CHAPTER THIRTY-THREE #2
Her hand in mine felt like the garden in Corbenic.
Like the letters about foals, orchards, and the half-wild stallion no one else could manage.
I lifted her hand and pressed my mouth to it.
Her skin was warm against my lips. I held it there a moment longer than courtesy required, and when I straightened, I looked at her suddenly and completely understood that what I wanted wasn’t her hand at all.
The want was simple, clean, and the dragon didn’t interfere with it, which meant it was mine.
Truly mine. Not the dragon’s acquisition, not the obsession, not the howling claim: this was simply my own want, my own desire.
Her free hand came up and touched my jaw. Her fingertips were light against my face as her eyes moved across mine with a tenderness that wasn’t asking for anything in return.
“When you’re ready to tell me the rest,” she said quietly, “I’ll still be here.”
I turned my face into her palm and closed my eyes, relishing the feel of her skin. The amber light was warm through my eyelids, and the foal breathed slowly and steadily between us as Isolde’s hand curved against my jaw.
For three seconds, I was just a man. Not the dragon’s vessel. Not a king. Not the thing sitting in the dark between two impossible futures. Just a man being touched by a woman who’d chosen to see him and hadn’t yet been given a reason to regret it.
Three seconds.
A groom appeared at the stall door. As soon as he saw us, he was apologetic.
He mentioned that Mordred had questions about the prisoner’s binding and that the council required my presence for the northern crisis.
Those three seconds of bliss closed over themselves and left no evidence that they’d ever existed.
I opened my eyes and dropped Isolde’s hand. The king returned; I felt it happen, felt the mask moving back into its position with the ease of something that had become second nature. I thanked Isolde for the conversation about the foal, and when I did, my voice came out formal.
She read the shift, just like she always did. And once she read it, she stepped back and gave me the room the crown required and didn’t make me feel guilty for taking it, which was the most generous thing she could have done.
“The foal needs a name,” she said. “Think about it.”
-ARTHUR-
I lay awake that night.
The dragon pulled south toward Galahad’s quarters. It was steady and insistent, like a current running beneath everything. I pressed my fist against my chest and breathed. And all the while, I thought about a name for the foal. I tried to think only about the name.
But I found my thoughts consistently returning to a woman in amber light asking if I was all right. Soon those thoughts turned to a woman in an amorphous gray gown asking nothing, offering nothing, requiring nothing, and somehow costing more than everything.
I lay in the dark between them: one who was warmth, horses, and letters written in good faith, and the other who was winter, deception, and whatever this was that the dragon had decided before I had any say in it.
The distance between what I should have wanted and what I couldn’t stop wanting was the exact measure of how far I’d fallen from the man who’d held Isolde’s hand in a stable and felt, for three seconds, like someone who might still deserve the life she was offering.
For as much as I’d wanted to hold Isolde’s hand in the stables, I wanted to fuck Guinevere so hard that no other man would ever be able to take my place. I wanted to show her who was in charge and how much her defiance had cost her.
I didn’t choose a name. In truth, I didn’t choose anything.
The dragon breathed in the dark, and I breathed with it, and outside, in the third stall, a chestnut foal slept in the hay with her white blaze pressed to the wood with no name.
-KAY-
The training yard was nearly empty when I found him.
Lance stood at the other end, practicing one of his sword sequences by himself. I waited until he’d completed the routine, then I approached him.
“A moment of your time, Sir Lancelot,” I said.
He lowered the sword and looked at me with feigned patience that was really just contempt wearing better clothes. “Kay.”
“You may want to set that down.”
He didn’t set the sword down, but I also hadn’t expected him to. He was the type of man who would go against advice just to do so.
I clasped my hands behind my back and let the silence sit between us for a breath, as I’d learned that one’s best arrow in the conversational quiver wasn’t conversation at all.
“During our last conversation,” I began, “you made a point, and it was a very good one, as it happened. You said I had no proof that there had existed any type of... inappropriate relationship between you and the prisoner.”
Something shifted behind his eyes, something that was barely perceptible but resembled concern. And concerned he should have been because he was now standing very still at the edge of something he couldn’t see the bottom of. But I could.
“I remember,” he said.
“I thought about that... thought about it for quite some time, truth be told. You were right in that I had no proof.” I paused as I nodded. “So I went and got some.”
He said nothing, but the pulse in his neck increased visibly.
I turned and walked a few paces to give him a moment to compose himself.
“Every time you were in the training yard,” I began as I flicked off one finger, “you watched Lioran. I watched you watch Lioran. Now, a commander watches his subordinates: yes, of course, that is true and it’s to be expected because it’s a commander’s function. But there’s a quality of attention,
a particular quality, that has nothing to do with command assessment and everything to do with a man who can’t stop the direction of his own eyes, a man who fights the pull and loses, repeatedly, across the span of an afternoon. And, after that, many afternoons.”
I glanced back at him. “You lost rather badly.”
Lance’s jaw tightened.
Finger two. “Then there was the night you returned to your quarters at an hour I will describe as... unusual. Not only was the hour decidedly late, but you appeared to be a man who was making deliberate choices about the weight of his footsteps.”
I kept my voice conversational. “My chamber is two doors from yours, in case you had forgotten. And I make it my business to know the sounds of the men who live near me and near the king. I get to know their patterns, and I watch for their habits, their anomalies.”
I let that land. “You were an anomaly that evening.”
“Kay—”
“—I haven’t finished.”
He closed his mouth.
“After the particular night in which you returned quite late, during breakfast the following morning, you sat down, and your expression was doing two things at once. It was both alive in a way it had never appeared to be alive before, but there was also... fear there in roughly equal measure.
You wore the expression of a man who has done something magnificent but knows it may cost him everything.”
I saw his face go very careful and very still.
“And then, during training later that same day, you put your hand on Lioran’s shoulder, which was routine enough, unremarkable to anyone else in that yard.”
I paused. “Except that your hand lingered there another second or more. Perhaps less. And she—”
“—that’s not—”
“—she flinched.” I said the words quietly.
“Not away from you, but this flinch was of a body that knows another body... intimately. A body that remembers joining with another body.”
I tilted my head. “Two people who have recently been unclothed together cannot entirely pretend they haven’t been. They become stuck in one another’s orbit, and if an outsider is looking for the right cues, he will find them.”
I paused. “And I believe it was that night or the next that you never returned to your room at all.”
Lance looked at me for a long moment. His voice, when it came, was controlled, though barely.
“That’s all conjecture based on your own opinions. None of it consists of anything that would be considered proof.”
“You’re correct,” I said. “It isn’t proof when taken separately, instance by instance.”
I let him have that for exactly three seconds.
“However,” I continued, “I have recently been appointed as the king’s Seneschal, in case you were unaware.”
His eyebrows rose in surprise. “Yes, the role was applied to me only very recently. And in case you had also forgotten the role of Seneschal, it means my function is to see precisely what others miss, and you were not nearly as invisible as you believed yourself to be.”
I cleared my throat and prepared to lay this largest bit of evidence on his doorstep.
“As Seneschal, I have the authority to search any and all knights’ rooms. While searching yours, I found a rather small tunic tucked beneath your clothing, wrapped in oilcloth in the chest at the foot of your bed.
I thought it a rather interesting choice for a man to wrap another man’s tunic in such a way.”
Lance stared at me, and the expression in his eyes had changed. He was paying much more attention now.
“As you might well imagine, I had the small tunic tested,” I continued. “And I suppose you won’t be surprised to know that the tunic carried a magical signature.” I paused to catch my breath. “Lioran’s magical signature or shall we call her by her true name? Guinevere.”
The silence in the yard was now complete. Even the wind had the decency to stop blowing.
“Now,” I said pleasantly, “you are welcome to argue that each of these things, taken separately, amounts to very little, and if you were to make such an argument, I would hastily agree with you. Observation is not testimony, after all. And a hidden tunic is not a confession,
just as a flinch is not evidence.”
I paused and gave him a broad grin. “But taken together, layered, and added to your performance with Agravaine when he said something rather... crude about the prisoner and you were quite quick to come to her defense... Well, taken together, all of that evidence paints a picture, Lance,
and a rather detailed one. The kind of picture a king tends to notice.”