CHAPTER NINETEEN
-KAY-
The thing about power was that most men grabbed for it.
I never grabbed. I waited.
Patience was the only virtue I’d ever cultivated with any sincerity, and it had served me better than Arthur’s sword, better than Lance’s pretty face, and better than Galahad’s insufferable righteousness.
All those men reached, strained, and bled for what they wanted.
And still they woke each morning with their hands empty of the thing that mattered most.
I simply watched. And waited. And when the moment came, I picked it up off the floor where they’d dropped it.
The corridor outside Arthur’s solar was cold at this hour.
Stone walls, no torches yet: the servants hadn’t made their morning rounds.
The light that filtered through the arrow slits was thin, barely enough to see by.
I liked it that way. Darkness was useful.
It made men honest, or at least careless, which amounted to the same thing.
I’d been standing here for two minutes.
I knew because I’d counted.
The guards at the door were Alexander and a young one whose name I hadn’t bothered to learn.
New to the post, probably. His armor fit poorly across the shoulders, no doubt a hand-me-down from a larger man.
His weight shifted every forty seconds or so, left foot to right, right foot to left.
He was nervous or cold. Either way, he wasn’t paying attention.
Alexander was better. He kept his eyes forward and his face blank, which meant he was thinking about something else entirely.
His wife, most likely. From what I’d heard, she’d had a difficult birth three weeks ago.
This was their second child, and the infant had lived, though the question of the wife had been touch and go for several days, which I knew because I made it my business to know such things about men who guarded doors I occasionally needed opened.
It was then that I stepped from the shadows and into their line of sight.
“Sir Kay.” Alexander’s voice was neutral, professional.
“I need a moment with the king.”
“His Grace hasn’t called for—”
“—I know he hasn’t called for me.” I kept my voice mild. “That’s rather the point.”
A pause, and Alexander weighed it. I watched him do so, watched the slight tightening around his eyes, the barely perceptible shift in his jaw. He was a loyal man, Alexander. Genuinely so, not the performed variety. That made him predictable.
“Your wife is well?” I asked.
The question landed exactly as intended, and his composure slipped by a fraction, but only a fraction.
“She’s improving, my lord. Thank you.”
“Good.” I held his gaze a moment longer than necessary. “The king, Alexander.”
He stepped aside.
When I entered the room, Arthur was standing at the window.
He stood with his back to me, one hand braced against the stone frame, looking down at the training yard below.
He was still wearing his nightclothes: a dark linen tunic, unlaced at the collar, and dark braies.
The dragon tattoo was visible through the thin fabric, the lines of it shifting slightly as he breathed, and for a moment, the ink looked almost animate. Almost.
I’d seen that tattoo for years, but only recently had I truly understood what it meant.
He didn’t turn around.
“Whatever it is, Kay, it can wait.”
“It can’t.”
A silence. He turned, then his eyes found me in the dimness and stayed there. The blue was flat this morning: not cold exactly, just settled. A man who hadn’t slept, or hadn’t slept well, and had stopped trying to hide it.
“Close the door,” he said.
I did.
Then I crossed the room at a measured pace.
Not hurried, never hurried. I stopped a few feet from him, clasped my hands behind my back, and looked at him the way I imagined a brother looked at a brother, which was a thing I’d spent considerable time studying because I’d never quite felt it naturally.
“You look terrible,” I said.
His mouth moved into something that wasn’t quite a smile. “Kay, invaluable as always.”
“How long has it been since you slept more than a few hours?”
“That’s not why you’re here.”
“No,” I agreed. “It isn’t.”
I let the silence sit. Arthur’s eyes narrowed by a degree, that slight calculation he always did, that quick assessment, and I watched it happen. Watched him try to read me and find, as he always found, not very much. I’d made a lifelong study of giving people only what I wanted them to see.
“Say it then,” he said.
“I know about the dragon.”
Nothing moved in his face. Nothing at all. That told me more than an expression would have.
“How long have you known?”
I cocked my head to the side as I pretended to think about it. “Long enough.”
“And how did you—”
“—the way you run cold when you should run hot,” I answered.
“The moments when you go somewhere else inside yourself and come back a half-second later with your jaw set differently. The way your eyes change color when you’re losing your temper; they glow faintly red.”
I tilted my head slightly. “Like something behind them is turning up the light.”
“Kay—”
“—it was the same tattoo our father bore. And now I understand that he had taken the dragon into himself just as you have into yourself.”
His jaw tightened.
“I remember the day Uther destroyed three hundred of his own men, how he reduced them to ash, yet no fire was ever reported. The official account said it was plague, if I’m not mistaken?”
I paused. “I was there, Arthur. I saw the ash. What is more, I know what plague looks like, and I know what it doesn’t look like.”
A muscle moved in his throat, but he said nothing, just turned back to the window, though there was nothing to look at; the training yard was empty at this hour, just churned mud and scattered straw.
“You could have used that information against me,” he said.
“Yes.”
“But you didn’t.” He turned to look at me then with a slight smirk. “Or you haven’t yet.”
“No, I haven’t. And I don’t intend to.” I paused intentionally. “Because that’s what brothers do, Arthur. They keep one another’s secrets. They remain loyal.” I held his gaze. “I’ve been loyal to you all your life. Has anyone else?”
The line landed where I’d aimed it. I saw it in the slight parting of his lips, the minute drop of his shoulders. They didn’t soften exactly; Arthur didn’t soften. But something shifted in the room’s temperature, as though something had unlocked.
This was the part that required the most precision.
Arthur was suspicious by nature. That was useful; paranoid men needed confidants the way drowning men needed rope. But he was also intelligent, which meant I couldn’t oversell it. The moment I reached, I’d lose him.
So I didn’t reach. I simply stood there, patient as I’d always been, and let him come to the conclusion himself.
“Why now?” he asked.
“Because you’re losing control of it.”
The words hit. I could tell as much by the way his posture changed, barely, just a fractional stiffening through the spine, but I caught it all the same.
“The girl has something to do with it,” I continued.
Not a question.
He said nothing, which was answer enough.
“I’ve been watching,” I continued. “How you are around her. How it... how the thing in you is around her.”
I paused. “I’ve seen you hold your temper in a siege. I’ve seen you sit across a table from men who wanted you dead and eat your supper without spilling a drop. I’ve never seen you look the way you looked at the tavern when we found her with Corvin.”
“Don’t.”
“I’m not judging you.” I made my voice careful.
Neutral. The voice of a man who had no stake in it.
“I’m telling you what I’ve observed because I’m the only one in this court who will. Mordred serves you because it suits him. Lance—” I paused just long enough.
“Lance has his own complications at present.”
Another silence. Arthur had gone very still.
“What complications?” His voice was quiet. The dangerous kind of quiet.
“Nothing I can name with certainty.” I turned slightly and moved toward the table, where a half-finished cup of something dark had been sitting long enough to lose its steam. I straightened a book that didn’t need straightening. “Only impressions.”
“Speak your mind.”
I picked up the cold cup, then put it down again.
“In the Great Hall,” I said, “when the girl was made to strip.”
“Kay.”
“I’m not speaking to offend you. I’m telling you what I saw.” I turned back to him. “I believe Lancelot was the only one who wouldn’t look at her.”
Silence.
“Most men couldn’t help themselves,” I continued. “Perhaps they tried to look away. But that beauty...” I kept my tone measured, observational. “Lance was the only one who refused to look.”
Arthur’s hand, the one at his side, curled slowly. “That only means his sense of chivalry runs deeper than anyone else’s.”
“Or... it could mean something else entirely.”
He frowned. “What?”
I shrugged. “Perhaps he’d seen it before?”
He was quiet for a moment as something fierce burned in his eyes. “That’s a very hefty accusation to deliver at the feet of the King’s First.”
I nodded. “Yes, it is.” Then I breathed out. “Tell me, did you know he visited her in the dungeon? Before the escape. Before she was recaptured?”
“No, I did not know.” A pause, then: “What passed between them?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t hear it.”
A technically true statement. I hadn’t heard it.
I had, however, been told of the duration of the visit and the fact that Lance had returned from it in a state of considerable agitation, which wasn’t something Lance experienced with regularity.
He was accustomed to victory, occasional boredom, and the particular smugness of a man who’d never lost a fight.
He didn’t, as a rule, experience agitation which meant something must have agitated him.
I left all of that unspoken. The silence was doing better work than I could.
“That is yet another example that doesn’t point to much,” Arthur said, frowning at me. “Lioran was a friend to all the knights. Thus, each of them carries his own disappointment. That could simply be an example of Lance broaching his.”