CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX #2
I should have stood. Instead, I stayed in the chair, watching the fire, and he stayed behind his table, and neither of us moved to end the conversation. The room had that quality some rooms get late at night. Gravity slightly different. Rules slightly suspended.
He spoke first, which surprised me.
“It wants her.”
I said nothing.
“The dragon.” His voice had changed. The man playing the role of king had come down, not fully, never fully, but enough that I could hear something in his voice.
Something tired, raw, and considerably younger than his face would suggest.
“It’s been—” He stopped. Took a deep breath, then started again.
“I’m accustomed to managing it. I’ve managed it for years. It’s loud. It wants things. That’s its nature.” A pause. “This is different.”
I watched him.
“It screams for her.” The words landed simply, without drama, which made them worse.
“Every hour she’s in this castle. Every hour I’m in this castle with her in it. It screams for her and I—” His jaw set again.
He picked up the goblet at his elbow and put it down without drinking any of the ale within it.
“I can feel it moving. Beneath my skin. Wanting to move toward her even when I’m standing still.”
He looked at the fire, and then something seemed to occur to him because he looked up at me again.
“You understand that I won’t lose control of it.”
“I understand that you haven’t lost control of it,” I said, and the ‘yet’ in that statement hung there unsaid.
“Yes,” he said quietly. “That.”
I’d watched the prophecy of kingship land on Arthur like a boulder from the moment he was a young man.
Then I’d watched him build himself into the shape it required.
And I’d resented him for every gift he hadn’t earned and every gift he had.
I’d stood in his shadow for three decades and learned every variation of his expressions.
Yet, I’d never heard him admit, in any form, that control was a project rather than a condition.
“And Isolde?” I asked. “Is her appearance here simply a coincidence?”
“Not a coincidence,” Arthur answered and shook his head. “She soothes me.”
“And the prisoner?”
He looked up at me. “She’s not cooperating.” He shook his head and his jaw grew tighter. “She fucking fights me at every turn.”
“And Galahad?”
“Apparently, she’s behaving for Galahad, from what he reports. But... she still won’t cooperate with me.” Something moved behind his eyes. “She looks at me like she’s calculating her next argument.”
“That’s information,” I said.
“It’s irritating.”
“Also information.”
His mouth pressed flat. “Your Seneschalship will cover the knights’ quarters.”
“And their correspondence. And their visitors. And the movement of anyone within this castle.” I let that settle. “It’s a thorough office.”
He looked at me steadily. “What do you assume? What proof are you after?”
I shook my head as I leaned back into my chair. “I can’t accuse someone of something this... nuanced unless I have the proof I require. And until I have that proof, I cannot name names.”
I didn’t elaborate. I didn’t need to.
Instead, I stood.
“Goodnight, Arthur.”
He said nothing. He was looking at the fire again, his hand still resting against the goblet, his jaw set in that particular way that meant something was moving beneath the surface of him, and he was the only wall between it and the room.
I let myself out.
In the corridor, the torches burned steadily.
The guards were slightly too still in the way guards get when they’ve heard more than they were meant to.
I walked past them without acknowledgment, already thinking ahead, already mapping the access I’d have by morning against the questions I needed answered.
I never brought Arthur suspicion instead of evidence. But I intended to be there when my suspicions bore fruit.
-KAY-
The knights’ quarters smelled like wet wool and ambition. I moved through them methodically, without appetite for the work itself, but with an eye for what the work might eventually produce.
Hours I spent in those rooms. Many hours documenting unimportant things like which men left their boots outside their doors without a servant to collect them.
Of course there were protocol violations, the petty sediment that collects at the bottom of any institution.
None of it mattered, but all of it went into my records.
Lance’s room was the last in the corridor.
Two days ago, the king had sent him to the Severn Frontier. There was an actual conflict breaking out there, concerning cattle raids and some lord who had more resentment than tolerance. This sort of mission called for precisely those talents that Lance had and none of those he didn’t have.
I’d watched him ride out from the upper courtyard; his back was straight, and his horse moved like an extension of his body. Even leaving Camelot on routine business, Lancelot du Lac looked like a man departing for legend.
I waited another quarter hour before attempting to enter his bedchamber.
His door, of course, was locked. But as Seneschal, I had the key to every lock in this castle which is exactly why I’d requested the title. This room was no exception.
The chamber was exactly what I expected it would be: sparse.
Weapons lined the left wall, each in better condition than the furniture.
A shield with a silver wolf depicted upon it was propped rather than hung.
Two swords, one ceremonial and one functional, stood on the opposite end of the room, and the functional one showed more use.
There were letters on the writing table: a stack of them, folded and refolded, the paper gone soft at the creases in a way that meant he’d read them more than once.
I flipped through them and determined they were from his now-deceased mother. Touching.
I went through the desk after perusing the letters.
But I found nothing of interest, just a record of debts owed to him, debts that had never been collected.
There was also a draft of a letter he hadn’t finished yet hadn’t discarded, which was interesting in the way that abandoned things are always interesting, but not relevant.
Next, I moved to the wardrobe. It was both clean and practical. His clothing was well-made, and he took care of it, which was consistent with the rest of him.
I moved to the chest at the foot of the bed. There were winter linens on top, undisturbed. The folding was a servant’s work: tight, even. I lifted them out and set them aside.
Underneath them, at the very bottom of the chest, I found oilcloth wrapped around a very carefully placed bundle. It was the kind of wrapping you used for something you wanted to last.
I picked the bundle up, which wasn’t heavy. Even before I unwrapped it, I had a general sense of what it was, the way you sometimes know the shape of a room before you step into it. The oilcloth fell open across my palms and revealed a tunic.
It was a very small tunic, impractically small, really.
The kind of small that could belong to a slender young man if you were being very generous about it, or to a woman if you were paying better attention.
The tunic had been folded, not stuffed into the chest and both words meant starkly different things.
‘Stuffed’ meant you wanted the thing out of sight.
‘Folded’ meant you kept going back to it.
I turned it over.
Something had dried on the fabric. A pale smear, slightly stiff. I looked at it for a moment the way I looked at grain reports. I was fairly sure it was cum. Slightly put off at the thought, I folded it back onto itself.
I was convinced this was Lioran’s tunic.
After all, what other knight was small enough to fit into the ridiculous thing?
I thought about that for a moment. If this cum-stained tunic had occurred when Guinevere was still Lioran, it matched the timing quite perfectly, the timing and my hunch.
Regardless, I found this quite interesting.
Mainly that Lance still possessed the stained tunic and that he’d kept it with him all this time.
He could have very easily sent it to the washing with his other clothing: knights’ clothing was misplaced all the time.
No one would have thought anything of it.
Yet, Lance hadn’t done that at all. Instead, he’d packed the tiny tunic in oilcloth and tucked it under his winter linens.
Lancelot du Lac, who had given his entire life to Arthur’s service, Arthur’s name, and Arthur’s court, had kept this in his clothing chest like a secret he intended to keep forever.
There was nothing in the world more useful than a man whose guilt and longing were working against each other because they pulled in opposite directions, making him fight his own self.
I rewrapped the tunic in the oilcloth and tucked it under my elbow. Yes, this might be some sort of proof, but as of yet, it was still a hunch. It wasn’t yet a fact. And only magic would be able to turn it from a hunch into a fact.
Elsbeth, the mousy little herbalist, would be in the lower hall at this hour.
She kept to a schedule the way anxious people often did, the predictability functioning as a kind of armor.
What was more, she owed me, and she knew it.