CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE #4
That surprised me. After what had happened in the Great Hall, I’d expected it to still be writhing, crowing, satisfied with itself for having made a spectacle of us both.
Instead, it lay low, coiled somewhere beneath my ribs as if it were waiting for something.
Ours, it said, once, very quietly.
“Where is Kay?”
“Outside, Your Grace. I passed him in the corridor.”
“Send him in.”
There was a brief pause, then the sound of the door opening and closing, and then opening again.
Kay entered without ceremony, as though announcing himself was a waste of breath he could spend more usefully on other things.
He was still dressed from the hall. The morning hadn’t given either of them time to change.
“Your Grace.” His voice was dry, careful.
“Sit down.”
Kay sat while Mordred continued to stand at the edge of the firelight with his hands clasped behind his back in the way that meant he was already organizing his thoughts into lists.
I kept my eyes on the courtyard below for another second before I leveled them on Kay.
“No one leaves Camelot,” I said. “Not a single noble. Not a lord, not a lady, not a cousin visiting for the season. If they try, you turn them around. If they insist, you find them comfortable chambers and you lock the door.”
Kay said nothing, which meant he was already calculating how many men it would take to ensure no one left Camelot.
“The gates are to be sealed. All correspondence out of this castle goes through me. Every raven, every rider, every letter carried under a cloak. Nothing moves without my seal on it.” I turned from the window briefly. “Can you manage that by tonight?”
“Yes,” Kay said.
“Good. I want it done before dawn.”
I looked back out the window at the emptiness.
“If there are any noble houses who were missing from the… festivities earlier, I want them ordered to arrive at Camelot post haste. I want every noble from every house interred in Camelot until further notice.”
I took a breath. “After what… happened, I need to keep my enemies close and any who might choose to become my enemies.”
“Yes, sire,” Kay said with a quick nod.
“There’s something else,” I said. “Let it be known, quietly but clearly, that any person found discussing the king’s condition will answer for it. That includes servants, guards, and nobility alike.” I paused. “Make the consequence plain.”
The room was very still.
“How plain?” Kay asked.
“Plain enough that no one tests it.”
Another silence. Kay was not a man who was easily rattled, but I heard the quality of that silence, and I knew what lived inside it.
“I’ll also need the herald,” I continued. “Before morning. I want an account drafted of what occurred this morning. Not what they saw, but what I tell them they saw.” I let that settle.
“What should this account say?” Kay asked.
“That the dragon isn’t a curse, and it’s not a sickness. It’s a mark. A divine inheritance, old as the kingship itself, older than Camelot’s first stone. If the church can be persuaded to bless it, so much the better. Find whoever it takes to make that happen.”
“And if they won’t?” Mordred asked from behind me.
“Then find someone who will.”
Kay exhaled slowly through his nose. “The lords who were present in the hall this morning,” he started. “Several of them have already withdrawn to their chambers.”
“Then post men outside those chambers.”
“And if they object?”
“They may object as loudly as they wish. From inside their rooms.”
I straightened and turned from the window entirely.
“I want names, Kay. Every noble who reacted tonight. I want to know who moved toward a door, who whispered to the person beside them, who looked like they were already composing a letter in their heads. I want those names before I sleep.”
Not that I would sleep. Not after what had happened.
Kay nodded once, slowly, and I could see him filing it all away.
He was a good Seneschal for precisely this reason: he didn’t flinch, he didn’t editorialize, he simply received the order and went to work.
Whatever he thought of what I was asking, he kept it behind his teeth, which was more than most men could manage.
“That will be all, Kay.”
He bowed and left without another word.
The silence that followed was a different kind of silence. Mordred hadn’t moved.
“The court is shaken,” Mordred said.
“I know.”
“There are questions about your fitness to—”
“—I know, Mordred.”
There was a pause then, and I turned around to face him.
“Galahad?” I asked. “What is his condition?”
Mordred nodded. “He is alive. His divine magic is doing its best to heal him, but the dragon’s fire is not ordinary fire.”
“Percival? Has he been called to tend to Galahad?”
“Percival refuses to heal him, or to even attempt it.”
I nodded, because I couldn’t blame him. “I don’t want to discuss the dragon, Mordred, so if that’s why you’ve come.”
“No,” Mordred started. “That is not why I’ve come.” Then he cleared his throat. “I have come to tell you that… the prisoner is a problem.”
I said nothing, because I’d always known she was a problem. She was the fucking biggest problem on my list of problems. But to hear it now, delivered to me with such surety, surprised me.
“You will have to explain that sentence.”
“Every incident that has plagued this kingdom of late,” he continued, “correlates to her. Since she arrived, you have been unwell. I daresay you have been in a constant fight against yourself.”
His voice was even, academic, as though he were presenting findings on crop rot.
“She is the catalyst… I imagine the dragon responds to her in ways it does not respond to anything else.” I nodded because it was true.
“What are you suggesting?”
Another pause. Mordred wasn’t a man who suggested things carelessly, which meant whatever was going to come out of his mouth next was planned and it was well thought out.
“There are methods,” he said, “that would leave no mark, no wound. She would simply fail to wake. The court would be told she attempted escape in the night. Given her history, no one would question it.”
He let that sit for a moment. “It would be clean, Your Grace. It would be quiet. And it would be over... all of this... would be over.”