CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE #3
I reached out, and the shadows reached with me, moving towards him and wrapping around his body. All it took was a thought and the shadows acted. Galahad flew backward, and his feet cleared the floor by nearly a foot. He traveled eight feet before he hit the stone.
FINISH HIM!
Before I could think a rational thought, before I could talk myself down from this absolute need for destruction, another blast of fire billowed out of my mouth and caught him, erupting him into flames as everyone looked on in horror.
The screaming started immediately.
Galahad didn’t go down clean. He thrashed, both arms windmilling, his body turning in the flames as the fire climbed from his legs to his torso with a speed that was almost elegant.
The tips of the flames were blue, and blue fire burned hotter than orange.
I knew that. I’d known it when I’d opened my mouth.
The blue fire was the dragon’s fire, and it didn’t negotiate. It consumed.
He hit the ground and rolled, and the fire rolled with him, clinging to his robes, finding the folds of fabric and following them inward.
The hall had fractured completely. People were backing toward the walls, pressing into doorways, some of them already through them.
A nobleman near the east hearth knocked over his chair in his rush backward and didn’t stop to right it.
Guards who were supposed to be holding their positions were gripping their halberds and looking at each other with the specific blank expression of men waiting for someone else to make the first decision.
“NO ONE LEAVES THIS ROOM!” I thundered, and in response, my knights took up sentry in front of both doors.
Mordred had taken five paces back from where he’d originally stood and was watching the fire as it left my mouth, his lips pressed together, both of his hands raised to chest height in the posture of a man who was ready to act but not yet certain which action was correct.
Let him burn.
The dragon was utterly calm about it, calmer than I was. It watched Galahad’s thrashing with something that wasn’t satisfaction exactly, more like completion, like a thing that had been promised had arrived on schedule.
The threat ends. She is safe. Let him burn.
The scales were still moving across my jaw, and I could feel the double-timbre still sitting in my throat, the dragon’s voice coiled beneath mine like a second instrument tuned a full octave lower.
Galahad screamed again, and the sound of it reached a register that shouldn’t have been possible for a man.
Then Guinevere did something that surprised me.
She’d been on the floor where Galahad had thrown her, but she was on her feet now.
Yet she wasn’t trying to run, and she hadn’t pressed herself against a wall, attempted to flee, or done any of the things three hundred witnesses were currently doing.
She was upright, she was oriented, and she was looking at Mordred.
“Remove the binding,” she called to him.
Her voice didn’t shake.
Mordred looked at her. Then he looked at me.
I didn’t tell him to do it, but I also didn’t tell him not to do it.
The dragon was still present behind my eyes, still calculating, still watching Galahad burn with that cold reptilian equanimity, and some part of me was still enough beast that the idea of her unbound magic loose in this room was producing a sound low in my chest that wasn’t quite a growl.
She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at Mordred, and her violet eyes had gone a shade darker.
“Now,” she said.
Mordred made his decision in the space of a single breath.
He nodded, then raised both hands, palms outward, and the crystal pendant at his throat flared, a triangle of white-blue light against his midnight robes.
His lips moved in something fast and precise, the syllables running together in the way of a man who was reciting something he’d long since memorized, not performing it but executing it.
Then he made a fist.
The motion was small, both hands rising, fingers spreading, then curling inward with controlled force, like pulling a root from packed earth. A sound came with it that was somewhere just below audible, a frequency that pressed behind the eyes.
I saw it leave her.
The binding came away in a single piece, a silver-gray light that Mordred’s fist crushed immediately, the light fracturing between his fingers and dissolving into nothing before it reached the floor.
Guinevere turned to face Galahad, and what happened next took less than two seconds.
She breathed in once, and I watched the air change around her.
Moisture gathered. It came from nowhere and everywhere simultaneously, pulling from the cold stone walls, from breath, from the damp that lived in the mortar between blocks, from the air itself.
It gathered above and around her in a mass that had weight, presence, and it moved with clear intention.
Then she raised one hand and brought it down, and the water came with it.
The wave wasn’t large, but it didn’t need to be.
It came down over Galahad in a single precise column, dense and fast, and the blue fire went out with a sound that was almost a shriek, the flames collapsing inward as the water hit them,
steam billowing outward in a rolling white cloud that swept across the floor and erased the nearest six feet of the room from view.
The silence that followed was total.
When the steam thinned, Galahad was on the floor.
Based on the gentle rise and fall of his chest, he was still alive, but barely.
He was breathing in ragged, shallow pulls.
His robes were destroyed, scorched to black rags in places, and the skin of his arms and throat was black.
His golden hair was completely gone, leaving only his scalp, which was as blackened as the rest of him. But he wasn’t dead.
Only because she’d made a choice. She’d had two seconds, and she’d used them to save his life. After everything he’d done to her, everything he’d put her through... everything he’d planned to see through this morning... she’d rescued him.
The dragon processed this with something I couldn’t name. Not confusion, exactly, but a recalibration. A slow, enormous shift in attention, the way a very large animal turns its head toward a sound it hasn’t heard before. It was surprised, just as much as I was.
I stood in the center of the hall with the cracks still spreading slowly beneath my boots, the shadows still pooling at my feet, my jaw still armored with scales, and my hands still not entirely my hands, and I looked at her.
She was standing in the dissipating steam, her white hair loose and her borrowed gown darkened at the hem where water had soaked the fabric. Her eyes came back to find mine with an expression I couldn’t read.
She held my gaze.
And the dragon beckoned me forward. It wanted me to cross the room and stand beside her to keep her protected.
It wanted me to wrap my shadow around her and let the whole room see what she was to me.
I could feel the pull in my chest like a hook, but I didn’t move.
Instead, I pushed back because I had to get control again.
It wasn’t a fight that looked like anything from the outside.
From the outside, I was simply motionless, my jaw clenched, my hands shaking slightly.
From the inside, though, I was somewhere dark, vast, and furnace-hot, and there was something in there with me that was the size of a cathedral, and I was pressing against it with everything I had.
The shadows thinned.
The torches steadied, one by one, guttering back to their natural positions. The temperature climbed: slowly, grudgingly, as if the cold were reluctant to leave. The stone was still cracked. That wouldn’t change. But the darkness pouring off my body subsided, retreated, and finally disappeared.
I blinked twice. By the third time, when I opened my eyes, I could see color again: Mordred’s midnight blue robes, the gold of the candelabras, the violet of her eyes. And then I saw three hundred people, on their knees or pressed against walls, all of them staring at me.
The secret was out; there was no version of this where I suppressed what they’d seen.
Not in a hall this full, not with a herald present, not with Galahad’s unconscious body lying on the floor in front of everyone.
By evening, the truth of what happened here in this hall would be in every tavern between here and the coast.
By the week’s end, all of my enemies would know the truth.
So. Control what you can.
I let the silence sit for one more breath. Then I spoke.
“The dragon lives within me.” My voice was my own again.
Both registers gone. Just my voice, which I kept measured, which I always kept measured because the alternative was unacceptable.
“It has been mine since I took it from my father. Uther couldn’t hold it. It would have broken free and burned Logres to the ground. I took it instead, and in so doing, I kept all of you safe. I am still keeping you safe.”
Nothing moved in the hall. There wasn’t a sound, not even a shifted foot.
“It has lived inside me for many years.”
I looked at the room, not at any one face, but at all of them, moving slowly, deliberately, so that each person felt the weight of my gaze.
“If I die, the beast is released. Unbound, uncontrolled, with no vessel to contain it. And if that happens, you all die with me; all of Logres dies because the dragon is that powerful. You have some sense now of what that force looks like when it is merely provoked.”
I let them sit with that image for a moment.
“Consider carefully,” I continued, “who you threaten in my presence.”
-ARTHUR-
Two Hours Later
Although I hadn’t called for Mordred, he appeared all the same, as if his presence had been summoned by the stench of trouble. The door opened quietly without the sound of knocking, and I didn’t even bother looking up to see who it was, since I knew very well who it was.
“Your Grace.”
His voice was the same as always: precise and calibrated, as if he hadn’t just seen his king turning into a beast.
“Mordred.”
I heard him cross the room, heard the quiet displacement of air as he stopped somewhere behind my left shoulder. Outside, the courtyard was empty.
The dragon was quiet.