“What do you want to know about them?”
“Will they still kill anyone who crosses them?”
“Yes, unless—” I stopped.
“Unless what?”
“Unless you have the right...token.”
That wasn’t quite a lie, but it also wasn’t quite the truth. The truth was blood, Merlin’s blood, the stones woven from it and keyed to it. But the word ‘token’ was vague enough to swallow.
He let that sit.
“Mm.” He turned and walked toward the weapons rack, and I watched him set the practice sword down with care. “What’s the approach look like? From the stones to the main gates of Caer Gwyll?”
I didn’t tell him that there weren’t any main gates, that the sheerness of the obsidian mountain was sufficient to deter unwelcome intruders. “Open ground,” I answered. “Mostly. Some tree cover on the northern side.”
“How much tree cover?”
“Enough tree cover.” Now these questions were taking the shape of something I didn’t like because it felt like we could have been discussing an ambush or a scouting party or the like. Thepoint was, there was no way I was handing the King of Logres the approach vectors to the only place I’d ever felt safe.
Arthur still stood with his back to the weapons rack, his arms loose at his sides, and he was looking at me with something that wasn’t satisfaction but also wasn’t surprise.
“You’re good at this,” he said. “Or you were good at it until just now.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“Yes, you do.” He tilted his head slightly. “You stopped. That’s interesting. Most people don’t notice themselves stopping.”
The cold in the air had settled into my collar, and then down the back of my neck. I held the practice sword at my side and said nothing because everything I could say at this point either confirmed I’d been giving him real intelligence or confirmed I knew what he was doing, and neither of those things served me.
He crossed the yard toward me and then stopped just outside arm’s reach.
“The gap,” he said quietly, “is more useful than anything you’ve said.”
He took the practice sword from my hand with the unhurried ease of someone who’d never once doubted his right to take things.
Then he walked away and he didn’t look back. Just summoned the guard by flicking his fingers, and soon the guard was headed toward me, and that was just as well because the yard was already filling with the knights, and I didn’t want to face any of them.
Not when I stood in this cold yard with the smell of sawdust and iron around me and understood, with the delayed clarity of someone who had just watched themselves be outmaneuvered, that I’d given Arthur something today.
Not the stones. Not the blood. Not the real key to anything, that was true. But I’d shown him where the door was.
And what was more, I’d shown him that I knew where it was.
-LANCE-
The yard was loud with it: the ring of steel on steel, orders barked across the practice ground, boots on packed dirt. I had no reason to be standing at the far edge of the colonnade with my back against the stone and my eyes on the wrong part of the yard entirely.
I told myself I was watching the drill.
She moved through the form Arthur had set for her: I’d seen it end, caught the tail end of whatever he’d been putting her through, and I noticed that there was something different in the way she carried herself. It wasn’t confidence exactly, no... it was something harder than that. She’d shed something, or acquired something, and I couldn’t parse which. The distinction mattered, though, even if I didn’t know why I was still trying to make it.
Arthur crossed the yard away from her without looking back. I knew that walk. I’d been reading the set of his shoulders for years, and what I read there now wasn’t indifference, even if that was what he was pretending it was. Indifference would have been easier, but this was something he was holding by the throat.
I looked away and breathed in deeply, irritated with myself for even noticing as much as I just had. Why Arthur was training her, I didn’t know. I mean, I knew the reasons that he’d given us in the council meeting, but those reasons didn’t ring truesomehow. I believed the real truth was more along the lines that he just couldn’t keep away from her, but that was a reason he couldn’t face, so he’d called it something else.
I supposed I couldn’t even fault him for that. In truth, we both were having our own internal battles where she was concerned.
