CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR #2
His arm tightened around me, tightened almost imperceptibly, the way a hand tightens in sleep around something it doesn’t want to lose. I looked up and over my shoulder into his face.
His eyes had gone dark; the black at the edge of his irises was spreading rapidly.
Meanwhile, my heart was doing something catastrophic.
Something that made so little sense to me because this man was the reason for all the pain and hardship I’d experienced.
He stood for everything I hated, and I should have hated him. I did hate him.
So, why...
Don’t, I thought. At myself. At him. At whatever was happening in the inches between us that had nothing to do with the practice yard, prisoners, or kings.
He never answered. Instead, he released me.
Not slowly. His arm dropped, he stepped back, and the cold rushed into the space where his heat had been. I turned to face him before I’d made a conscious decision to do so.
He’d already put distance between us. Three steps. His expression had locked itself back into the familiar arrangement: controlled, measuring, giving nothing. But there was color in his face that hadn’t been there before, and his breathing hadn’t fully settled.
Neither had mine.
He picked up my fallen practice sword and held it out to me, hilt first. I took it. Our fingers didn’t touch.
“What did Merlin tell you about me?”
He asked the question the same way he asked everything: flat, without inflection, slipped into the space between one moment and the next.
But this one landed differently. I felt it in my chest because I understood what it was: a deflection.
He’d absolutely felt whatever had just traveled between us, but he hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it. So, he’d simply changed the subject.
I didn’t answer right away.
The silence stretched long enough that he noticed it. Long enough that I noticed him noticing it. He didn’t push. He just waited, sword at rest, watching me.
The briefing had happened in the upper room at Caer Gwyll. Merlin had stood at the window with his back to me while he talked.
Arthur Pendragon is not what Logres believes him to be.
He is brilliant, yes. Ruthless, absolutely.
But Camelot was built on a lie. The kingdom he claims to have purified of magic runs on it: in the wards, in the grain stores, in the water table beneath the city.
He understands this. He has always understood this.
He does not suppress magic because he fears it.
He suppresses it because he cannot afford to share it. Remember the difference.
What Merlin hadn’t told me, what no briefing had accounted for, was the gap between the shape of the man and the man himself.
I made a choice about what to give Arthur.
“He told me you were brilliant,” I said. “But ruthless,” That Camelot runs on magic it claims to have outlawed, and that you knew that. That you’d always known it, and the ban on magic was never about fear. It was about control.”
Arthur’s expression didn’t change. He turned the practice sword once in his hand, a slow rotation, and then set it against the rack.
“And do you believe he was wrong?” he asked me.
“No.”
He looked at me sidelong.
“But?”
I shouldn’t have paused. The pause was the tell, and he caught it immediately, the way he caught everything, with that quiet, total attention that had nothing performative in it.
“The briefing was thorough,” I said.
“That’s not an answer.”
“No.”
He waited again. That patience of his was silence with an edge, and the longer it lasted, the more the empty space demanded to be filled.
I set my own practice sword back on the rack and kept my eyes there for a moment: on the worn wood grain, the places where other people’s hands had smoothed it down.
“What did you expect when you arrived here?” he asked.
I opened my mouth with something ready, some version of what I was supposed to say: a prisoner giving calibrated intelligence, keeping the real things locked down, offering just enough to keep the exchange alive.
What came out instead was: “Someone easier to hate.”
The words arrived before I’d decided to release them. Simple and flat, they were in the air between us, and there was nothing I could do about that.
Arthur went very still.
I held his gaze because looking away would have been worse, would have confirmed something I wasn’t ready to confirm.
His jaw shifted once. A muscle along it tightened and then released.
“And now?” he asked.
The question was so quiet I almost missed it.
My chest pulled tight around Mordred’s binding, and I thought about Corvin in the dark below us and Galahad.
I thought about the cold water baths, the witch’s mark I didn’t possess, and Galahad’s roaming hands.
I thought about the weight of a mission that had cost me everything because a man I’d trusted had told me it was necessary and that I was made for it.
I thought about the arm across my chest and the heat of Arthur and the thing that had moved in me like a tide given no permission.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You don’t know?”
I nodded, and I couldn’t say why, but the truth was suddenly pouring out of me. “I dislike you exceedingly,” I answered as he smiled. “But there’s more to it than that... between us. And we both know it.”
“Do we?”
I nodded. “We do. And even if you won’t admit it, you know it as well as I do. And that’s all I can say because that’s all I know.”
He held my gaze for three full seconds. Then he looked away first, out toward the far end of the yard, and whatever had opened briefly in his face closed itself again.
The king reasserted himself over the man, that familiar composite of control, distance, and absolute authority clicking back into place.
He nodded once, then he walked toward the eastern gate.
I stood in the middle of the empty yard with morning light across the stones and the ghost of his arm still warm against my chest, and watched him go. The guard who was meant to return me to Galahad’s chambers was already moving toward me, but I couldn’t say I even cared.
Instead, my mind was on Arthur. He was the enemy. I knew that. And yet... yet the draw between us, the pull I’d felt that he’d felt too...
I didn’t know what to do with it.
-GUIN-
The Great Hall was already full when the guard and I arrived.
The guard opened the door, stood aside, and I walked in.
Every head didn’t turn at once. It was more like a wave.
The people nearest the door noticed me first, and then the ones behind them, their collective attention moving through the room in a slow ripple.
Soon that ripple reached the far end of the room where the knights sat at the high table, and even a few of them glanced over with the practiced disinterest of men who wanted to look like they weren’t looking.
I’d learned to walk through it. Pick a point at the far end of the room and move toward it without rushing, without hesitating, without doing anything that could be read as either defiance or submission. The walk itself was the performance, and I’d gotten better at it. Or so I thought.
The servants’ end of the table was half-empty. It always was at this hour: the kitchen staff ate in shifts, and the ones who’d already finished had gone back to work. The remaining seats were empty because no one was going to fill them.
Not next to me, anyway.
I sat. A girl came by with bread, and I took a piece before she could think better of leaving it. A boy followed with the soup ladle, and I held out my bowl without making eye contact, which was the fastest way to get served.
The soup was thin, but it was hot. I ate, but this time I tried to employ a little more decorum than last time because I remembered what awaited me if I was too demonstrative in my hunger.
Around me, the hall continued its own life.
Two serving women at the far end argued about something in low voices.
A dog worked its way under the table and found my feet and settled there, which I chose to take as a kindness.
The fire in the central hearth had gotten high, and the nearest torches along the wall were unnecessary, their flames small and pale in comparison.
I tore the bread and began to eat it as someone sat down across from me.
I looked up and I caught dark curly hair, olive skin, and a face that belonged in a painting of a sea voyage rather than a drafty Great Hall. Tristan. He was looking at the bread basket in the center of the table with genuine interest, like he’d only just noticed it was there.
He was, by any measure, exactly where he wasn’t supposed to be. I knew it, he knew it, we both knew it.
I stared at him, frowning.
He didn’t seem to notice, or if he did, he chose not to. Instead, he picked up the tankard in front of him, considered the ale, took a sip, and set it back down with the careful expression of a man recalibrating his expectations.
“The ale is worse than last week,” he said. Not to me specifically, possibly to the table, even though we were the only ones sitting here.
I waited for the rest of it: the conversation that I was sure would follow: questions about my crimes, about Merlin and Caer Gwyll, about Lioran, or what I was doing here. Something.
Instead, he reached toward the bread basket and stopped, looking at me directly for the first time.
“Would you mind passing that?”
I looked at him and then I looked at the basket, which was closer to him than to me by at least a hand’s width.
“It’s right there,” I said.
“It is,” he agreed. “But you’re still closer.”
I wasn’t, but I passed it to him anyway.
My fingers grazed the side of his hand when he took the basket from me, and the cold hit me like stepping into a river in January.
Not cool. Not the chill of a drafty room or a man who’d come in from outside.
He was cold the way stone is cold when it’s been underground.
Cold the way things are cold when they’re no longer alive.
I pulled my hand back without even realizing it.
He didn’t seem to notice. Instead, he broke off a piece of bread with the focused pleasure of a man who’d earned his meal, then spread it with the thin butter and ate half of it.