CHAPTER SIXTEEN #2
The table itself was beautiful, an eight-foot-wide expanse of pale oak with grains swirling tightly to form rings like that of a target. The eight chairs around the table were the same in all respects, except for position.
The dragon had been quiet since the small hours of the night before, after I’d nearly lost the battle against it and had to leave Corvin’s cell before I lost complete control.
I didn’t know why the dragon was quieter now, but it had settled into a low vibration in the base of my chest, something that had burned down from white-hot to merely dangerous.
I’d spent the night at my desk, maps spread under candlelight, running numbers on supply lines and garrison rotations I already knew by heart.
My hands had simply needed something to do, and my mind had needed something that wasn’t her.
And the two of them. Together.
Even now, the thought made something tighten in my chest, something I was fairly sure wasn’t the dragon.
I didn’t know what I’d been thinking: forcing Corvin to fuck her.
I’d said it was in the name of proving my dominion over the dragon, but now with the realization that I hadn’t proven anything, I was at a loss.
By the time the light had started bleeding under my door, signifying the coming of morning, I’d accepted the night for what it was: a loss.
My body hadn’t slept because my thoughts had circled back to the same point every hour with the reliability of a mill wheel: what had happened in that cell and what I was going to do about it.
Now, I sat in my positionally distinguished chair and tapped my fingers against the hard wood of the table.
I’d laid everything out, and now we were discussing the recent rise in borderland issues.
Mordred had just given a full overview of the supply convoy losses we’d suffered and the pattern of pinprick strikes that were flaring up all over the north.
We’d lost three convoys in a month. There had been minimal casualties but maximum disruption to grain distribution in the eastern villages.
Mordred wasn’t certain if this was an act of aggression from Merlin or from the Northern Rebellion.
Or perhaps they were two faces of the same coin.
It was clean intelligence. It was correct intelligence. And it demanded discussion.
Percival was the only one who was actually listening. He had that look he got when absorbing information: his head slightly tilted, the unruly curls falling over his forehead, his blue eyes moving between the map spread across the table and my face.
The rest of them, I was convinced, had thoughts that ran elsewhere: to the two prisoners who were currently in the dungeon. Soon that exact subject was broached by none other than Kay, who never bothered to hide his interest or lack thereof.
“What’s to be done about the prisoners?” he asked, and everyone’s attention immediately turned to me.
Galahad spoke first, but that was no surprise as he always spoke first when he’d prepared a position, and Galahad was always prepared. It was both his greatest virtue and his most exhausting quality.
“The female prisoner should be tried under the Laws of Penetration.”
He laid his opinion out with the calm of a man reciting liturgy he’d memorized young.
“She is guilty of espionage, magical infiltration, and impersonation of a knight of the realm.”
He then not only cited the three separate statutes but their original authorship, the precedents set during Uther’s reign, and those set under mine.
He wasn’t wrong about anything he said, but that was to be expected.
Galahad was never wrong. The crime fit the statutes the way a blade fit a sheath: cleanly, completely, and without gap.
“The penalty prescribed,” Galahad continued, “is death.” A pause. “For both prisoners. Corvin above all: he swore the Round Table oath and broke it. He chose Merlin over his king. That cannot be forgiven. If it is, then the oath means nothing.”
His gray eyes were clear and still. There was no heat in them, no emotion. He wasn’t angry, offended, or even irritated. He was just certain.
Gawain looked at the map. Then at Galahad.
“We trained beside her,” he said.
Not an argument. Gawain knew the statutes as well as Galahad did.
Regardless, he spoke the way a man sets a stone down in front of another man’s path: not to fight, just to make him acknowledge it exists.
“She fought well. Not only that, but her magic is powerful.”
He met Galahad’s eyes and held them without expression.
“Putting her to death would be a waste of that magic.”
Tristan turned his ring over his knuckle, once, then twice.
I’d quickly learned it was the tell he had when he was agreeing with something he didn’t want to be seen agreeing with too quickly.
He nodded. “Gawain makes a good point. That kind of power destroyed...”
He let the thought sit there. “Seems like a resource poorly managed.”
Of course, I agreed as well, though I didn’t say anything at this juncture. Instead, I wanted them all to feel as if they’d been heard.
Gareth said nothing. His hands were folded on the table in front of him, and he was busily looking at them. He’d been looking at them since before I started speaking.
Agravaine, beside him, was watching the room.
And I knew that particular quality of Agravaine’s attention: the way his pale green eyes moved from face to face without appearing to move at all.
He was calculating who was winning this argument, and his lean, barely perceptible, slight forward shift of one shoulder was toward Galahad.
Not because he cared about the Laws of Penetration, but because he’d read the room and decided Galahad’s position had more structural support, and Agravaine had never taken a position for any reason other than structural support.
Kay hadn’t spoken. He was watching me, which was different from watching the room. Kay always watched me. Even now, even after everything, there was something in that expression that I recognized from childhood: the older boy monitoring the younger for cracks.
“She’s Merlin’s daughter,” I said. “Corvin is Merlin’s second. We’re currently holding both of them.” I let that settle. “That’s not a position we surrender.”
Lance exhaled once, beside me. A single breath through the nose, but he said nothing. I didn’t look at him.
Kay’s mouth shifted. Almost a smile. “Agreed.”
Galahad didn’t blink. “The law—”
“—is noted.” I looked at him directly, though not unkindly. “The sentence is deferred pending my assessment of her intelligence value.”
“My lord—” Galahad began to argue.
“—The Round Table advises.” My voice didn’t rise. It never needed to. “It doesn’t decide.”
The silence that followed had a particular texture to it, one that wasn’t resentment, exactly, but something close to it.
Galahad didn’t like to be disagreed with, especially when he believed he was right.
He looked at the table, and when he did, his jaw was set and his hands were still.
I watched him fold the argument away with the discipline of a man who believed absolutely in the structures he operated within and who had just been reminded that the structure had a ceiling he hadn’t installed.
Gawain exhaled through his nose, and the sound was something between relief and discomfort. Clearly, he didn’t want her dead, but he also didn’t want to be the man who’d argued against it in front of witnesses.
Agravaine’s lean returned to neutral.
I let the silence hold a moment longer before I continued.
“There is one further matter.” I looked around the table, and when I had all of them, including Galahad, I went on.
“The female prisoner possesses water magic of a caliber we haven’t ever seen before. You all saw her when we apprehended the two of them in the tavern, and you’ve seen her magic when you trained beside her as Lioran. So you know that magic is precise, controlled,
and destructive in a way that speaks to considerable power.”
I paused. “I intend to understand that power before I make any final decision about what to do with her.”
Kay’s brow shifted. “Understand it how?”
“By testing it.” I held his gaze. “We will assess her combat capabilities in the structured environment of the training yard. We’ll consider her magic from a different perspective this time: looking at its range, its limits, stamina,
and what she can and cannot do under pressure and under instruction. Before I decide what this asset is worth, I need to know what it actually is.”
The word asset landed the way I intended it to.
Not harshly, but with clarity. She wasn’t a guest in Camelot, but she also wasn’t a condemned prisoner pending execution.
She was a resource whose value hadn’t yet been fully calculated, and I was a king who didn’t discard things before he understood them.
“Were her abilities not decided already?” Gareth asked. “During the Shadow Trials?”
It was a good question and one I’d expected. “The Shadow Trials were aimed at making certain each of the Knights of the Round Table had the magic required to become a Knight of the Round Table. Now it’s about understanding the extent of her magic and how big a threat she poses or how big an ally.”
“An ally?” Gawain asked with a frown.
I looked at him. “That is my end goal, yes: to turn her away from Merlin and convince her to honor our side instead.”
“I don’t believe that’s possible,” Lance said, and the others nodded their agreement.
“The option of death has a way of changing one’s loyalty,” I answered.
Gawain looked at the table. Tristan had stopped turning his ring.
“You’re planning to train her then?” Lance asked quietly from beside me.
“I’m planning on evaluating her,” I corrected. “Training implies I’ve already decided she’s useful. I haven’t. This is an assessment. What she does with it is information. What I learn informs my decision.”
Galahad’s jaw tightened once and then released, but he didn’t speak.
“She remains in custody throughout,” I continued. “The sessions will be supervised, contained, and reported to this table. If she is the weapon her father built her to be, I will know it. And then I will decide how to use her. Or whether to use her at all.”