CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE
-ARTHUR-
The message was three words.
The north remembers.
I read it twice, which was two times more than it deserved, before I threw it into the fire.
The parchment curled, then blackened, and the dragon rose to meet the heat, coiling upward through my chest with a hunger that had nothing to do with the northern territories and everything to do with the woman two floors below me.
Our mate is diminished, the dragon said, not for the first time.
I had to admit she’d appeared exactly that way at the evening meal the night before.
Clearly, Galahad had forced her into his fasting hours.
But where the dragon had been concerned by her rather gaunt state, I’d been the opposite.
I believed it a good thing that Galahad’s teachings were wearing her down.
That had been the whole point: to bend her, to make her submissive, so I could more easily control her.
The council chamber went quiet. Around the table, seven men watched me with the particular stillness of people who have learned that sound invites consequence.
Kay watched from the far end with his arms folded and his thin mouth flat.
Mordred observed from where he stood beside the hearth, his eyes moving between my face and the fire with an expression I hadn’t deciphered in eight years of trying.
The dragon pressed.
Ours. We must release her from his custody.
I planted both palms on the table and addressed the room without looking at any of them.
“Double the garrison on the northern road. Triple the levies on any caravan coming out of Rheged. And find me the man who wrote that message.”
I left before anyone could respond, and my feet took me to the place they always took me when crown and kingdom became too much.
The stable smelled like hay, leather, warm animals, damp straw, and the specific honest musk of horses that have been worked hard and brushed down. It smelled like nothing that required anything of me.
I’d had horses before I’d had a crown. Some days I remembered that, and some days I couldn’t afford to.
A foal had been born a few weeks ago in the third stall.
She had her mother’s ears and legs that were still slightly too long for her body.
She’d been growing fast: the grooms wrote it up in their quarterly reports, and I read those reports the way I read dispatches from the provinces, with half my attention and none of my presence.
I’d told myself I would visit more often.
I’d been telling myself that for three weeks.
I let myself into the stall. The foal lifted her head and came toward me immediately, nose to my palm, lips working over my fingers like an animal that has learned to expect an apple and finds its expectations consistently met.
My hand was empty.
She nosed deeper, investigated my sleeve, checked my other palm, but found nothing. She then stepped back and looked at me with an expression of such disappointment that something in my chest nearly gave.
“She’ll forgive you if you scratch behind her left ear.”
I turned and found Isolde standing at the stall door with her arms folded and a half-smile that said she’d been there long enough to watch the whole exchange and had timed her entrance accordingly.
She wore riding clothes: not the court dress she’d arrived in but practical riding skirts and a linen tunic gone soft with washing.
Her dark auburn hair was pulled back into a braid that had loosened at the end of a long day.
Hay covered her boots, and there was a smear of something dark on her left sleeve that was almost certainly axle grease.
She looked like she belonged here.
I scratched behind the foal’s left ear, and she leaned into my hand with enthusiasm: her whole body tilting, her eyes going half-lidded, one hoof scraping against the straw with involuntary pleasure. Isolde laughed.
It was a real laugh. Unguarded, low, and surprised. It filled the stable the way warmth fills a cold room. I hadn’t heard anyone laugh like that in weeks, and the sound did something to my chest that the dragon didn’t interfere with because the dragon didn’t care about Isolde, even if I did.
The absence of the beast was both a relief and a wound.
Isolde let herself into the stall. The foal recognized her immediately and turned to press its nose into Isolde’s shoulder, lipping at the end of her loosened braid with the easy trust of an animal that has been visited regularly.
Of course, it made sense that Isolde would find herself most at home in my stables. She bred horses.
We stood together in the stall with the foal between us, and for a few minutes, we talked about nothing important: the foal’s conformation, the strong hindquarters that predicted speed, not just endurance, and the mother’s recovery from a difficult birth.
I hadn’t known the birth was difficult.
Isolde glanced at me when I said so. There was no judgment in her expression, but there never was with Isolde.
Not wanting the conversation to stutter, I asked about Corbenic’s breeding program simply because I wanted to hear her talk about something she loved.
And because the alternative was standing in silence wondering what was happening in Galahad’s quarters.
Isolde lit up immediately, and the composed noblewoman who had sat across from me at a few formal dinners navigating trade agreements dissolved entirely,
replaced by a woman who could talk about bloodlines and fetlock angles with a passion that other women of her station reserved for jewelry and gowns.
She told me about a stallion she’d acquired from the eastern territories.
“Difficult animal,” she said, scratching the foal’s nose.
“Half-wild. He bit my steward. Then he bit the farrier. He bit my father, which my father hasn’t forgiven.”
A pause. “But when he runs—” She stopped, and I could tell she was looking for the right words, which Isolde rarely needed to look for.
“When he runs, it’s like watching something that was never meant to be contained. You don’t ride him. You convince him, for a few minutes, that your direction is worth following.”
She was describing a horse, yet I heard something else: a man who was carrying something wild and barely contained. Something that bit everyone who got close. Something that couldn’t be mastered, only persuaded, and even then, just temporarily, and at great cost.
I studied her face. I noticed how open and animated it was. But she was speaking about a horse, and I was thinking about something completely different. The parallel was accidental. She had no idea what she’d said or what it could mean to me.
Sometimes, the universe was just cruel.
The light changed then as the late afternoon sun came through the high stable windows at an angle that turned everything golden: the hay, the dust, the air itself. The foal had stopped moving. She stood between us with her head drooping against Isolde, her eyes closed, and her breath slow.
It was the most peaceful moment I’d known in weeks.
The silence was comfortable. Not loaded, not careful, not the silence of a room full of people waiting to see which direction I’d break. Just two people standing in the warm light with a sleeping horse and nothing that required immediate resolution.
Isolde spoke into it.
“You’ve been avoiding me.”
I didn’t deny it. I had a kingdom to run, a crisis to manage, a hundred legitimate reasons for my limited availability. The lies were right there, polished and ready, and I’d used them on more important people than Isolde.
But she’d sat across from me in a garden in Corbenic and extended trust in the specific way that requires something in return, and I’d accepted that trust, and the crown doesn’t override what accepting trust obliges you to.
“I have,” I said.
“Is it the spy?” She said the words plainly. No euphemism. No circling. “The woman who pretended to be a knight? Merlin’s daughter.”
So, she’d heard. Of course, she’d heard. It was silly to think she hadn’t. Gossip traveled faster than anything in Camelot. My hand stilled on the foal’s neck. “In part.”
Isolde watched me the way she watched horses, reading the body for what the words weren’t saying. She was quiet for a moment. Then she asked a question that no one else in this castle had ever asked me or would ever think to ask me.
“Are you all right?”
Not: Is the kingdom secure? Not: What are your plans for the prisoner? Not: Does this affect the treaty between us?
Instead: Are you all right?
It was the question of someone who saw the man inside the king and considered the man worth asking about.
The crack ran through the wall before I could stop it.
I felt it open and felt the cold coming through.
So, I sealed it with control, the way I sealed everything, because I was still Arthur, and Arthur didn’t break in stables or anywhere else, for that matter.
But the crack had been there; Isolde had watched it form, and her eyes had gone soft with something I didn’t deserve.
So, I told her a version of the truth.
Not the dragon truth. Not the Excalibur truth.
Not what happened to my body whenever Guinevere was in the room truth.
I told her the human truth: the version a man might confess to a woman he trusted in warm light with hay on her boots and no audience.
I told her that someone I’d allowed near me hadn’t existed and that I was having a hard time coming to terms with that truth.
That the person I’d come to regard had been nothing more than a construction.
That the betrayal wasn’t a single lie but an entire fabricated self, living at my table, earning my respect through deliberate and comprehensive fiction.
I told her that I was angry and that the anger was complicated by things I wasn’t ready to name.
Isolde listened without interrupting. When I finished, she didn’t offer advice, and she didn’t offer comfort. She also didn’t produce the diplomatic reassurance that every other person in my life would have defaulted to. Instead, she reached across the foal’s sleeping back and took my hand.
Her fingers laced through mine. Her palm was warm and calloused: the hand of a woman who holds reins, who hauls hay and doesn’t send servants to do the parts of life that require actual contact.