CHAPTER FOURTEEN #3
I turned and walked toward the stairs, and my boots were loud on the wet stone.
“Arthur.”
I didn’t stop.
“Arthur. Do not hurt her!”
I took the first stair. Then the second. Behind me, I heard him hit the bars with the flat of his palm: one sharp crack of sound that rang out and died, but I didn’t look back.
-ARTHUR-
The first sign of the headache was a throbbing sensation in the back of my left eye.
That was how it always began, every time: needle, knife, and finally the pressure of the beast pushing from the inside, like claws biting through my cranium. I knew what each kind of pain indicated, whether just restlessness of the dragon or its rage. This was rage.
It wasn’t the only one feeling restless and angry, though. I’d been pacing for almost an hour.
The fire in the hearth had burned to nothing, but I hadn’t called for anyone. I didn’t want witnesses when I was like this; I didn’t want anyone to see my jaw locked, my hands flexing open and closed.
WE MUST GO TO HER!
“No.”
I said the word to the empty room, to the tapestries, to the cold stone floor and the guttering light. To no one. I was fully aware of how I looked. A king, alone in his chambers, arguing with himself. If any of my men had seen me, they’d have sent for a physician. Or a priest.
WE FEEL HER PAIN! GO TO HER!
“I don’t fucking care.”
The pain spiked. I pressed the heel of my palm against my temple and kept walking. Stone to stone. The length of the room, then back again. The same path I’d worn for the last hour while the beast threw itself against the walls of its cage and screamed.
It had been like this since I’d left her with Mordred.
What I felt now was the dragon’s displeasure transmitted through my body like a hot wire, and it had nothing to do with my own conscience, which was perfectly clear.
Clear because I knew what she was: a spy.
Not only that, but she’d used magic against me in front of my men.
Mordred’s binding was the appropriate response.
Truly, it was the only response, other than her death.
“You should be fucking grateful that she’s even still alive.”
SHE HURTS BECAUSE OF YOU!
“She brought it on herself.”
GO TO HER NOW!
“Shut up.”
GO—
“I said shut up.”
I stopped walking and put both hands flat on the surface of the writing desk as I breathed through my nose. The wood grain swam slightly in my vision, and the candlelight fractured. I waited for the wave to pass.
But it didn’t fucking pass. The dragon pressed harder, and behind it was something almost coherent, not words exactly, more like an image. Her face. The exact arrangement of her features. The precise quality of her silence.
I shoved the image away.
This was the part I hated most. Not the fire. Not the dreamflame or the seer’s visions or any of the darker gifts the creature had pressed into my blood when I’d been younger and stupid enough to think power was something you could take without cost. I’d made a fair peace with all of that.
What I hated was this: this wanting that wasn’t mine. I hated the creature’s obsessions that bled through the walls of the cage until I couldn’t tell anymore which side of the bars I was standing on.
It had never done this for anyone before her.
In the years I’d lived alongside it, it had murmured at me about gold, power and enemies it wanted burned.
It had never once told me to go to someone.
Never fixated on a single living person the way it fixated on her from the moment she’d walked into the Great Hall in a fake man’s armor with violet eyes and a face I’d been looking at ever since in the dark behind my own eyelids.
I hated the beast more than I hated anything in this world or the next. More than Merlin. More than treachery. More than Corvin. More than Guinevere, even. More than the slow rot of everything I’d built by my own hand and sword. I hated it with a clarity that was almost clean.
And the beautiful, singular thing, the only comfort this fucked arrangement offered, was that the beast couldn’t do a single gods-damned thing about it.
No, it was trapped, caged inside my skin, inside my blood, pressing against my ribs like it wanted to split me open and crawl out, but it couldn’t.
It raged, it howled, and it sent needles through my eye sockets, and still it sat in its cage because I held the lock.
I lifted my head and looked at the door.
The headache was extraordinary. The beast was shrieking now, not in words, just pressure, just want, just the image of her face on a continuous loop behind my eyes.
WE MUST GO TO HER!
I picked up my crown from the desk and turned it once in my hands.
“Fine.”
My voice came out flat. I was speaking to my own chest, to the tattoo coiled under my linen, to the thing sealed in my blood that had been screaming itself hoarse since sundown. “Fine, I will fucking go to her.”
I set the crown back down, crossed to the door, and pulled it open. The corridor was dark and cold, the torch nearest me guttering in the draft. Two guards snapped to attention, but I didn’t look at them.
But you won’t fucking like what’s about to happen.