CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE
-ARTHUR-
The reports had been sitting there since early morning.
I hadn’t read them yet.
They lay ordered in terms of importance.
Well, in order of Kay’s importance, since Kay thought like that.
He was always classifying everything, putting things into categories, assigning a mathematical value to governance.
On top was the name ‘Corvin’. Second in line was the name ‘Guinevere’.
Third was an account of border movements from the northeast border, including men riding with a force of armed horsemen bearing no known symbol.
After that followed six other sheets: trade problems, food shortages, a plea from the western region regarding the drought, and a letter from the Archbishop that I’d been ignoring for two weeks because whatever it said would require me to do something I didn’t feel like doing.
I had a good idea that the Archbishop was complaining about the fact that months ago, I’d allowed Galahad to take the unused chapel of Camelot and make it his own.
The Archbishop’s last letter had said something about the Vow of the Boundless being an abomination to the current religion of Logres and blah blah blah.
I held a cup of tea that had long since gone cold while I stared at the wall.
But then a piece of paper that was sticking out from the middle of the pile caught my attention, and I reached for it.
It was a report from Renhaven, one of my garrison leaders.
And what it mentioned didn’t make much sense.
‘A river running backward’ followed by ‘a man forgetting his wife’s name.’
I’d had stranger things reported to me: the borderlands bred rumor the way wet grain bred rot; but Renhaven didn’t deal in rumor.
He dealt in bodies, blades, and the precise accounting of both.
The man had once written me a three-line report after holding his garrison against forty raiders for six days.
Just three lines with no embellishments: ‘We held. Eight dead. Supplies adequate.’ That was Renhaven.
Yet this letter had paragraphs.
I stood and walked to the window. The training ground spread out below, a few squires already working the archery butts. The sound drifted up in the thunk of arrows finding wood and the low commands of the drill master. They were ordinary sounds, the sounds of a kingdom at work.
But then I thought about the part of Renhaven’s report that mentioned a lamb born with two faces.
I’d heard something similar from the northwest, maybe three weeks ago.
It was a report I’d filed under superstition and peasant anxiety.
Before that, there had been a report about a well in the village of Morrath that ran black for a day and then ran clear again, and the priest who’d blessed it swore afterward he could not remember the words of the blessing he’d spoken a hundred times.
I’d filed that one away too, under the heading: ‘I have no idea what to make of this, so I’ll ignore it for now.’
I turned from the window.
The reports were still on the desk. Corvin’s name on top. Guinevere’s beneath it. The letter from Renhaven was still in my hand. I set it down on top of both of them.
The pattern was the wrong shape for coincidence, and I knew it.
I’d known it for longer than I wanted to admit, in the way you know a wound is infected before you’re willing to look at it directly.
They were a myriad of small wrongnesses: little things behaving as if something large and heavy had pressed against them from the other side.
Merlin would have had a name for it.
The thought arrived the way thoughts of Merlin always did: unwelcome, accurate, and followed immediately by the familiar cold anger that had replaced grief somewhere in the last several years.
I wasn’t certain exactly when I’d stopped mourning what we’d been to each other and started simply resenting the space he’d left.
Probably around the time I realized he’d been lying to me since before I could hold a sword.
But that didn’t change the fact that Merlin would have had a name for whatever in the hell was going on.
He would have known something odd was going on for months leading up to these reports.
He would have been watching the strangeness building, but he would have said nothing because saying nothing was Merlin’s preferred instrument.
He believed in information held rather than shared, in knowledge used as a leash.
I sat back down.
Outside, an arrow struck the center of a butt with a sound like a knuckle cracking. Someone down there cheered. The drill master told them not to.
I picked up the quill.
At the bottom of Renhaven’s report, in the narrow margin, I wrote: ‘Send eyes to the eastern pass. Daily reports. Any recurrence, ride immediately.’ Then I set it aside and looked at the stack.
Corvin’s name. Guinevere’s name beneath it.
She was with Galahad now, which meant she wasn’t my concern for the time being, and that was just as well because I needed a break from her, and from the never-ending thoughts about her that wouldn’t let up.
I drank the tea. It tasted like metal and old leaves.
Something was pushing against the edges of the world, and it had been doing so for longer than anyone had told me, and every person who might have explained it to me had their own reasons for the particular silence they’d chosen.
I looked at the window. The arrow thunk continued below. Steady, rhythmic, ordinary.
The door swung open.
Kay didn’t bother knocking; he never did. I allowed it because arguing with Kay over trivialities was pointless when I could hardly be bothered. He came into the room carrying his leather satchel under one arm, his face set into that expression he always wore just before he ruined my day.
“Here are the harvest petitions from the north,” he said, setting a second stack of papers beside the ones I still hadn’t read.
“The Archbishop has sent another letter. And the envoy from Gaul is requesting an audience before the week’s end.”
He paused and set his portfolio on the edge of the table.
“And the Corbenic delegation arrived yesterday.”
He let that land as I put the cup down. “The Corbenic delegation... is here?”
“Lady Isolde,” he said with a clipped nod.
“Along with the envoy of her father, two counselors, and twelve others.”
His voice conveyed nothing, no emphasis, no inflection.
Only facts, spoken in his usual flat voice, as if he were watching me through the words.
“They were expected, of course; this visit has been planned since late summer.”
A pause. “I assumed you remembered?” I didn’t.
“She’s here to discuss trade pacts, clarification of borders, and review of the grain tariff.”
He adjusted a piece of paper that didn’t need adjustment.
“I’ve made plans for a reception in the Great Hall at midmorning. I trust you won’t object; it seemed fitting.”
I said nothing.
“Will that suit you?”
“That will suit me.” How had I forgotten that Isolde was coming?
Kay stared at me. And in that second, his power escaped him involuntarily.
I could see it: that split second in which he appraised everything around him and saw the fissures in it.
He’d done it from the time we were children, and I’d despised it then.
But I disliked it even more now, though for other reasons.
He was gone without saying another word.
I sat alone with the reports and still didn’t read them.
Isolde.
The name moved through me with a sensation I wasn’t certain how to fully describe.
It was something quieter and more complicated than the dragon’s pull.
Not heat exactly, but something warm. The memory of her in the garden in Corbenic came back even though it was something I’d been deliberately not remembering: the smell of night-blooming roses, the full moon in the sky, her lovely face, her voice in the dark saying,
I recognized the look of a man who needed air.
I had needed air.
She’d followed me because she was curious, or at least that’s what she’d said.
I’d stayed because I liked the fact that she was direct, that she spoke to me as if we were equals.
We talked about horses for an hour and then about obligation for another hour, and when she disagreed with me, when I said something about Uther’s methods that she found defensible, she told me plainly she found them defensible.
Strangely, the disagreement had felt like a doorway into something real, something that didn’t require me to perform, something that felt like fresh air rushing into a stale room.
I’d almost kissed her that night.
I remembered the weight of the moment: her hand on my arm, her face tilted toward mine, the space between us reduced to a breath.
I’d leaned in. I’d crossed half the distance.
And then the dragon had moved: shifted inside my chest with the slow awareness of something old and very large being slightly disturbed in its sleep, and I’d stopped.
Because I’d had to stop. Because kissing Isolde would have meant something I wasn’t prepared to give her. Or couldn’t give her.
So I’d stopped and stepped back.
Isolde had accepted it. She’d squeezed my arm, said goodnight, and walked back toward the house with the composure of a woman who would never give anyone the satisfaction of seeing her disappointed.
That composure had broken something in me.
Her grace at being refused made it worse than if she’d been hurt.
We’d written letters after: careful, measured letters, the kind that spoke of horses and orchards but meant everything else.
I’d told her of the foal, a chestnut with a white star on her chest that had been born in late autumn.
I’d written three sentences about that foal, and Isolde had written back six, and between those sentences, we began building something that had no name but felt like it was growing toward one.
Then Guinevere happened, and along with her, the night everything fractured, and I hadn’t written to Isolde since. I hadn’t had the stomach for it, pretending we could be something we couldn’t be.
I pushed back from the table and went to get dressed.
-ARTHUR-
The Great Hall in full morning light was a particular kind of theater.
High windows let in the pale sun in long columns that hit the stone floor and scattered.