“It’s been a difficult week,” I said.
Isolde absorbed this. She didn’t push. Didn’t ask about the prisoner, though she knew. Of course, she knew. Every court in Logres knew about the knight unmasked, the spy in the kingdom, by now. Instead, she let the silence sit for three steps, and then she said, “The foal you wrote me about a few months ago… the chestnut. How is she?”
I almost laughed.
Almost laughed at the absurdity of it: the deliberate, generous absurdity of it, this woman standing in the wreckage of my week with a question about a horse we’d written about months ago, offering me something small, clean, and completely untangled from the catastrophe.
“She’s growing,” I answered. The words came easier than anything I’d said in days. “She has her mother’s temperament: she’s stubborn and fast. She threw a groom last Tuesday.” I paused. “And she bit Kay.”
Isolde’s smile broke open, full and unguarded, the smile I’d first seen in the garden that night when she told me she’d followed me because she was curious about a king who needed to escape his own banquet. Soon the smile became a laugh, and I laughed along with her.
“She sounds magnificent,” she said.
“She is,” I answered.
We reached the guest quarters. The door stood open, a servant inside arranging the room. I should have said good day and turned back toward the council chamber and all the things requiring my attention.
Instead, I lingered.
Isolde stood in the doorway and looked at me. Her expression was the quiet, perceptive thing it always was. She read my face with the attentiveness of a woman who’d spent enough time watching me that she’d learned my topography. She knew. Not the specifics, of course, and nothing about the dragon, nor the sword, nor the terrible particular hunger that pulled toward a white-haired witch. But Isolde knew the shape of it.
She didn’t ask.
“I’m glad the foal is well,” she said.
She meant half a dozen other things but said none of them, and I loved her for the restraint and hated myself for requiring it.
“She’d like you,” I said. “Wouldn’t let anyone near her in the beginning. She was particular about who she trusted.”
“Good horses usually are.”
I nodded then stood another moment in the corridor like a man waiting for himself to do something.
“Isolde.” Her name came out lower than I’d intended. “I want you to know—” I stopped. Started again. “I don’t—” Another stop. The words were wrong. All the words were wrong for what I was trying to say, which was:you have no idea what it costs me to see you. You awaken something in me that is restful, good, and so far from what my life has become that it feels like a window in a sealed room.“You have no idea how good it is to see you. What kind of quiet you bring with you.” I paused. “You always have.”
Something passed across her face, something that was brief, unguarded, and then very quickly collected.
“It’s good to see you too, Arthur.”
I walked back to the Council Chamber and once there, I sat down and put the first report in the long list of reports in front of me.
But I didn’t read it.
I pressed my fist against my chest in something that had become a habit now, the gesture I used when the dragon was moving and I needed the reminder of bone and flesh between me and it. It pushed back against my knuckles with a slow, rhythmic surge. Not Isolde. It had never roused for Isolde, not in the garden, not in the letters, not today in the corridor. Isolde awoke theman,not the beast. And not for the first time today, I remembered the garden again. The wanting that felt clean, proportionate, and like something a person could survive.
The dragon didn’t care about gardens.
It was pulling south. Down through the castle’s bones, to a white-haired woman with water magic pressed under her skin by Mordred’s binding.
I became livid.
Not at the dragon. The dragon was beyond negotiation. No, I was livid withher. At the specific, infuriating fact of her existence, at the way she’d arrived in my life like a splinter under the skin, at the way the thing inside my chest had looked at her and saidminewith a conviction it had never aimed at Isolde of Corbenic, who was warm, direct, uncomplicated, and good. Isolde deserved to be chosen. Isolde deserved a man whose first impulse toward her was his own and not a monster’s borrowed want. Were it not for the fucking beast, that impulse would be there. Fuck, it still was. Yet, the beast would never allow it.
The fury sat in my chest alongside the dragon, and neither of them moved.
I sat in the Council Chamber and didn’t go to the dungeons where I still needed to interrogate Corvin. I just... fuck, I didn’thave the energy for it. Outside, the winter light shifted, and the castle moved around me.
All I could think about was the garden in Corbenic. The moon full in the sky and a woman’s hand on my arm.
