CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
-ARTHUR-
The Riddle of Blood Trial
Watching Lioran face the Riddle of Blood, I wasn’t certain what to think.
My fingers tightened as I studied his every movement with more scrutiny than I had afforded any other candidate.
When he cut his palm, his blood spilled into the silver channels of the altar, just as every other candidate before him had done.
Then he began the incantation—words I had heard recited numerous times during this trial already—and yet, when they came from him, they carried a strange resonance.
A pull. I leaned forward unconsciously, breath caught halfway in my chest, hoping—needing—to understand who he truly was—the nature of his beginnings.
Where he had come from. How he possessed such power and yet seemed to have emerged from obscurity.
And, most importantly, I needed to understand if he was related in any way at all to the white-haired witch who continued to plague my every moment.
But the magic was cloudy, confused.
Unlike every candidate before him, whose magical echoes burst forth in luminous clarity, Lioran’s lineage emerged clouded.
Blurred. As if seen through fogged glass or the refracted veil of water in motion.
I blinked, and the images shifted—almost too quickly, as though trying to read a dream slipping from memory upon waking.
I caught glimpses—faint suggestions of elemental water users in his line. Rural folk, perhaps, modest magicians with weak, sanctioned abilities. The kind I had long tolerated in the northern borderlands. Harmless. Beneath concern.
And yet…
The power I'd witnessed from Lioran during the previous trials—the control, the raw force—was far beyond the feeble echoes now playing before me. The strength the Riddle of Blood indicated and what I had witnessed firsthand could not exist within the same individual. Or could it?
Where others' lineages flared like beacons—clear and unmistakable—his bloodline flickered like a flame starved of air.
The manifestations danced at the edge of comprehension: half-formed faces, locations that started to delineate before they melted into one another, ancestral figures who refused to resolve into focus.
Even the altar seemed uncertain, its glow faltering as it attempted to read him.
And that unsettled me.
I shifted beneath the weight of my ceremonial mantle, my eyes never leaving the haze of images playing out in front of me.
What I saw—or rather, what I failed to see—was a truth in itself.
Perhaps Lioran's beginnings were as humble as he had claimed—a simple story of rural parentage and unremarkable blood.
The thought should have brought relief, yet it settled uneasily in my mind like armor that didn't quite fit.
Certainly, commoners and peasants would not waste precious coin or effort following their ancestral trees through generations of toil and obscurity.
They had neither the resources nor the leisure to trace their lineage back through centuries of forgotten names.
But the trial would trace that heritage back, I argued with myself.
Perhaps it had. The more I considered it, the more sense it made that no celebrated lords or ladies would emerge from such modest origins: no sprawling family castles crowned with ancient banners, no deep roots extending into the fertile soil of noble houses.
The bloodline reading had shown me exactly what it should show for a knight of common birth.
“An unremarkable lineage,” Mordred said at last. I turned to him; his expression was unreadable beneath his heavy hood.
He traced slow, absent patterns along the silver chain at his neck.
The triangular crystal pendant there—his focus and channel—remained inert against the folds of his midnight-blue robes.
“Lioran’s heritage appears to be that of minor water mages from the northern provinces,” I said softly, my words for his ears alone.
Mordred nodded. “Stranger things have happened.”
The ambiguity in his tone prickled along the edge of my awareness. Even now, after decades of battle and diplomacy, Mordred remained unreadable. And I hated it.
Lioran stepped away from the altar, the faint echo of the ritual’s magic still humming around him like a song half-forgotten.
Though I couldn't hear his exact words, I could see Agravaine berating Lioran about his humble origins and the absence of aristocratic blood in his ancestry.
Lioran said nothing; he still appeared rather shocked from the trial itself and simply stood beside the altar, staring forward as though something was haunting him.
"And now," Mordred said, his voice carrying through the chamber with quiet authority, "the second half of the Riddle of Blood awaits. You must walk through the doorway, Sir Lioran. Accept what your blood has revealed. Face what secrets lurk within your mind."
I watched Lioran's throat work as he swallowed.
Every knight before him had hesitated at this threshold.
The second half of the Riddle of Blood stripped away pretense, dragging hidden truths into daylight.
Shame, guilt, ambition—the doorway revealed it all.
Some candidates had emerged broken, their darkest moments displayed for all to witness.
Others, like Galahad, had walked through with heads held high, their secrets mundane enough to pass without consequence.
Lioran squared his shoulders and approached the shimmering archway.
He stepped through.
The air around the doorway rippled, then erupted into numerous images—fragments of memory given form. I leaned forward, intent on studying every detail.
The first vision materialized: Lioran as a younger man, perhaps sixteen or seventeen, standing before a weathered cottage.
A woman—his mother, perhaps—lay sick in a rough-hewn bed.
I watched him press coins into her palm, far more than a peasant boy should possess.
His face twisted with shame as she asked where he had gotten them.
The image shifted. Lioran in a merchant's stall, pocketing food while the vendor's back was turned. Small thefts. But in the name of survival. The kind of desperation that drove good people to compromise.
Nothing that concerned me. Poverty had bred these choices.
The third vision bloomed: Lioran training in secret, moonlight streaming through the gaps in an old barn roof.
He moved through sword forms with clumsy determination, practicing strikes against a post wrapped in old sacking.
No teacher guided him. No master corrected his stance.
He had learned alone, stealing knowledge from watching others, cobbling together technique from observation and stubborn repetition.
That explained the raw edges in his fighting style—the brilliance mixed with gaps in fundamental technique. Self-taught. Ambitious enough to pursue knighthood despite having no proper instruction. That spoke to his character, not conspiracy.
Another vision emerged: Lioran standing at the edge of a cliff, looking down at Camelot from some distant vantage point.
The wind whipped his cloak around him as he stared at my castle with an expression I recognized all too well—longing mixed with resentment.
The look of someone who wanted desperately to belong to something far greater than themselves, yet believed they never would.
A man who saw the walls of power and knew he would always stand outside them because he didn't believe he belonged.
The visions faded.
I sat back, processing what I'd witnessed. Theft born of necessity. Self-taught skill born of determination. Outsider's resentment born of exclusion.
All perfectly reasonable secrets for a knight of humble origins to carry.
Nothing that raised alarm. Nothing that suggested conspiracy or connection to Carlisle's machinations.
And nothing that would point to any relation to the white-haired beauty.
I had to admit—that was the most disappointing part.
And yet.
That nagging instinct refused to quiet. The dragon within me stirred, its interest in Lioran undiminished despite these revelations.
If anything, the beast seemed... amused.
As though it knew something I didn't. As though it saw past the surface to some deeper truth the Riddle of Blood had failed to capture.
Or perhaps I was imagining the whole thing, and this was yet another instance of the dragon's will seeping in to eclipse my own.
Lioran emerged from the doorway, his face pale but composed.
Mordred studied him. "Your secrets are modest ones, Sir Lioran. You may take your place among those who have passed the Riddle of Blood."
Lioran bowed and stepped aside.
-GUIN-
I drew in a breath, steadying my posture.
I couldn’t afford to collapse under the weight of truth, not when I was still standing before my peers. My heartbeat pounded, and I felt like I couldn't breathe. Somehow, I held my expression in place.
Do not allow the emotions to overtake you, I told myself. You must maintain your cool, or your disguise will slip.
From the looks on the knights’ faces, it seemed no one had seen what I had—the truth about my heritage. The Caliope had succeeded, or maybe it was the Veilwood. Regardless, Elenora hadn't betrayed me—her elixir hadn't turned against me. Did that mean she was a friend, not a foe? Perhaps.
Relief, warm and welcome, flickered in my chest—but it was quickly buried beneath the weight of everything else I'd just learned about myself, about my parents, about the people I'd believed were my parents. As I stepped back into the circle of candidates, my eyes found Arthur’s almost instantly.
He looked at me in that quiet, measured way of his—calculating, searching. I couldn’t tell what he saw. But his nod came slowly, and when he spoke, his voice rang clear.
"You’ve done well," he said to us all, but his eyes lingered on me longer than necessary.