CHAPTER FORTY-THREE #3
This was real; I was sure of it. Whatever had been building since Corbenic, since the letters about foals, since the afternoon in the stables, all of it was real.
Not diplomatic choreography. Not strategic positioning.
Just two people who had found in each other the thing Isolde had just described: a partnership that makes you more.
I didn’t know when my hand had moved toward hers on the stone, but I noticed it the way you notice something that has already been true for a while: her hand on the wall beside mine, our smallest fingers touching.
The contact was so slight it could have been accidental, but it wasn’t accidental.
And we both knew it wasn’t accidental. Neither of us moved.
I looked at our hands. Mine scarred and calloused, the old scar running from wrist to elbow white in the morning light.
Hers calloused from reins, brownish from the sun.
I thought about how easy this was, and then I thought about the terrifying simplicity of it.
There was no suppression required, no monster to manage.
What I felt was legible to me because it was mine, and it was human.
Yet the legibility was so unfamiliar that I sat with it for a moment just to confirm it was real.
Isolde turned her hand over on the warm stone, palm up. She didn’t look at me; instead, she watched the river and left her hand open and waited.
I looked at her upturned palm, and I saw the life in it: ordinary, clear, possible. The horses, the orchards, and the woman who asked about my dog. The evenings. The partnership. The life that was real, good, and mine for the choosing.
I reached for her hand, and my fingers closed over hers. Her palm was warm from the sun-heated stone, and her fingers curled around mine almost instinctively. The contact was permission and promise at the same time and the gentlest thing that had happened to me in longer than I wanted to count.
She turned toward me at the same moment that I turned toward her. The distance between us was a breath, less than a breath really. She leaned in, and I met her halfway. The distance between us closed.
And the dragon detonated.
Not a slow escalation, not the manageable tide I’d learned to meet and redirect.
This was an eruption: a full-body convulsion of heat and possession that rocketed up my spine and locked every muscle simultaneously.
Gold flooded my vision, the dragon’s fire bleeding through my sight the way it did when the creature’s emotions overwhelmed containment and the line between its perception and mine dissolved.
WE WILL NOT BETRAY OUR MATE!
The command hit my nervous system like a fist and I was stunned over the fact that the dragon hadn’t seemed to care that I’d taken countless women to be, but it cared about this almost kiss?
Perhaps because it knew Isolde was a real threat to Guinevere?
Whatever the reason, the dragon reacted not in a whisper, but an imperative.
A physical fact. Every instinct in my body reoriented in the same instant: the magnetic north of the thing in my chest swung from wherever I was to the corridor where she was in Galahad’s room, and the swing was so violent it nearly took me off the wall.
I jerked back. My hand ripped from Isolde’s as my feet found the ground.
The dragon was pulling me southward, through the garden wall, through the castle stone, toward her, and staying where I was required planting my feet and gripping the warm stone and using every containment technique Merlin had ever drilled into me, and still the gold wouldn’t clear from my vision.
“Arthur—”
I heard Isolde’s voice the way you hear voices underwater. Present, meaningful, but impossible to fully receive.
“I’m sorry.” The words came out cracked, and they weren’t spoken in my voice but something rawer underneath it. “I have to... there’s something I have to—”
I couldn’t finish. There was no sentence that ended honestly. Something inside me that is not mine just detonated against the idea of me kissing you and is now demanding I leave you here.
I stumbled out of the garden.
I didn’t look back because I knew if I looked back, I’d see her face, and her face would do something to me that I couldn’t afford right now, couldn’t afford in the corridor, couldn’t afford while fighting the creature for control of my own legs.
So I kept walking: through the garden entrance, into the cool shadow of the castle wall, and the dragon quieted by increments as I moved toward what it wanted me to move toward.
Behind me, the garden was warm, still, and empty except for Isolde on the wall.
But I didn’t look back. I kept walking. The dragon pulled, and I followed because the alternative was worse, because containment required compliance on days like this, because the king couldn’t afford to be seen convulsing in a garden over a prisoner in a knight’s custody.
I told myself all of this, and I kept walking.
The gold faded from my vision by the time I reached the south corridor. The dragon settled: a deep rumble of possessive contentment that I despised. It had what it wanted. It didn’t need to fight me any longer.
I stopped in the corridor, put my hand on the stone wall, and stood there for a moment with my forehead almost touching the cold surface.
All I could think about was the garden, the wall, the morning light, and Isolde’s palm, open and warm from the sun-heated stone.
The dragon eventually took everything from me.
-ARTHUR-
The door to my chambers shut behind me, and I turned the bolt.
I hadn’t gone to Guinevere as the dragon beckoned. Instead, I’d retired to my chambers.
I crossed to the bed and gripped the post.
The wood was smooth under my hands from years of use; the carved oak had darkened at the top where my father must have done the same. The grain pressed into my palms now, and I held it until the pressure in my chest leveled out enough to breathe.
She is close. We can feel her. Go to her.
“No.”
I said it to the empty room: to the fire, to whatever lived behind my ribs and called itself mine.
The dragon said nothing back. It rarely argued in words. Instead, it just pulled, like a hook set deep in my chest, tugging in the direction of her. Always fucking tugging me towards her.
I pressed my forehead to the bedpost. The carved oak smelled faintly of beeswax, which meant someone had polished it today or perhaps yesterday. It was a small, irrelevant fact, but I focused on it, regardless.
In the garden, the river had been loud and bright, and Isolde’s hand had been warm in mine. That was real. Her hand was real. The grass under our boots and the sound of the foal in the stables testing its new legs in the next paddock over... those were all real things. Solid things. Human things.
Isolde is ash. Our mate is fire.
I didn’t answer.
Isolde had asked me to name the foal. It was just a small, silly thing she’d asked, but I remembered the way she’d tilted her head when she’d asked. And I’d told her I would think on it. I’d been thinking on it for days.
There had been a name that had popped into my head, though. In the garden, with Isolde’s hand in mine and the sun coming off the water, the foal’s name had been right there, on the surface of my tongue, solid as a coin.
I’d felt it on my tongue, tasted the shape of it, the weight of it.
Then the dragon woke, and everything inside me went to fire and explosion, and the name was gone. And it was still gone.
I straightened and loosened my grip on the post because my knuckles ached.
There was no name now. Just a blank space where the name had been, smooth and unhelpful, like a word forgotten mid-sentence.
I poured myself a glass of wine I didn’t want and then stood at the window looking out at Camelot below.
The courtyard was quiet, except for two guards at the far gate, their torches guttering in the evening wind.
A black cat crossed the cobblestones, and I watched it until it disappeared into the night.
Isolde was probably in her rooms by now. I imagined she was reading, or writing letters home, or thinking about the king and the way he’d almost kissed her before something had happened to his eyes and his voice, and he’d immediately hurried away like a thief in the night.
I drank the wine. Tomorrow I’d send word to the stable master, and I’d tell him to allow Isolde to choose the foal’s name.
I set the glass down and noticed how the fire had burned low. The room was cooling, but I made no motion to stoke it. In the northeast corner of my awareness, the dragon still pulled, patient and implacable, like a compass needle that only pointed one direction.
I didn’t move toward the door. Instead, I stood at the window and watched until the torches steadied and the night settled into itself.
Still, I didn’t move. That was all I had. Not wisdom, not virtue, not the gold-plated righteousness of the king I’d meant to be. Just the bedpost, the window, and the long, grinding work of standing still
.