CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO #3
The anomalies along the northern wall, the ones that had started as isolated incidents: candle flames bending toward nothing, shadows pooling in wrong shapes, were coming more frequently.
Mordred used the word confluence and then immediately qualified it as premature speculation.
But Mordred didn’t speculate. When he used a word, he meant it.
I set the report face down on the table, because none of this mattered at the moment. All that did matter was everything else.
“Galahad was still at the chapel during everything... that happened in the training yard?”
Kay nodded.
“How many follow him now?”
“It’s hard to know for certain, but one of the guards reported that the entire chapel was full this morning.” Kay straightened the stack of papers with two precise taps against the table. “Many of them were among your guard.”
My guards and men-at-arms sitting in candlelight while Galahad prayed over them. Galahad, who had been humiliated in front of the other knights. Galahad, who had—
I stopped the thought. I’d been stopping that particular thought all day because it didn’t go anywhere useful.
“What is more...” Kay continued, before clearing his throat. “I have been told by a reliable contact that Galahad has now made his bedchamber in the chapel. He’s eating there and sleeping on the floor near the altar.”
I looked at my hands again. The thumbnail. The dark crescent of dried blood.
“He’s building something,” I said.
“Yes,” Kay answered. He didn’t bother with qualifications.
Galahad was radicalized, and I’d made him that way.
I’d taken away the formal structure that kept men like him controlled, and in doing so, I’d handed him a narrative: the persecuted holy man, the knight punished for his righteousness.
He would use it. Fuck, he was already using it, and the men in that chapel were proof.
I stood and went to the window. “Perhaps I should have banished him.”
“Had you banished him, those men in the chapel would no doubt be double. Or triple. Keeping him close was the wise decision.”
I turned to look at him. “Yet, there’s nothing I can do about it. I can’t throw him in the dungeon or lock him up in his bedchamber.”
“No, you can’t. You have to allow him to do whatever he’s doing until you have enough proof to stop it.”
The courtyard below was empty. The fountain caught the moonlight, water pouring endlessly over the marble statue of me that stood frozen in the act of pulling the sword from the stone. I’d commissioned that fountain in my third year of reign. I’d thought it projected the right image.
Now it just looked like a man straining at something that wouldn’t move.
She’s awake.
The dragon was quiet when it said the words. It wasn’t demanding. In truth, it didn’t need to demand anymore. It had learned, somewhere in the last few weeks, that certainty worked better.
She’s thinking about you.
I pressed my forehead against the cold glass of the window. Outside, nothing moved.
The problem, the problem I couldn’t say aloud to Kay, and the problem I couldn’t write in a response to Isolde, couldn’t quantify in any of Mordred’s careful reports, was that I no longer knew where the dragon’s wanting ended and mine began.
It had been easier when I could point to the creature and say: That’s the thing that desires her.
And that thing isn’t me. That is the beast.
But I’d beaten Lance within an inch of his life, and I’d done it with my own hands and my own anger, and I’d known every second what I was doing.
And I hadn’t stopped.
He soiled what was ours. He took from her what was ours to take. He should have been destroyed.
“Is that all?” I asked Kay, without turning from the window.
He hesitated a fraction too long. “The rebellion took another supply road three days east of here. We lost fourteen soldiers.”
“And the northern patrols?”
“There are reports of strange lights above the treeline near the Ashwood border, and one patrol has failed to return.”
I turned from the window and I could feel Kay’s eyes steady on me.
“You look tired,” he said, with no sympathy.
“Go.”
He gathered his correspondence and then moved towards the door.
At the door, he paused, without turning back around.
“Galahad’s faction asked the castle priest whether a formal petition could be made to the crown regarding the nature of the prisoner’s continued presence here.”
He said the words evenly. “The priest told them Galahad had no jurisdiction. But I assume Galahad will find another channel.”
Then he was gone.
I stood in the middle of the room and listened to the fire die.
Ours, it said. We must claim her. She must know the feel of us penetrating her so she forgets the other man.
His fucking name is Lance.
“Lance,” I said out loud as I looked at the blood under my thumbnail again.
Outside, the rebellion was burning supply roads. Galahad was assembling a congregation. The veil was thinning in ways Mordred refused to name outright. Lance was confined to the dungeon with Corvin. And Guinevere was ten or so feet down the corridor.
I sat back down on the edge of the bed and pressed my swollen knuckles together as I waited for the fire to go completely out.