CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE #3
Wood clashed against wood, but all I could focus on was the set of her teeth and the fact that her controlled patience had burned off entirely.
Good.
“Careful,” I said.
She hit me again.
I caught her wrist this time, turned her momentum against her, and walked her backward until her shoulders met the fence post. I wasn’t rough, just immovable. She strained against my grip, and I let her feel that she wasn’t going anywhere.
-LANCE-
I stopped at the archway in the training yard as soon as I saw her with Arthur, then stood there long enough that Gawain nearly walked into my back. He muttered something and went around me. I didn’t move.
She held the practice sword in a grip that was technically correct and yet somehow also entirely her own. Arthur circled her. She circled him back. Neither of them spoke.
I’d seen Arthur train a thousand times. I knew his footwork the way I knew my own name: the slight forward lean before he committed to a strike, the way he telegraphed nothing with his face while his shoulders told you everything that was worth knowing.
He wasn’t doing that now, though. Now he was patient.
Measured. Letting her set the tempo. That was not a thing Arthur Pendragon did.
She drove forward. He blocked and gave ground. Not fully, just enough to let her feel the give, then he held. She reset. He came again from a different angle, and she caught him. Then he smiled. It was small. He probably didn’t even know he was doing it.
I turned away and walked to the weapons rack.
The wooden practice swords were fine for footwork and form. I selected one, then found an empty stretch of yard along the eastern wall and began drilling. These were combinations I could do blind, had done blind.
You kissed her.
I hit the pell harder than necessary. The post shuddered. I hit it again.
Strangely, I remembered when she’d pulled Excalibur from its pedestal.
In truth, I’d never been able to get the image out of my mind.
Arthur needed it to be nothing more than a trick, something constructed by Merlin’s magic.
But I was fairly convinced it was neither.
What was more difficult to digest was what it meant.
And more: how could an enemy of the crown pull the exact sword that crowned kings?
I’d been standing twelve feet away from her at the time, hiding among the trees.
I’d seen her face in the moment before she touched the hilt, before she knew it would move, before she knew anything.
There had been no smugness in her expression.
No calculation. She’d looked the way men look when they’re shown something they were never supposed to see.
Surprise.
The sword had gone to her like it was coming home.
I hit the post again. Wood cracked down the grain. I found another pell and started over.
The thought I’d been turning away from for two weeks now surfaced and wouldn’t be dismissed.
The sword knew what Arthur would become.
I buried the thought fast. Drilled faster.
My shoulders screamed by the seventh combination. I added footwork. Then the full sequence: strike, recover, pivot, drive. Again. And again after that. My lungs burned. Good. Pain was better than thinking. Pain stayed inside the body, and the body I could manage.
Gawain said something to Agravaine, who was standing nearby. I caught unhinged and pell, but I didn’t care.
-ARTHUR-
“I demand,” I said, “to know who took your maidenhead from you.”
Her breathing was quick and shallow as she stared up at me with those stunning eyes, and I saw the war in them clearly: anger and something that had been there since the moment I’d put her into that dungeon.
“As I said before, it’s none of your fucking business.”
I came in so close, the ends of our noses nearly touched.
“It is my fucking business. Everything within these walls is my fucking business. Every person inside them answers to me.”
I held her gaze. “When I ask something of someone under my roof, it’s not a question. It’s a command, which means you will answer me.”
She went still, but it wasn’t in submission.
It was the stillness before something moves.
Then she leaned forward, something difficult considering I had her pinned, but she still managed it all the same.
She also managed to close the distance until there was nothing between us but a few inches of cold morning air.
Take her mouth. Let her feel our hunger.
Her eyes met mine without flinching.
“Fuck you, Arthur.”
I held her there for a moment as everything within me screamed at me to grab her face and bury my tongue in her mouth. Instead, I released her wrist.
The morning had warmed slightly while we’d been at it, the frost burning off the fence posts, and somewhere across the yard a groom was leading a horse through a gate.
The ordinary sounds of Camelot going about its morning business seemed to taunt me as I turned away from her and picked up the cloth I’d left draped over the practice post, pressing it against my jaw.
She’d caught me once near the hinge with a feint I hadn’t seen coming.
I wouldn’t make that particular mistake twice.
She waited and the look on her face was one of surprise and perhaps confusion. “Aren’t you going to say or do something?”
I looked at her. “About what?”
“About the fact that I just told you what I told you.”
I chuckled as I shook my head. “Your words don’t bother me, you stupid girl... it’s your lack thereof that does.”
Then that door closed behind her eyes once more. “You can keep asking who fucked me, and I will keep not responding.”
“Yes, I’ve noticed, and this whole conversation has grown rather dull.”
“Then you’re giving up?”
“For now, I suppose.”
She almost smiled. “Are you giving up on sparring with me too?”
“No,” I answered as I came at her once more, but she blocked me. “Lyonesse,” I said.
She said nothing.
“You know where that is?”
“Southeast,” she said. “Across the Narrow Sea.”
“You’ve studied geography.”
“I’ve studied many things.”
I turned back to face her. She’d reset her stance so that her feet were slightly apart and her weight was balanced. She was ready.
“Sir Tristan was born in Lyonesse,” I said. “A city called Varos, as I understand it. On the eastern coast.” I came for her, but she sidestepped me. “Did you encounter anyone from Lyonesse during your time in Annwyn?”
Her brows drew together. “No.”
“No traders? No emissaries? No soldiers?”
“Annwyn doesn’t receive many traders.” She said the words with a dryness that almost made me want to laugh. Almost. “It’s not exactly on the merchant road.”
“No.” I watched her face. “How well do you know Tristan?”
“Not well.”
“Were you introduced to him prior to your arriving in Camelot?”
“No.”
I looked at her. “Has he fucked you?”
She looked right back at me. “No.”
I crossed the yard toward the weapons rack and began selecting a different practice blade, an activity that required nothing of me and allowed me to keep my face at an angle she couldn’t read entirely. “He sat with you at dinner.”
“He did.”
“Why?”
She was quiet for a moment. I heard her shift her weight. “You’d have to ask him that.” A pause. “And I assume you already have.”
“I’m asking you.”
“I don’t know why he sat with me.”
“Do you believe he wants to fuck you?”
“How the hell should I know?”
“You’re a beautiful woman, and beautiful women know these things.”
She frowned. “Well, I don’t know, Arthur.” Another pause. “Do you think he wants to fuck me?”
“Yes,” I answered quickly. “Just as all men who see you want to fuck you.”
“Do you want to fuck me?”
I turned to look at her then. “We aren’t talking about me.” I took a breath. She took one too. “I want to know about Tristan.”
“Then ask him what you want to know.”
“Why did you choose to sit with him at dinner?”
“Was I supposed to get up and walk away?”
I frowned. “Did you enjoy yourself then?”
“Yes,” she answered. “He’s... easy to talk to.”
“What does that mean?”
“Exactly what I just said.” She breathed out a sigh of frustration. “You are relentless.”
I paused. “Answer the fucking question.”
A smile almost lit her mouth. “Tristan doesn’t seem to require anything of me beyond the conversation itself, and... I like that.”
I set the blade back against the rack with more deliberation than was necessary.
“What did you talk about while you ate dinner with him?” The question landed flat, informational, the sort of question a man asks when he’s building a picture of enemy movements, of possible networks, of foreign connections he hasn’t mapped yet.