In the dark, Morgan’s breathing was steady from the next room. It was that particular still quality it had when she was somewhere else entirely, her body running on its own while the rest of her moved through walls, wards, and sleeping minds two days’ ride away. I’d watched that breathing for years, and the watching had never become ordinary.
She was a woman who measured time in centuries, and yet she’d chosen to warm my bed. At least, for now. Maybe for the foreseeable future. Hopefully for the foreseeable future.
CHAPTER TWENTY-EIGHT
-ARTHUR-
The dragon woke before I did.
That had started three days ago. I’d opened my eyes in the dark, and it was already there, pressing against my ribs from the inside. Not yet demanding. Just awake and aware. Pointed like a compass needle towards the lower reaches of the tower where Galahad kept his ward.
I lay still and waited for it to settle.
It didn’t settle.
She stirs the ancient hunger. We must go to her.
“Quiet,” I said to the ceiling.
-ARTHUR-
Lance was already in the yard when I arrived. He was working through forms with the ease of a man who was moving through memory that came from having done the same thing ten thousand times. He didn’t look up when I crossed thecobblestones. The morning was cold, the sky a flat gray, frost still edging the stones near the stable wall.
“You’re late,” he said.
“I’m the king.”
“You’re still late.”
I picked up a practice sword from the rack but didn’t bother with a shield. We fell into it without ceremony: that was the thing about Lance; there was never any ceremony between us in the yard. Every other man in Camelot softened their blows when they faced me. Lance hit me like he was trying to kill me, and I’d told him once that if he ever stopped, I’d replace him.
He hadn’t stopped.
For a while, there was just the sound of steel on steel, boots on frozen ground, and my own breathing. My arms ached. My shoulder had been bad since the week before, some old injury from the Saxony campaign that came back every winter like an unwanted houseguest. I pushed through it. The pain was useful. Pain required attention, and attention was something I needed to spend carefully right now.
Closer.
I drove forward. Lance retreated two steps, absorbed the pressure, redirected. I felt the blade glance off my forearm, and the sting of it ran up to my elbow. Good. I reset. I came again.
We went on like this for an hour.
By the end of it, Lance’s breathing was elevated. Mine wasn’t. That was new.
And he noticed. He lowered his sword and looked at me with the particular expression he reserved for things that troubled him.
“Your shoulder was bothering you twenty minutes ago,” he said.
“It still is.”
“You’re not moving like it is.”
I set the practice sword against the rack and noticed how steady my hands were. Not only that, but my pulse, if I concentrated, was barely elevated. A month ago, this session would have left me winded and pleasantly exhausted. Now I felt the same as when I’d started: still overcome with an energy that needed to be extinguished as the dragon pressed against the inside of my chest like it was looking for a seam.
“Galahad had a conversation with me yesterday, and it’s still on my mind,” I said because I needed to say something that wasn’t about my pulse rate.
Lance came and stood beside me at the rack. “What did he say?”
“That he wanted more time with the prisoner.” I almost smiled. Almost. “He said he needed another few days to instill within her the good and pure way.”
