CHAPTER FIFTY-SIX #4
But Lance had made his choice, and then he’d come back and stood beside me, and I’d trusted him with things I trusted no one with, and the whole time—
I stopped the thought there.
The dragon stirred, just barely, a low shimmer of heat that I recognized as something adjacent to satisfaction.
It had never warmed to Lance. I’d always assumed that was jealousy, the dragon’s territorial instinct misreading a friendship for a threat.
Now I wondered if it had simply known something I hadn’t.
I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes until the thought dissolved.
Lance was in the dungeon. That was where he’d stay until I decided otherwise, and I wasn’t going to sit here in the dark and grieve him like a man who’d lost something precious, because the man I was grieving hadn’t existed.
Or if he had, he’d made his own choices about what to do with the trust I’d given him.
Then I remembered the way she’d looked at me when I’d asked her if she loved him and she’d said she did.
Then we destroy him.
No. I thought back. I can’t do that.
Regardless, I was done thinking about Lance.
My mind then turned to thoughts of the problem that was still standing in front of me, which was laid out as plainly as a map.
I was good at problems. That was the thing no one understood about what I’d built here: they saw the executions, the restrictions, and the iron rule, and they called it tyranny, and perhaps it was.
But every decision I’d ever made had logic behind it.
Every body that had swung from my gates had been a calculation. Not cruelty, but calculation.
And so I calculated now.
The dragon reveal had happened in front of three hundred people.
By tomorrow, it would be double that. By the end of the week, every village within riding distance would have a version of it, worse with each telling.
It didn’t matter what edicts I’d enforced.
Gossip traveled no matter what laws were in place to make sure it didn’t.
They’d speak in whispers of a king who wasn’t entirely a man, a king who breathed fire and moved like something older than the crown on his head.
Fear was a currency. I’d always understood that, perhaps because my father had spent years drilling that exact lesson into me.
Regardless, I’d spent years learning to spend that currency wisely.
But fear had a ceiling. And what sat beneath fear, what outlasted it, what built something that could survive the death of the man who wielded it…
that was legitimacy. It was the story people told themselves about why a king deserved to rule.
It was the sword in the stone. The prophecy.
The bloodline reaching back through centuries to something hallowed and true.
I stood and walked to the window, noting how the torches burned, steady in the windless night, and the stones glistened faintly from the earlier rain.
She’d pulled it.
Even though she’d pulled the sword that had only ever responded to my hand, she hadn’t returned for it since.
Well, as far as I knew, anyway. I’d warned Nimue, and apparently that warning had stuck.
As to what I thought about the fact that Guinevere hadn’t returned to the lake to uphold the prophecy?
I didn’t know. Mainly because I hadn’t allowed myself to think anything of it.
I pressed my knuckles against the cold glass.
The factions against me already existed, and they had, far before she’d ever come to Camelot disguised as a man.
There had already existed Merlin’s network and Carlisle’s army, the scattered lords who paid their taxes with one hand and sent coin to Caer Gwyll with the other.
They had grievances, soldiers, and enough hatred between them to keep a war burning for a decade.
Now I had a new enemy faction to add: Galahad’s.
But what none of my enemies had was a figure who could stand before them and say: the land chose me. The sword chose me.
She didn’t even know what she was. That was perhaps the most dangerous thing about her.
As far as I could tell, she had no ambition for the crown, no hunger for power, none of the obvious marks of someone building toward something.
Which meant she couldn’t be bargained with in the usual ways, couldn’t be managed by giving her something she wanted, couldn’t be used as a pawn in any arrangement that required her cooperation.
What was more, she’d always be more useful to my enemies than to me the moment they got their hands on her.
She’d already escaped once: Corvin had walked into my dungeon and walked back out with her.
And she had Merlin’s ear. What was more, she had water magic that was powerful enough to crack Mordred’s binding when sufficiently provoked.
I’d seen what she’d done to Galahad and to his bedchamber.
I remembered the frost on the walls, the buckled stone.
I’d allowed her to keep her life when most other men in my place would have ended her the second they’d had the chance. What was more, I’d kept her alive while believing I could control the problem she represented.
But I was wrong. I couldn’t control her any more than I could control the wind or the rain.
The dragon stirred. A single, low pulse of heat.
Ours.
I ignored it.
This was the part that required clarity, and the dragon didn’t reason.
It wanted, it hoarded, and it burned, and every impulse it had when it came to her was the exact opposite of what the situation demanded.
I’d let it confuse me from the moment I’d taken her captive.
I’d watched her across training yards and dinner tables, and I’d let the heat in my chest convince me that the path forward was simple.
It wasn’t simple. It had never been simple. And I’d been a fool to let myself believe otherwise.
There was the kingdom: built by my hands, paid for in blood, and I wasn’t about to watch it be dismantled.
And there was a woman who’d pulled a sword from a stone and didn’t yet understand what that meant.
Or maybe she did understand it, but she’d been telling the truth when she’d said she wanted no part of it?
Perhaps. Regardless, that wasn’t the main point.
The main point was that other people would understand.
Merlin understood. The moment he found a way to put her in front of a crowd with Excalibur in her hand, the story of my reign would end, and a new one would begin.
And that was just a matter of time, I was certain, because even if she wanted no part of the ruling of my kingdom, Merlin did want it.
He’d always wanted it. And in that story, I was the monster who had held her in my dungeon for a month, before handing her over to Galahad to commit his own unspeakable atrocities against her.
I was the monster who had breathed fire in a hall full of screaming witnesses.
All that remained now were the facts. And the fact was that I was a problem solver; I’d always been a problem solver.
And there was a solution: one I’d been circling for longer than I wanted to admit.
One I’d been resisting, not because it was wrong, but because the wanting of it felt dangerous in a way I hadn’t yet learned to manage.
I went to my desk and sat down, then I pulled a clean sheet of parchment toward me as I trimmed the candle and lit it.
Ours, the dragon said again, its voice inside my mind even louder now. It felt like a low throb moving through my ribs. Our treasure.
I picked up the quill, and I wrote Mordred’s name at the top of the page. Then I stopped and sat for a moment with the quill hovering over the parchment. The candle flame bent in a draft I couldn’t feel, and the room was absolutely still around me.
Her face came without invitation, and not the way it appeared when she’d first arrived here: wary, guarded, all sharp edges and careful eyes.
This was a memory of the face she wore in the training yard when she thought no one was watching her: open, the expression of someone who hadn’t been worn down yet.
The dragon’s heat surged, and I pressed my palm flat against the desk until the heat subsided.
Then I wrote the rest of the letter.