CHAPTER FIFTY-NINE #2
In fact, I was in such shock I couldn’t even trust that my ears had reported the truth in his words.
But it was the reaction of the court that insisted I had heard correctly.
First, there was nothing but silence and confused expressions.
Then the hall broke open, and the sound hit me from every direction, all at once.
I couldn’t have told you what individual voices said because they all compressed into a single roar of shock that seemed to push the air out of the room.
I was aware of it the way you’re aware of water closing over your head: distantly, with the clarity that comes just before you stop being able to breathe.
Through all of this, I watched Isolde go very still in the way that only someone practiced at surviving public humiliation can manage. It was a stillness that wasn’t calm but a performance of calm. Underneath that composed exterior, though, I was sure she was coming apart.
As for me? I didn’t know what to think. And when Arthur turned his head and looked directly at me, it was all I could do to hold his gaze. I couldn’t read the expression in his eyes, but I could feel my own narrowing of their own accord as I realized he’d just ensnared me in the ultimate trap.
He smiled at me, and that smile reeked of victory, of my own defeat.
I could feel my breath coming in shorter and shorter gasps, and it was all I could do to look away from the smug expression on his face.
I found solace in the floor, but then my attention soon returned to Isolde once more, and I watched as her composure held for another three seconds.
I watched it hold, and then I watched something behind her eyes crack.
Her chin came up, and her hands, which had been folded at her waist, pressed together until her knuckles went pale.
She looked at me as I looked back at her, and neither of us moved.
I thought: It should be you up here. You know it. I know it. Every person in this room knows it. And then I thought: And still he chose me.
That second thought arrived without my permission, and I buried it so fast I nearly choked on it.
Because what it was, underneath the horror that had locked every joint in my body, what it was beneath the cold, pragmatic mapping of every escape route snapping shut one by one: Corvin in the dungeon, the dragon that had stopped Galahad’s blade, the prisoner who didn’t refuse the king...
what lived beneath all of that was something I absolutely could not afford to think.
He’d chosen me.
Not Isolde with her ancient bloodlines and her freely given presence, not the diplomatic match that made sense on paper, not the woman who had walked into this court with her head held high and her future apparently secured.
He’d chosen the prisoner, the woman he’d thrown into a cell. He’d chosen the woman who had used her magic against him. He’d chosen the prisoner, and I had no fucking idea why.
A flicker of something moved through me, something dark, warm, and absolutely vile. I recognized it for what it was and felt the floor tilt under my feet. It was, strangely, the feeling of winning.
I wasn’t supposed to feel that. I was the daughter of Merlin, sent here to betray this man.
What was more, I believed in what we were fighting for.
I’d seen firsthand what Arthur’s crown cost the people beneath it.
I had reasons, stacked, sorted, and examined from every angle, as to why Arthur Pendragon was the enemy.
And still, I looked at him.
He was watching me with those blue eyes, and his face was doing the thing it always did in public, revealing nothing at all. It was the king’s face, the armor face. But he was watching me the way the dragon watched me, with that specific quality of attention that had no diplomatic name.
This wasn’t only strategy, although it wore the name of strategy.
Yes, strategy and diplomacy were the container, the respectable shape he’d poured the decision into so it would fit inside a formal announcement.
But the contents were something else. The contents were those of a man who could have chosen any woman in this room or any woman outside of it...
but he’d chosen the one he’d locked in a cell because he couldn’t let her go.
This wasn’t about love. It wasn’t even about desire. Fuck, I didn’t imagine that Arthur even liked me very much. He’d made this move because it was the only one left to him. It was the only answer to the question of what was to be done with me.
And that meant my cage had just gotten a little bit larger, but that was all. I was still in a cage; only the bars were gold now. Yes, they might have been wrapped in silk and luxury, and they came with a crown, but they were still bars.
I heard the court around me, knights exchanging rapid, murmured sentences, a woman near the front wall making no effort to hide her shock, the careful silence of the men who understood the political implications and were already calculating what this meant for their position.
I heard all of it, but I processed none of it.
My hands were flat at my sides, and I didn’t know when I’d pressed them there. I couldn’t even feel my fingers.
Mordred, at Arthur’s left, looked like he’d swallowed something sharp. The blankness had cracked, and beneath it was something that looked a lot like shock. But that shock only lasted a split second before he reassembled his face into the nothingness it usually was.
Arthur held up his hand again, but the noise in the room didn’t die immediately. It took longer. That itself was information.
“The betrothal stands,” he said, and the finality in his voice wasn’t a threat, exactly. It didn’t need to be. “Arrangements will be made in accordance with the dignity of the crown and the lady’s station.”
The lady’s station. Yesterday, my station had been: prisoner.
I watched him as he descended the dais, watched as the crowd parted for him. He walked toward me, and I stood where I was because there was nowhere else to retreat and because my legs had apparently decided to stop accepting instructions.
He stopped in front of me and smiled down at me. Up close, I could see the line of his jaw, as well as the slight tension there. His eyes gave nothing away, and yet they also wouldn’t leave my face.
He said, quietly enough that only I could hear it, “You look like you’re going to be sick.”
“I’m debating exactly that,” I answered, and I was surprised my voice worked.
One corner of his mouth moved into a hint of a smile. “Debating whether to be sick?”
“No. Debating whether you deserve the warning before I do it.”
The almost-smile held for a half second longer than it should have. Then it closed, and he was the king again, and he offered me his arm in a motion that wasn’t an offer at all, but an order.
The court was watching, and all I could think about was Corvin and Lance in the dungeon and how the dragon had stopped a blade meant for my throat.
I put my hand on his arm. I had no other choice.
If I refused his announcement in front of all the court, I knew it wouldn’t be good for me.
What was more, maybe this was exactly what was meant to happen.
Maybe in uniting with Arthur, it would stop the animosity between him and Merlin, and peace could be found?
Or maybe this was simply fuel tossed onto a fire of hatred that would soon burn uncontrollably.
The silk of my sleeve pressed against the rough wool of his, and beneath that was the warmth of him, solid and undeniable. I looked straight ahead at the assembled court of Logres, but soon my attention sought Isolde again.
Her chin was up a fraction too high. That was the tell.
Not tears, not a tremor in her hands, not any of the things a lesser woman might have allowed herself.
Just that fractional overcorrection: her spine going precisely too straight, her shoulders pulled back.
She looked first at Arthur, and then, because she couldn’t help it, she looked at me once more.
And for one single moment that was barely a breath, barely long enough to be called a moment at all, she couldn’t hold my eyes.
Her gaze dropped, not to the floor, but just slightly downward and to the left, as if she’d found something of interest.
Then she found herself again and looked back up, and her expression was perfectly composed once more, the performance fully resumed.
But I’d seen the fracture. It had lasted less than a second, but it had cost her everything she had to close it.
And I suddenly hated Arthur in a different way than I’d ever hated him before.
I hated him for what he’d done to Isolde: for the completely insensitive way he’d handled her.
I hated him for the fact that her expression was breaking as if she were made of porcelain and someone had just come at her with a hammer.
-CORVIN-
The ward-light had burned for over forty days.
I knew because I’d counted, made note of every morning and the way it brightened by a degree.
In the evening, it dimmed into a pale imitation of a sun cycle.
Mordred had built the fluctuation into the enchantment in order to keep me oriented, to keep me sane, maybe, or to remind me that he controlled even the rhythm of my days.
I’d come to hate that light more than I could say. So when it died, I didn’t panic. Instead, I sat up on my cot and listened.
The torches went first. I heard them gutter out in sequence down the corridor, one after another, like something moving fast was swallowing them whole.
Then the ward-light followed: that cold, bluish luminescence Mordred had threaded into the stone above my cell door.
It simply flickered twice and went out completely.
Then I was in blackness, total and absolute. We all were.
The guards noticed immediately, and in noticing, I could hear their panic.
“What in the gods’ names—”
“Don’t touch it, don’t—”
“Someone fetch a taper, fetch—”
“The wards are down. All of them. Something’s wrong with the wards.”
Their boots scraped against the stone. There were two of them on duty this evening, maybe three, and they were clustered near the corridor junction.
By the sound of their voices and their footsteps, they were confused, and now I could hear them reaching for torches that wouldn’t catch.