The possessiveness in his voice wasn’t even dressed up.
No, it was real, it was ugly, and it was raw.
But what upset me the most was the part of me that didn’t hate it, the part of me that reveled in his obsession.
I pressed my palms flat against the stone wall as I just stood there, watching Lance’s careful blankness begin, very slowly, to crack.
-LANCE-
Arthur stood at the center of the training yard with his sword across his shoulders and his wrists draped over the blade in that particular way he stood when he was waiting for something or someone to break.
He’d been in one of his moods since dawn: the kind that made stable boys press themselves flat against walls and senior knights develop sudden, urgent business in other parts of the castle.
I’d positioned myself near the gate, which was an old habit: always know your exits. Meanwhile, a few of the knights had developed a sudden, intense interest in their boots.
The silence stretched and, of course, my attention found Kay’s. He was already watching me with a smile on his face, and that smile said he not only held my strings but in this moment, he was aware of nothing else. Just one word from him and my truth would be laid bare at Arthur’s feet.
With no warning at all, exhaustion hit me like I’d just run full-bore into a stone wall. It wasn’t the type that came from battle or sleepless nights in the saddle. No, this was something that had been building since the moment I’d pressed my mouth against hers and lost myself completely.
The exhaustion wasn’t just toward the lie of omission; I was exhausted with the way Kay’s smile had become a permanent fixture on his face, exhausted with the fact that Arthur’s jaw ground against itself every time he looked at her, and I was exhausted with watching her stand in this yard, chin up,
shoulders back, absorbing every barbed question and loaded silence like she’d been built for it.
She hadn’t been built for it. Neither of us had.
My feet moved before the decision had fully formed in my head. Kay’s eyes tracked me immediately, that smile sharpening into something concerned, something questioning.
I didn’t look at him. I was sick to fucking death of looking at him.
I walked to the center of the yard, past Percival, past Gareth, past Gawain and Agravaine, past Arthur’s coiled frustration, and I stopped three feet from my king.
Arthur’s eyes cut to me, and they narrowed as a muscle in his jaw flexed.
“It was me.”
I heard the words falling from my tongue before I’d fully realized I was going to say them.
My eyes quickly moved from Arthur to Guin where she stood behind him and the only thing I noticed was the color blanching from her skin. Her eyes went wide and she shook her head slightly.
Arthur didn’t do or say anything for the span of three heartbeats. That was the thing about Arthur in moments like these: he never moved quickly.
“What did you say?”
My jaw was tight. “You heard me.”
The yard had completely stopped breathing. I was vaguely aware of Guinevere, who was still shaking her head. But now there was fear in her expression. Fear for me.
Beyond her, Kay had moved in closer, and now I caught his expression cracking.
Just slightly, but it was enough for me to see the calculation beneath it flickering, recalibrating.
He’d had his leverage neatly arranged, and now I’d taken it from him and put it somewhere he couldn’t reach it.
I watched him realize that, but it didn’t make me feel as good as I’d expected it would.
Arthur looked at me for a long time, and there was something in his face I’d seen before, not often, but enough that I recognized it. I’d seen it the night his father died and he’d taken the dragon, and I’d seen it once at the edge of a battlefield after he thought I was dead.
It was the look of a man absorbing an impact he hadn’t seen coming, the look of someone taking stock of damage before they allowed themselves to feel it.
“I want you to know that I never wanted to... care for her.”
The words came out rough, and completely inadequate, but I had to say something, had to try to make him understand.
“I fought it. For longer than you know.”
I paused, and when he still didn’t speak, I made myself hold his gaze.
“Yes, I knew what she was to you, the obsession you had for her. And I told myself that was the whole reason I should never touch her. That I was—” I exhaled slowly.
“I told myself that I was capable of being the kind of man who could look at her and feel nothing I wasn’t supposed to feel.”
Something moved across Arthur’s face. Not rage but something worse than that, something that looked like recognition, like he was listening for something he’d already suspected and hated himself for knowing it all along but never fully believing it.
“I wasn’t strong enough, Arthur.” I paused, keeping my eyes on his face because I couldn’t look at her.
I knew that if I did, I would lose whatever courage was currently driving me.
“No matter how fucking hard I tried to keep away from her, I couldn’t. I failed not only you, but I failed myself. But fuck I tried. I tried to be the man I wanted to be, the man you wanted me to be. Gods know how hard I fucking tried. I want you to believe that I did, Arthur,
because it’s the only true thing I can offer you right now.”
The yard was still holding its breath. I could feel it at my back: none of the men moving, not coughing, not even shifting their weight. There was only the distant sound of a horse in the stable, restless, unaware.
“You wanted her.” My voice dropped and my heart was already in my throat.