Arthur’s eyes moved across my face as he studied my expression for the lie he believed was there, no doubt looking for the slight tension at the corners of my mouth when I was shaping a half-truth, or the way my breath changed when I was deciding how much to give him.
I met that searching gaze, held still, and let him look.
Whatever he found satisfied him, or came close enough. He raised his sword again.
“Where does the rebellion get its funding? Its weapons?”
This one I answered faster because the answer was the same, and it cost me less to give it. “I don’t know.”
His eyes sharpened by a fraction at the difference in how I’d delivered the response: the slight ease, the absence of the careful stillness I’d held for the first question. He pressed forward in a slow advance that pushed me back toward the center of the yard.
Twice I got inside his guard. The second time I got close enough I heard something change in his breathing. Then he took me apart, completely and totally. It wasn’t cruel, and that was almost worse. He read the overextension in my third feint, redirected my blade with one clean rotation of his wrist, and stepped behind me. His forearm came across my chest, and the practice sword fell out of my hand, clattering against the stones six feet away.
His arm didn’t move. And neither did I.
Three heartbeats of both of us breathing hard. Still, his forearm was a bar of iron across my chest, pushing against my breasts. I could feel the heat of him through the thin prisoner’s gown, through whatever careful distance he’d maintained between us, through all the architecture of a king and his prisoner.
His breath was at my temple.
I didn’t move. Couldn’t or wouldn’t? The difference between those two things had blurred considerably. Then something happened that I wasn’t expecting and didn’t know what to do with.
It started at my chest, right where the binding sat the heaviest, and it moved outward like a tide that hadn’t been given permission to move. It wasn’t my magic; no, this was different. This was something pressing against me from inside, reaching towardhim, toward whatever lived beneath Arthur’s skin, the beast.
I’d seen the dragon before. It existed in that primal place behind his eyes, and what I was feeling now didn’t make any sense because the feelings flowing through me were recognition. Like two flames leaning toward each other through a draft.
“You feel it too,” I whispered, without even realizing I’d spoken.
His arm tightened around me, tightened almost imperceptibly, the way a hand tightens in sleep around something it doesn’t want to lose. I looked up and over my shoulder into his face.
His eyes had gone dark; the black at the edge of his irises was spreading rapidly. Meanwhile, my heart was doing something catastrophic. Something that made so little sense to me because this man was the reason for all the pain and hardship I’d experienced. He stood for everything I hated, and I should have hated him. Ididhate him.
So, why...
Don’t,I thought. At myself. At him. At whatever was happening in the inches between us that had nothing to do with the practice yard, prisoners, or kings.
He never answered. Instead, he released me.
Not slowly. His arm dropped, he stepped back, and the cold rushed into the space where his heat had been. I turned to face him before I’d made a conscious decision to do so.
He’d already put distance between us. Three steps. His expression had locked itself back into the familiar arrangement: controlled, measuring, giving nothing. But there was color in his face that hadn’t been there before, and his breathing hadn’t fully settled.
Neither had mine.
He picked up my fallen practice sword and held it out to me, hilt first. I took it. Our fingers didn’t touch.
“What did Merlin tell you about me?”
He asked the question the same way he asked everything: flat, without inflection, slipped into the space between one moment and the next. But this one landed differently. I felt it in my chest because I understood what it was: a deflection. He’d absolutely felt whatever had just traveled between us, but he hadn’t wanted to acknowledge it. So, he’d simply changed the subject.
I didn’t answer right away.
The silence stretched long enough that he noticed it. Long enough that I noticed him noticing it. He didn’t push. He just waited, sword at rest, watching me.
The briefing had happened in the upper room at Caer Gwyll. Merlin had stood at the window with his back to me while he talked.
Arthur Pendragon is not what Logres believes him to be. He is brilliant, yes. Ruthless, absolutely. But Camelot was built on a lie. The kingdom he claims to have purified of magic runs on it: in the wards, in the grain stores, in the water table beneath the city. He understands this. He has always understood this. He does not suppress magic because he fears it. He suppresses it because he cannot afford to share it. Remember the difference.
What Merlin hadn’t told me, what no briefing had accounted for, was the gap between the shape of the man and the man himself.
