CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE #2
He dragged her forward into the open space before the front of the room, into the sight of everyone, and he turned to face the room with his eyes blazing.
“In the name of the Gods who see all wickedness,” he yelled, and his voice didn’t shake. No, it was trained, which meant he’d been practicing. “I declare this creature an instrument of darkness, a witch and a consort of fallen powers, and I demand her life be given to the Flame of Judgment.”
The room went very quiet as he drew his dagger.
I felt it before I understood what was happening. Something shifted inside my chest: not a thought, not a decision. It was something lower than that and something older. Like a fault line giving way.
Ours.
The word didn’t arrive in language. It arrived in temperature: in the sudden, total plummet of every degree of warmth I’d ever held inside my body.
And it arrived in the image that came with it: her throat with a blade threatening it, and the pulse there that the dragon knew in the same way it knew my heartbeat, because it had recognized her from the first moment she’d stood in my presence.
DESTROY HIM!
A sensation, a vibration, moved through my bones like the reverberation of a struck bell, the dragon cycling through something that might have been panic if it were capable of panic.
OUR MATE! SHE IS—
And then my own voice was meeting the creature’s.
SHE IS MINE.
The torches nearest me guttered, but there was no draft because no window had opened. They simply bent away from me, the flames leaning outward like something was displacing the air, like the air itself was moving back, making room, getting out of the way of whatever I was becoming.
I was still sitting. I was aware of that much.
Still sitting on my throne with both hands flat on the gold armrests, my crown on my head, and three hundred people watching.
I was aware of Galahad’s arm, the angle of his elbow, the specific and particular wrongness of the blade’s position relative to her neck, the fact that all it took was one motion and she would bleed out in front of me.
I would never let that happen.
The dragon was already doing some reptilian calculation of distance and trajectory and the precise number of seconds between now and irreversible, and underneath that calculation was a sound I could feel in my back teeth.
I was still sitting. But then I wasn’t still sitting, but I didn’t remember standing. I was simply upright, and the chair was behind me.
The dragon pushed.
Not against me. Through me. It moved through my body the way heat moves through metal, finding every available channel, and what it brought with it was something anterior to rage.
Something that had existed when the world was younger, when men were smaller and the things that flew above them were the apex of everything.
The stone beneath my boots cracked in a single sharp sound, like a branch breaking, and then a second crack branched outward from the first, fracturing the flagstone in two directions at once.
Mordred took three steps backward. I registered that.
I also registered his jaw dropping as the shadows came off my body, shadows that were leaking from me, pooling at my feet, climbing my legs, threading between my fingers.
They were dark, moving and alive with something that wasn’t darkness but wore it.
Get to her. Get to her. Get to her.
The dragon wasn’t giving me a command. It was stating a fact, the way a river states the fact of its direction, the way gravity states the fact of down.
There was no version of the next ten seconds that didn’t end with me between her and that blade.
The dragon had already decided this. I was simply the body it was going to use to accomplish it.
Three hundred people were in the room, but the only sound was my breathing and the slow, splintering advance of cracks spreading outward from where I stood.
I looked at Galahad.
Whatever he saw in my face made him hesitate.
That was a mistake. That hesitation was the only thing that kept him alive in the next three seconds, because it meant he hadn’t yet done the irreversible thing, and some thin civilized layer of me was still present enough to understand that the irreversible thing had not yet happened...
But it could. It could still. The blade is still—
That was my voice in my head, not the dragon’s.
Galahad’s blade was still raised.
“MINE.”
The word came out of my mouth in two voices: my own, which I recognized, and something else underneath it: something vast, rumbling, and very, very old.
Like a sound that predated the language it was borrowing.
Following it was a thunderous yell that started at the base of me and then rippled through my mouth.
It didn’t echo off the walls; it pressed through them.
It pressed through everything: through stone, through bone, through the soft tissue of every mind in that room.
People went down.
Not all of them, not instantly, but in a wave, radiating outward from where I stood.
Knees hit stone as hands flew up to cover ears.
A woman near the door collapsed against the man next to her, and two guards dropped their halberds with a clatter.
Someone was praying very quickly, the words running together.
The horns came in slowly; that was the part that always surprised me.
It seemed to make more sense that the beast would arrive all at once like a storm breaking.
But instead, the pressure started at my temples, deep beneath the bone, and built outward in a grinding sensation like something pushing through from the inside.
I didn’t reach up to touch them. I knew what they were.
The scales came next. They moved across my forearms first, and the sensation was somewhere between itching and burning.
Not painful, exactly, but just wrong. The skin didn’t break; it just changed, hardening in patches, the color deepening from gold to something darker, almost iridescent black, the way a raven’s wing catches light.
The tattoo moved as the dragon on my chest shifted beneath my tunic, the ink pulling and contracting like something breathing, like something waking up inside the lines that had been drawn to contain it.
The heat that radiated from it pressed through the fabric, and I could feel each coil of its body as it turned, reorienting itself toward Guinevere the way a compass needle finds north.
Galahad’s blade was still at her throat.
She was now underneath him, on the ground, and he was hovering above her, the blade pitched at her throat, but his eyes were on me.
And they were wide. Her eyes found mine across the length of the hall, and they were just as wide as his.
She was afraid and her fear did something to me. It did something to the dragon.
Ignited the fire, caused it to burn even hotter.
OURS.
The word came with heat, and the heat was everywhere at once: in my chest, in my skull, in the backs of my teeth.
Guard her. Keep her. The blade touches our treasure. We must destroy the threat.
I didn’t fight it.
That was the thing I’d think about later, in the dark, when the scales had receded, the horns were gone, and I was a man again, sitting alone in my chambers with wine I wouldn’t drink.
I didn’t fight it. Every other time the dragon had pushed forward, I’d fought it with everything I had, every scrap of will I possessed, pushing back against the tide until it receded.
But not this time. This time I let the tide come in.
Because Galahad had his dagger at her throat, and he wasn’t going to move it. Not for my voice, not for Mordred’s procedural objections, not for the weight of three hundred witnesses. He’d made his decision, and he was going to see that decision through. If I didn’t intervene, he would kill her.
Nothing I could say would stop him. But the dragon, the dragon could.
A second crack ran through the stone underfoot. Shadow pooled up at my ankles, and then followed like an old friend, breathing just like I was breathing.
Someone wept softly behind me down at the far end of the hallway, their sobs barely audible, but still there.
Galahad was trying to hold his ground, but his sword hand had developed a tremor. I watched his knuckles go white around the hilt and then to something bloodless and waxy.
I let the horns come fully, and soon my mouth was filling with fangs.
The grinding reached its apex, and then there was a sound like a key turning in a lock, and the pressure released as both points curved upward through the air above my temples.
The double timbre in my voice when I spoke again wasn’t a shout. It didn’t need to be.
“Drop the dagger.”
The words moved through the room the way the roar had: not through the ears but through the body, through the marrow, through the soft animal parts of a person.
Galahad’s hand shook, but he made no motion to drop his weapon, and in response, I opened my mouth, and something that had never happened before happened now.
A stream of fire billowed out of me, catching on the rug beneath me and the pendants that hung from the rafters above. The stream of fire was close enough to Galahad that he instantly backed away from it, and that was my cue.
The scales had reached my jaw. I could feel them there at the hinge, just beneath my ear, and the skin of my face tightened as the beast continued its advance.
My hands at my sides were no longer entirely mine.
The nails had darkened and lengthened by less than an inch, but enough to be seen and enough to be understood.
The hall had gone completely still.
Even the crying had stopped.
Guinevere’s eyes hadn’t left mine. Her chest moved in a slow, controlled breath but her chin stayed level. And something in her face had changed, not to relief exactly, more like recognition. She wasn’t afraid of me. That was the first thing I recognized. The dragon noticed that too.
“Move the fuck away from her!”
Galahad’s blade finally came all the way down.
He took one step back, then another. I watched him process what he was seeing, watched the calculation behind his pale eyes, the math of survival overriding the math of conviction.
“DO NOT TOUCH WHAT IS MINE.”