He didn’t say anything for a few breaths and just studied me instead. And the look on his face was measuring, as if he were running calculations in his mind.
“Let me describe the alternative first, just so we understand one another.” His voice was pleasant, as if he were telling me that the rain clouds would soon pass and Camelot would be bathed in warm light. “I go to Arthur and I tell him his First Knight, the man he trusts above all others, the man who stands at his right hand, took the virginity of his enemy while she was embedded in his court as a spy... while she was his prisoner in waiting... while she was, by any legal or moral standard, a security breach of the highest order.”
I said nothing but allowed him to continue even though I already knew what the consequences would be.
“Arthur won’t execute you. He loves you too much for that. But he will strip your rank, and he’ll banish you from Camelot, which is its own sort of death, I suppose. But perhaps the worst of it will be that the knowledge that you bedded the one woman who has been his obsession... well, that knowledge will destroy what remains of the trust between you.” He paused. “Not because you fucked her and took something from her that no other man ever can again, but because you didn’t tell him the truth even though you had every possibility.”
The last sentence hit the way he’d intended it to, and there was nothing I could say to argue his points. He was exactly right. The act itself could have been construed as a weakness that was nothing more than a human mistake, a temptation I wasn’t able to resist... Arthur could perhaps forgive that. It could be presented as nothing more than a moment of poor judgment with a stunning woman whom I hadn’t yet identified as the enemy. Yes, it was forgivable, in theory.
But my silence afterward... wasn’t. That silence was a choice, repeated daily, and it transformed everything into something different. Not a weakness, but a conspiracy.
“So,” Kay continued pleasantly. “Your cooperation.”
Kay had done exactly what Kay always did: watched, waited, and produced the knife at the exact moment when the target was too exposed to deflect it.
“What kind of cooperation?”
He outlined it simply. Nothing dramatic, nothing that would require me to feel like a traitor in any obvious way; Kay was too clever for that. He wanted information, just small things like Arthur’s emotional state, whether or not Arthur was sleeping or if he was up all hours of the night. But I could see beyond the proposed innocence of his request.
“You want me to spy on Arthur.”
“I want you to help meprotectArthur from himself.”
His voice was quiet now, and something had shifted in his face, something that was now unsentimental, calculating, and real.
“Arthur is compromised,” Kay said. “The dragon is compromising him.” As to how Kay knew about the dragon, I didn’t know and didn’t ask. Nothing he knew really came as a surprise any longer. “Someone needs to watch the king when the king cannot watch himself. I am doing that, and now I’m asking you to help.”
He let that sit with me, even though I didn’t believe a word he said. I knew Kay well enough to know that he didn’t care a whit for Arthur. It was Arthur’s throne Kay cared most about.
“The alternative is I burn you to the ground and find someone else to stand next to him,” he continued, taking my silence for what it was: hesitation. “But I would rather haveyouas you are close to him in ways I never will be. We both can use that closeness to keep him alive.”
He moved to the window, hands clasped behind his back, and looked out at the courtyard below. The fountain caught the afternoon light, droplets spilling across the pale stone rendering of Arthur pulling the sword from the stone, the same image Arthur had commissioned and erected in his own honor. Kay stared at it for a long moment.
“More specifically,” he said, “I want to know about the dragon.”
The word landed with weight.
“When is it at its worst?” he continued, still looking at the fountain. “When is Arthur making decisions from inside it rather than from himself? When does he wake from his sleep and his eyes carry that color that isn’t his own? When does he lose hours he can’t account for?” He turned from the window then and looked at me directly. “I want to know all of it. And I want to know as it happens, not days later when the damage is already done.”
Kay was close to Arthur, yes, but not close in the way that mattered. Kay sat across tables from Arthur. He attended councils and managed ledgers and stood at the periphery of Arthur’s life with the permanent expression of a man who had been handed the wrong gift. He had access to Arthur’s authority but not to Arthur himself.
I had the other thing. The thing Kay had never been given and never would be. I was the one Arthur trained with at dawn when the rest of the court was still sleeping. I was the one who saw his face when the news was bad and no performance was required because there was no audience. I was the one who stood close enough during the worst moments to feel the temperature of the air around him change.
“And when I give you this information,” I said carefully, “what do you do with it?”
“I protect the throne.”
“You keep saying that.”
“Because it keeps being true.”
He said the words without blinking and I almost admired the discipline of it. Kay was a man who had told himself a particular story for so long that he’d worn grooves in it. He believed himself the overlooked guardian of Camelot, the unsung steward who kept everything upright while Arthur received all the glory.
What I knew without a doubt was that Kay wasn’t going to use the information to help Arthur. He was going to use it to know when Arthur could be managed. When the dragon had pulled him so far from himself that decisions could be made in the margins, quietly, without Arthur seeing clearly enough to stop them.
That was the intelligence Kay actually wanted: Arthur’s diminishment, measured and documented and filed away for use.
“And if I refuse?”
