CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT
-ARTHUR-
The war council met at the seventh hour.
I arrived last, but that was no surprise because I always arrived last.
It wasn’t ceremony, or not only ceremony; it was that I needed thirty seconds in the corridor before I opened that door, thirty seconds where no one was watching me arrange my face into something that would hold for the next two hours.
The Round Table looked different somehow. Yes, it was the same stone, the same carved seats, the same pale morning light coming off the courtyard windows. But the energy was different. When nine men sat at it with bad news, the table felt like what it was: a weapon platform.
I took my seat. No one spoke until I did.
“Three convoys,” I said. “Six weeks.”
I laid the fact out the way I’d rehearsed it in my solar at dawn, which was to say I did so without flourish, without anger. Since then, two outpost garrisons on the northern road had reported disrupted supplies. And now, according to this newest loss, I was also down two men, good men.
“This isn’t banditry,” I continued. “This is an attrition campaign. It’s coordinated, patient, and so far... very effective.”
No one argued with that.
Mordred spoke next. He had the ward-stone figures laid out on vellum, annotated in his precise hand, each notation smaller than seemed necessary, as if he begrudged the parchment the space.
One full cycle of maintenance materials had been intercepted.
Not the stones themselves, just the materials to sustain them.
He walked through the degradation timeline without raising his voice, but that wasn’t much of a surprise because Mordred never raised his voice.
He discussed the perimeter junctions and the fact that we had two months before the outer wards would begin failing where the boundary lines intersected.
“I’m pursuing alternative sources,” he concluded.
I watched him. Mordred without visible alarm was a specific kind of signal.
It meant he’d already passed through the stage where alarm was useful and he’d come out the other side.
It meant the problem was large enough that panic had already been processed and then set aside like a tool he no longer needed.
Once Mordred had finished speaking, Lance stood for the military assessment. His hands were clasped behind his back, which he did when he was being careful about how he said something.
“We can’t match the Rebellion’s mobility with regular force,” he said.
“Our infantry is too heavy. Not only that, but our cavalry requires supply lines the Rebellion has already demonstrated they can cut. Fixed position defense gives them every advantage... they simply choose when to engage and when to vanish.”
He paused and cleared his throat. “What we need is a smaller strike force. Six to ten men... something lighter. Something with no supply dependency. We need to be mobile enough to follow disrupted routes and respond within hours rather than days... sometimes the response even takes weeks.”
Gawain waited until Lance sat down, and then he looked at Lance in a silent question of whether he was finished. Lance nodded, and Gawain faced me.
“The prisoner,” he started.
“What about her?” I grumbled, because this was the subject I liked least.
“I raise her as an operational question. If she has intelligence value to the Rebellion, and the assumption thus far has been that she does, when does the extraction begin?”
He said the words without challenge. Gawain would never challenge me in council.
It wasn’t cowardice; it was method. He believed in process: that asking the right question at the right time achieved more than forcing a confrontation.
Not that he would ever confront his king, but his question was a good one.
“The assessment is ongoing,” I answered. “And has been, hidden under the guise of training sessions.” I paused. “I daresay some of you have seen the two of us sparring in the training yard?”
There were a round of nods and a grunt or two.
Gawain’s mouth tightened at the corners and he nodded once.
He didn’t ask what ‘ongoing’ meant, or what ‘assessment’ meant, or why, after more than two weeks, I still didn’t have a more precise answer.
But that was the truth. Where we stood now, I still didn’t have any idea (because she hadn’t admitted anything important).
Furthermore, I still didn’t know for certain if Guinevere had anything to do with the Rebellion at all.
For all I knew, the Rebellion and Merlin were two different entities.
Regardless, Gawain was too skilled to ask such questions directly.
But the tightening at his mouth said he’d heard the imprecision in my answer, and he’d remember it.
Agravaine spoke last.
He always let the others go first. I’d noticed this years ago. He collected information while others spoke, then used that information, and he timed himself like someone who understands that arriving last in a conversation is a form of leverage.
“If the prisoner is valuable enough to maintain,” he said, “one wonders whether the current supervision arrangement is... appropriate.”
He didn’t say Galahad’s name, but he also didn’t need to.
Every man at the table heard it in what Agravaine didn’t say, heard the implication that something about Galahad’s custody was being questioned, that an alternative existed, and that Agravaine was positioning himself as a moderate voice raising a reasonable concern.
He folded his hands on the table and looked at me with the attentiveness of a man who expected to be agreed with eventually.
I didn’t respond immediately. Instead, I watched the reactions of the others.
Across the table, Percival looked at Agravaine.
He didn’t say anything, though; he just simply looked, with that quality he got when his gift was reading something he didn’t like.
Percival’s empathy wasn’t telepathy; he couldn’t pull thoughts from a man’s head, but intention was another matter. Intent left marks.
Whatever he was reading off Agravaine at the moment hadn’t improved upon examination. He looked down at his hands again and said nothing.
The table waited.
I let it wait.
“The current arrangement serves multiple purposes,” I said finally. “The prisoner is being held by Sir Galahad for reasons that extend beyond her mere containment.”
She should be released to us, the dragon suddenly piped up. It had very little interest in matters of state and total interest in the white-haired witch.
I didn’t elaborate immediately. Instead, I watched the room calibrate itself around the pause, which told me things.
Agravaine’s expression stayed pleasant in that way of his that meant he was listening harder than he appeared to be.
Gawain had stopped drumming his fingers against the table, and Lance was looking down at it.
“We aren’t simply storing her,” I continued. “We are remaking her.”
Galahad spoke then. He’d been still enough through the council that it was easy to forget he was present, which was its own kind of skill even if he didn’t use it the way Agravaine did.
“Through the Vow of the Boundless,” he began, “a person may be brought to repentance. The corruption does not have to be permanent, and the vessel can be cleansed. The path is one of discipline, of prayer,
of stripping away the false self that sin has built until the true person underneath is able to receive truth.”
He spoke with a confidence that wasn’t arrogance so much as it was certainty in a process he understood better than anyone else in the room.
“The prisoner is making improvement. She participates in the Hours. She hasn’t resisted instruction as she did in the first days.”
He paused.
“I want to be clear that this is not a quick answer. It is a path, and paths require time. The man who abandons a path because it has not ended yet has not failed the path. He has simply failed his own patience.”
No one at the table said anything to that.
“Trust in the process,” Galahad said. “I do, and I have already seen results.”
“Is part of her penance starving her?” Lance didn’t move when he asked the question.
That was the tell. Most men leaned forward when they were angry, or they pushed back from the table, or they did something with their hands.
Lance always went still. He’d learned it from combat, from years of standing in front of men who were trying to read him, and he’d carried the stillness into every other room he’d ever occupied.
Yesss, the dragon hissed. Our mate does not do well in her captivity. She must be released to us.
The question dropped into the silence as every head at the table turned toward him. Lance didn’t bother to look at any of them, though. He kept his gaze on Galahad, and what was behind his eyes was anger that had been carefully contained.
Galahad met his gaze without any visible change in his expression. Lance pressed on before Galahad could answer.
“She wolfed her food at dinner,” he said.
“Both times I’ve seen her at the table. Not quickly, but as if she was ravenous. Like a starved animal.”
He paused. “And she’s thinner than she was three weeks ago. Noticeably thinner.”
He looked around the table then, not at me, but at the others. “Tell me none of you noticed.”
Percival’s jaw tightened, and his hand went flat against the table in the way it did when he was absorbing something he’d rather not be absorbing. “I have noticed,” he admitted and Lance nodded at him.
Gawain’s gaze dropped to the table’s surface.
“She is definitely thinner,” Tristan noted, and Gareth nodded, murmuring something along the same lines.
Agravaine watched Lance with the attention of a man who was noting something useful.
Galahad, meanwhile, waited for the room to settle.
He didn’t look discomfited. In fact, he looked the way he always looked, as though he existed at a slight remove from the emotional weather everyone else was caught in.
“Ritual fasting,” he said, “is among the most ancient disciplines of the Vow. The Order of the Scourge prescribes three fasting days per week for all practitioners.”