CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX
-ARTHUR-
The Next Day
I’d learned later that Galahad’s faction: six guards, two priests, and four men of lesser rank, had crumbled inside of ten minutes.
The two priests had attempted to leave through the side door and found it already blocked. The others just stood there cowering.
I’d ordered all of them to be sent to the dungeon.
Galahad was the only exception and that was purely due to the state he was in.
I hadn’t bothered to visit him but the reports Kay had given me were bleak.
He’d said burns covered the majority of Galahad’s body and he was still unconscious and unresponsive.
There was a part of me that hoped he’d die because then I wouldn’t have to bother with him or his zealots but the other part of me didn’t want to turn him into a martyr.
After the dragon had announced itself, the hall had cleared in under twenty minutes.
Under Kay’s orders, the court had returned to their rooms and were told not to leave.
The knights were guarding all the gates in and out of Camelot.
Kay had given them a quick briefing but I knew I needed to call a council meeting to explain what they’d seen, what everyone had seen.
Guinevere had been returned to her bed chamber and two guards had been placed outside it. Of course, I’d ordered Mordred to immediately reapply the binding, because I didn’t trust her without it.
Ours, the dragon had said. Our treasure is safe.
It was satisfied, content in a way it almost never was.
I ignored it.
What I couldn’t ignore was the fact that the entire court had seen my truth. The stone that had fractured beneath my boots would be walked over every day from now on, and no one who’d been in that room would ever again forget what they’d seen, nor what I was.
Not a king with a sword, but a king with something inside him that could end everything.
I’d spent so many fucking years making sure no one knew, and now? Now everyone did.
-ARTHUR-
The knock was soft.
Not Mordred’s non-knock, that barely-there tap that was really just his knuckle grazing the door while he was already pushing it open. Not Kay’s either, which was usually missing entirely. This was something else: considered and patient.
“Come.”
Isolde entered, and she was wearing dark green silk that contrasted beautifully against the red tones of her hair. She didn’t apologize for the hour or the intrusion but simply looked at me and asked if she might sit.
“Yes.”
I turned back to the window as I tried to find the energy for this conversation. I understood why she was here: I owed her an explanation. I knew that, but I was exhausted all the same.
The courtyard below was mostly empty. The castle had gone quiet in the hours since the events of the Great Hall and I supposed I couldn’t blame it. So much had happened, so much had been revealed, and so much was still coming.
As I remembered the events, I realized I hadn’t seen Isolde in the throng of people who had crowded the interior of the Great Hall.
I searched my memory for her face but still couldn’t locate it.
I could remember three hundred faces, the rows of torchlight, the weight of what had happened, but I couldn’t remember her.
I knew she’d been there. I’d been told she was there...
I understood why a moment later, and the understanding arrived without drama, the way the worst recognitions always did.
From the moment the dragon had fixed on Guinevere, nothing else had existed.
Not the hall, not the watching faces, not the sound of Galahad’s body hitting the floor or his screams after the dragon attempted to incinerate him.
There had just been her. Just that point in the center of the room that had become, without my permission, the only thing in the world that mattered.
“You were there,” I said without turning back around. Mostly, I didn’t want to see the fear in her eyes or the accusation.
“I was,” Isolde said, and I could hear her settling into the chair across from my writing table. “I watched the whole of it.”
I waited. Everyone else I’d seen since that moment had carefully constructed the appearance of not being afraid, which was its own kind of fear.
Kay with his tactical assessment that was really just anxiety dressed in strategy and Mordred with his clinical dissection that kept the thing at arm’s length.
“It was rather... remarkable.”
At that, I turned to look at her. “I don’t believe anyone has used that word to describe what they witnessed.”
A smile crested her lovely lips. “Well, I wouldn’t say it was a comfortable situation certainly,” she continued. “But, yes, it was remarkable. I don’t think I’ll see anything like it again.”
There was no frame for that response in my repertoire. Every response I’d constructed across the last several hours had assumed a particular shape of conversation: concern, fear, political calculation, loyalty demonstrations. None of them fit what she’d just said.
I said nothing, because I didn’t know how to respond.
“You’re waiting for me to be afraid of you.”
I nodded. “Most people are.”
“I know.” She tilted her head slightly. “I think you’ve grown so accustomed to that response that you’ve forgotten other responses can exist.”
I nodded again, and then she asked after Galahad, how he was.
“I don’t know,” I answered, which was true.
“It was a shock,” she continued, “that she protected him.”
“Yes.” I nodded. “For the life of me, I don’t know why she did… after everything he’d done to her.”
Isolde looked at me with something mild in her expression. “Because she’s a good person, regardless of whose side she’s on.”
I didn’t respond to that. Instead, I asked: “The gown she was wearing... That was a gift from you, I’m assuming?”
A small pause. “It was.”
I nodded and didn’t pursue it, and she let me not pursue it.
Then she asked: “How long have you carried this secret, Arthur?”
Not, “What is it?” or, “How does it work?” Not, “Is it dangerous?” or, “Are we safe?” Just: “How long have you carried it?” The question landed differently, possibly because there was only concern in her expression. I turned around fully from the window so I could look at her properly.
“Seven years,” I said.
“How did you come to have it?”
I told her the real version, not the court version, which was vague and gestural and implied inheritance, something passed through blood and lineage in ways that excused the choice from ever having been a choice. The real version was shorter and uglier.
“Uther had been losing the battle against the dragon. If it had broken free, there would have been nothing left of Logres to govern. I took it because someone had to, and there was no one else who would.”
She was quiet for a moment, doing the arithmetic, I suspected: imagining what it meant to have had seven years alone with the thing, seven years of maintaining a shape against the weight of it.
“Does it have its own mind?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Like a separate person? Or more like a hunger that thinks?”
I considered that. It was a better distinction than most people would have known to reach for. “Somewhere between. It has wants. Preferences. It calculates, in its way, and it remembers. But it isn’t a person.”
“Is it a spirit?”
I cocked my head to the side as I considered it.
“That’s probably a good way to think of it, I suppose. Whatever it is, it’s old.”
I looked for the words and found only approximate ones.
“It predates language. Predates the idea of a self, for whatever that means.”
Merlin had told me something similar once, when he was trying to explain what the dragon was.
I hadn’t understood what he meant then and I didn’t understand it now.
I wasn’t even sure why I’d said as much.
She nodded slowly.
“Does it cause you pain?”
I thought about the question as the fire in the grate shifted and the wood settled.
“Not in the way you might be thinking.”
“In what way, then?”
“It’s not so much pain as it is a pressure,” I answered. “It’s always present. Always pushing. The effort isn’t in fighting it; it’s in maintaining the shape of myself against the weight of it. Continuously. Without interruption.” I paused. “Every day.”
She sat with that for a moment. “Who else knows?”
“A very small number, and all were bound to silence in ways that made silence in their best interests.”
“And yet you never told me,” she said, though not in accusation. She was just naming a fact.
“No. Not you.”
“Was there anyone you told because you wanted to? Not because strategy required it?”
I breathed in deeply.
“No.”
She nodded as if she’d expected that answer. Then: “Are you lonely because of it, Arthur?”
I gave her the king’s version: that the nature of power, the price of it, the necessity of distance, is required from those you rule. I gave her the whole polished architecture of it, and she listened without interrupting, and when I finished she looked at me and said:
“I didn’t ask about power. I asked if you were lonely.”
I gave that question the long moment it deserved.
“Yes.”
She nodded. Like she’d known as much but needed me to say it.
Then she swallowed hard, and I could tell she was about to get to the point that mattered to her most. “Is the dragon,” she started, “the reason you never pursued me?”
The question was asked without bitterness, without theater, without anger or self-pity. What was more, she’d waited long enough and she’d earned the right to the real answer, and we both knew it.
“Yes,” I said. “It was entirely the reason. How could I have let you close to me with this thing living inside me? I was afraid that if you knew the truth, you’d fear me, and I never wanted that from you.”
“I know the truth now, and do I look like I’m afraid of you?”
I swallowed hard. “No. I... underestimated you.”
She nodded.
“Regardless, I wasn’t willing to... put you into this situation, Isolde. I... respected and still respect you far too much to ever force you into a marriage with... me and this beast.”
“I have never been forced to do anything I didn’t want to do.”
I nodded, because that was true. She was quiet for a few long seconds, and when she brought her large eyes back up to mine, they were sad.