CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX #3
“I find it interesting,” I continued. “That she appeared to… trust you when you’ve given her no reason at all.” I set the cup down. “As far as I know, you’ve given her no reason.”
He nodded, as if to agree with me.
Then it was my turn to nod as I leaned closer to him. “You came to Camelot because your power is useful to me. I haven’t forgotten that, and neither should you. The arrangement persists as long as you continue to make yourself useful.” I looked at him directly. “Complicate it, and it ends.”
There was no change in his expression. “I understand.”
No argument. No clarification, just I understand, delivered flat and clean, like a man confirming a route he’d already memorized.
The dragon shifted somewhere beneath the tattoo: something that wasn’t quite heat, something that was simply paying close attention.
I’d spent three days thinking about Corvin’s face in that tavern chamber, the way he’d looked at her across the room.
I’d known his expression immediately, recognized it the way you recognize a blade shape you’ve seen in your own hand.
Corvin had been in love with her, or something adjacent to love, and the dragon had responded to that with fire, with rage, with the specific desire to tear him out of the room and put him somewhere she couldn’t reach.
Tristan was different.
He didn’t look at her like Corvin looked at her. He looked at her like she was a language he was already fluent in, like the conversation was simply continuing something begun elsewhere, in some other room I hadn’t been permitted to enter.
I didn’t like that.
“She’s an intelligence asset,” I continued.
“She carries information I’m still in the process of extracting. Every conversation she has is a variable I have to account for.”
I paused to study him a moment. His expression was still just as immobile.
“You sat across from her at dinner and she talked to you, which means you changed something in her without my knowing what you changed.”
I let that sit. “I don’t enjoy unknowns.”
Tristan tilted his head slightly. “What would you like to know?”
“Everything she doesn’t say to my face.”
She was careful, controlled, watched every word with an attention that I could only describe as professional.
That was another thing I’d noted about her, in a list that kept growing.
“I want what she doesn’t say, what she asks about when she thinks the conversation doesn’t matter. I want to know what keeps her awake, whether she’s planning to attempt escape again, or whether she’s beginning to calculate something else.”
I paused. “I want to know whether her loyalty to the man who sent her here is holding.”
Something moved behind Tristan’s eyes as he nodded.
“You want me to become a friend,” he said.
“I want the information a friend would have.”
He was quiet for a moment. The fire ticked again. Outside the window, somewhere on the training ground, steel rang against steel.
“And in return?” he asked.
“The arrangement continues. You keep your position here as a Knight of the Round Table. Your magic stays welcome at Camelot.” I met his eyes. “And you keep your access to her.”
He didn’t hesitate; there was no pause to weigh terms, no question about the scope of the expectation. He simply said, “All right.”
That answer told me something: either he’d known this was coming from the moment I’d sent for him, or he’d already wanted the access and was simply being given a framework for what he would have sought anyway.
Both were possible. Both changed the shape of what he was to me, though in different directions.
“Access to her does not mean fucking her,” I added.
His head came up slightly at that. “I did not intend—”
“—all men who see her intend to fuck her,” I interrupted. “You will not be one of them.”
He nodded, but kept his eyes on mine.
“One more thing,” I continued, and my voice dropped half a register. I watched him notice. “Galahad.”
Tristan waited.
“He doesn’t need to know about this conversation.” I held his gaze. “His zeal makes him useful for some purposes. It does not make him useful for this one. If I find he’s been informed of our… agreement, I’ll consider it a decision you made, and I’ll respond accordingly.”
Tristan nodded once. It was short and it was precise.
“Good.” I looked back down at the parchment on my desk, which I had no intention of reading. “That’s all.”
Tristan stood, crossed back to the door, and let himself out without ceremony. The latch clicked shut.
Mordred didn’t speak immediately. He rarely did. He let the silence settle and then said, carefully, “He wasn’t surprised by the conversation.”
“No,” I said. “He wasn’t.”
The fire cracked. I turned the cup again on the desk.
The dragon said nothing. It had gone very still in the way it went still when it was watching something it hadn’t made a decision about yet.
Not a rival, it had decided, somewhere beneath language.
Something else.
I didn’t disagree. I just didn’t know yet what something else meant, and until I did, Tristan of Lyonesse would remain the most useful uncertainty in my court.