CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX #2
“Did you want to?” she asked. “Pursue me?”
There was a longer silence this time as words battled for prominence in my mind, bashing headlong against one another.
I settled for the easiest and truest response.
“Yes. In whatever version of my life didn’t include this... monster inside me. Yes, of course, yes. You’re exactly the kind of woman I would have chosen.”
I said the words without decoration. It wasn’t flattery, and I didn’t want her to mistake it for flattery. It was just the truth.
Something moved across her face then: it was the expression of having a door confirmed shut that you’d spent years hoping was only stuck. She absorbed my response the way she absorbed everything, without letting it knock her sideways, without hiding her reaction to it entirely.
Then she said, “I noticed something in the hall.”
She paused then, clearly choosing her words with the care of someone who understood that words, once placed, couldn’t be retrieved.
“The dragon,” she said. “It didn’t respond to anyone in that room the way it responded to... the prisoner.”
I said nothing.
“I’m not asking you to explain it,” she continued. “I’m just asking whether you understand what I think I saw? Does it have some sort of connection to her?”
“Yes.”
She nodded, and I felt the need to further explain. “I don’t understand it entirely, but Guinevere is a... sort of catalyst to the beast. Her magic and the dragon’s nature are in some kind of alignment. Though, I haven’t fully mapped it yet. All I know is that the creature responds to her.”
Isolde looked at me, and she wore the expression of a woman who was listening to a man describe a painting with perfect technical accuracy while missing entirely what the painting was of.
She didn’t push. She just said, “I see.”
And then, mercifully, she moved to something else and didn’t return to the subject of Guinevere, probably because she could see that it unnerved me.
After we had discussed the particulars about the dragon and my relationship to it for another few minutes, she stood and walked to the door. When she reached it, she turned back to me.
“I’m glad it was you who took it, Arthur,” she said. “You’re the only person I can imagine who is strong enough to keep it subdued. And... what’s more, it wasn’t only a huge sacrifice on your part, but you did so to save us all. And, of course, for that I’m extremely grateful to you.”
No one had ever said those words to me before. “Thank you.”
“And...” she paused. “I don’t think of you as changed, necessarily. I think of you the same way I always thought of you: as Arthur.”
Then she reached for the door.
“Isolde.” She paused. “Were you planning on returning to Corbenic?”
She seemed genuinely puzzled for a moment. “Did you not order everyone to remain here?”
I nodded. “I did, but I’m asking if you’d prefer to return home. I’d make an exception… for you.” I paused. “Only for you.”
She looked at me for a moment with something quiet and deliberate in her expression; then she shook her head.
“No,” she said. “I want to stay here, just in case you need someone to talk to.”
She gave me a quick smile; then the door closed behind her, soft, the same way her knock had been.
I stood at the window for a long time, looking at everything and seeing nothing. The courtyard was empty. Both guards had made their circuit and disappeared around the far tower. The torches burned alone.
I thought about what it cost to be known, even partially, even carefully, by another person, the specific exposure of it. Then I thought about the way Isolde had held the things I’d told her: not tightly, not possessively, just steadily. I remembered the absolute lack of fear in her eyes.
The fire in the grate burned low.
I didn’t let myself continue to think of Isolde because thoughts of Isolde led to thoughts that had no business taking up space inside my mind.
-GUIN-
I stood by the window and looked down at my hands.
Mine.
The word had been said in Arthur’s voice, yet it hadn’t been Arthur’s voice at all, but something underneath it: the dragon.
The sound had come up through the floor of him and growled through his lips.
Every person in that hall had gone still the way animals go still when they hear something large moving through underbrush.
Mine.
And the worst of it, the part I kept circling back to and then flinching away from, was what had happened inside my chest when the dragon had spoken through him.
Something within me had responded, that part inside me that was me but also foreign to me.
It was something that felt strangely old and also deeply embedded within me.
For one moment, I’d felt it answer. Not with words, not with thought, just a deeply seated recognition.
The way you know a sound you haven’t heard since childhood or the way your body knows a truth before your mind does.
I pressed my palms flat against my thighs.
The binding Mordred had placed on me again was a cold, tight thing that was wrapped around my center like iron wire.
Yet during the reveal of Arthur’s dragon, during the moment when the dragon had decided to announce itself and Arthur hadn’t protested, something had pressed against the binding from the inside.
I was pulled from my own thoughts at the sound of a knock at the door.
“Come in,” I said.
Tristan opened the door and ducked slightly through the frame. He was carrying two glass mugs and a small clay jug, and he looked at the room first before he looked at me, as if he was taking stock of his surroundings.
“I thought you might not have been able to sleep,” he offered.
“You’re right: I can’t.”
He nodded. “How are you?”
I shook my head. “I don’t know.”
Only yesterday I’d had a blade at my throat and I’d faced down certain death. Now? Now I just felt numb.
Tristan set the cups on the side table and then picked one up and poured whatever was inside the jug into the cup.
The liquid was dark, almost black in the candlelight.
He brought one of them to me, then returned to the table, pulling out the chair and sat, bringing the cup to his lips and emptying it in a few gulps.
I looked down at it and swirled it around in the glass, but I didn’t drink it. Instead, I watched him watching me with those dark eyes of his which seemed to hold all sorts of mysteries.
“I’ll have you know, I had a hard time stealing this wine from the kitchen,” he explained as he motioned to my glass with his chin. “The least you can do is try it.”
I laughed at that, but still didn’t taste it. Instead, I studied him with raised brows. “You are aware that I’m sure the guards are telling Arthur about your visits?”
He smiled and leaned back into his chair, looking very contented with himself. “I made sure they won’t.”
“And how did you do that?”
“With coin.” His smile broadened, and there was something within it that was decidedly boyish. “Besides, I’m sure the king has his hands full with everything that’s happened. He’s less than interested in keeping tabs on me.”
“True,” I replied, thinking about the fact that I hadn’t seen Arthur since the moment in the Great Hall when he’d let the truth about the beast be known.
Regardless, it wasn’t something I was going to worry about, not when the fire was throwing soft light all around the room.
I was still leaning against the windowsill, noticing how the courtyard below was dark and still.
And Tristan was still sitting at the table.
It seemed as if we’d both taken up posts on opposite sides of the room because we were too nervous about what might happen if we didn’t.
“You don’t have to stay,” I said, even though I had no idea why I’d even said it because I wanted him to stay.
“I know.”
I didn’t know what to say to that, but it seemed I didn’t have to think at all because suddenly words were leaving my mouth as if they had a mind of their own. “No one knows what to think any longer...”
“About?”
“Arthur... not after what happened yesterday.”
“No. They are... confused and frightened, I’d say.” He turned his cup slowly in his hands. “Now everyone must decide what to make of what they witnessed. That’s an uncomfortable place to stand.”
I looked down at the wine, watched how the surface of it trembled slightly, and realized it was my hand that was shaking.
I looked up at him. “What do you think about it?”
He cocked his head to the side as he smiled. “I admit, I’m still deciding.”
I nodded. “Me too.” Then I took a deep breath and stared down at the rings that were forming in the dark wine. “He called me his.”
Tristan was quiet.
“In front of the entire court. Whatever lives inside him...” I set the cup on the floor before I spilled it as I faced Tristan once more. “It looked at me. Tristan, it looked at me directly. Like I was the only thing in the room.”
“What did you feel when it did?”
I didn’t answer him immediately because the honest answer was the frightening one, and Tristan had a way of receiving honest answers without flinching that made it harder to lie to him. He’d been born somewhere that looked at the world differently. He looked at the world differently.
“Something inside me... answered it,” I finally said.
“Something?” His expression didn’t change as he waited for me to explain further.
“Yes, I don’t have a name for it, but it feels like something inside me that’s foreign to me, but still a part of me... I’m sure that doesn’t make much sense.”
I shook my head as I took a deep breath.
“I suppose what I’m trying to say is that whatever responded to Arthur’s dragon, it didn’t do so by some choice I’d made to respond. It was something underneath the choice. It was like... like recognition. As if two halves of something very old were looking at each other across...”
I couldn’t finish the thought because it didn’t make a lot of sense to me, so I was sure it made no sense to Tristan. “Across the distance.”
“That frightens you?”
I nodded. “Doesn’t it frighten you?”
“On your behalf,” he answered, one eyebrow reaching for the ceiling. “Yes.”