For three seconds, I was just a man. Not the dragon’s vessel. Not a king. Not the thing sitting in the dark between two impossible futures. Just a man being touched by a woman who’d chosen to see him and hadn’t yet been given a reason to regret it.
Three seconds.
A groom appeared at the stall door. As soon as he saw us, he was apologetic. He mentioned that Mordred had questions about the prisoner’s binding and that the council required my presence for the northern crisis. Those three seconds of bliss closed over themselves and left no evidence that they’d ever existed.
I opened my eyes and dropped Isolde’s hand. The king returned; I felt it happen, felt the mask moving back into itsposition with the ease of something that had become second nature. I thanked Isolde for the conversation about the foal, and when I did, my voice came out formal.
She read the shift, just like she always did. And once she read it, she stepped back and gave me the room the crown required and didn’t make me feel guilty for taking it, which was the most generous thing she could have done.
“The foal needs a name,” she said. “Think about it.”
-ARTHUR-
I lay awake that night.
The dragon pulled south toward Galahad’s quarters. It was steady and insistent, like a current running beneath everything. I pressed my fist against my chest and breathed. And all the while, I thought about a name for the foal. I tried to thinkonlyabout the name.
But I found my thoughts consistently returning to a woman in amber light asking if I was all right. Soon those thoughts turned to a woman in an amorphous gray gown asking nothing, offering nothing, requiring nothing, and somehow costing more than everything.
I lay in the dark between them: one who was warmth, horses, and letters written in good faith, and the other who was winter, deception, and whatever this was that the dragon had decided before I had any say in it. The distance between what I should have wanted and what I couldn’t stop wanting was the exact measure of how far I’d fallen from the man who’d held Isolde’s hand in a stable and felt, for three seconds, like someone who might still deserve the life she was offering.
For as much as I’d wanted to hold Isolde’s hand in the stables, I wanted to fuck Guinevere so hard that no other man would ever be able to take my place. I wanted to show her who was in charge and how much her defiance had cost her.
I didn’t choose a name. In truth, I didn’t choose anything.
The dragon breathed in the dark, and I breathed with it, and outside, in the third stall, a chestnut foal slept in the hay with her white blaze pressed to the wood with no name.
-KAY-
The training yard was nearly empty when I found him.
Lance stood at the other end, practicing one of his sword sequences by himself. I waited until he’d completed the routine, then I approached him.
“A moment of your time, Sir Lancelot,” I said.
He lowered the sword and looked at me with feigned patience that was really just contempt wearing better clothes. “Kay.”
“You may want to set that down.”
He didn’t set the sword down, but I also hadn’t expected him to. He was the type of man who would go against advice just to do so.
I clasped my hands behind my back and let the silence sit between us for a breath, as I’d learned that one’s best arrow in the conversational quiver wasn’t conversation at all.
“During our last conversation,” I began, “you made a point, and it was a very good one, as it happened. You said I had no proof that there had existed any type of...inappropriaterelationship between you and the prisoner.”
Something shifted behind his eyes, something that was barely perceptible but resembled concern. And concerned he should have been because he was now standing very still at the edge of something he couldn’t see the bottom of. But I could.
“I remember,” he said.
“I thought about that... thought about it for quite some time, truth be told. You were right in that I had no proof.” I paused as I nodded. “So I went and got some.”
He said nothing, but the pulse in his neck increased visibly.
I turned and walked a few paces to give him a moment to compose himself.
“Every time you were in the training yard,” I began as I flicked off one finger, “you watched Lioran. I watched you watch Lioran. Now, a commander watches his subordinates: yes, of course, that is true and it’s to be expected because it’s a commander’s function. But there’s a quality of attention, a particular quality, that has nothing to do with command assessment and everything to do with a man who can’t stop the direction of his own eyes, a man who fights the pull and loses, repeatedly, across the span of an afternoon. And, after that,manyafternoons.” I glanced back at him. “You lost rather badly.”
Lance’s jaw tightened.
