At some point before dawn, I stood to replace a burned-out taper. The candle in my hand threw light across the small mirrorbeside the altar. It was a steel mirror, not glass, polished to a dim but functional reflection. I used it to check the state of my tonsure, nothing more.
I looked into it now without meaning to, and the man looking back at me had blood on the hem of his robe. His hair was disheveled. His eyes were wide and very bright in the way eyes get when something in a man has been running hard for a long time without rest. There were marks on his knuckles.
I stared at him for a long time. The candle flame between us trembled.
Then I set the taper in its holder and turned away, dropping to my knees on the stone floor, and pressed my forehead to the cold as I began to pray.
“I am your instrument. I am your instrument. I am your instrument.”The repetition was a rope in dark water. I held onto it. “What is done in your name is not done in mine. I am only the vessel. Only the hand. I am not... I am not...”
Behind me, she breathed, slow and even. Either asleep or very skilled at pretending.
“I am your instrument.”
The cold stone pressed back against my forehead, impartial, unimpressed.
I prayed until the light changed.
-ARTHUR-
The solar was quiet when Tristan arrived.
I’d chosen the hour deliberately: mid-morning, when the court was occupied with its own noise and no one paid attention to a knight walking through a side corridor. Mordred stoodto my left, near the window, hands folded at his waist. His mismatched eyes tracked Tristan from the moment the door opened.
I didn’t rise.
Tristan crossed the room without being told where to stop. He planted himself at the correct distance from my writing table: not so close it was presumptuous, yet not so far it suggested nerves. That, too, I noted.
“You wanted to see me,” he said.
NotYour Grace.NotSire, just a statement of fact delivered in that slight accent that softened the consonants and made everything sound unhurried.
“Sit.”
He sat. He folded one ankle over the other, rested his arm along the chair back, and looked at me with the quality of patience that belonged either to very calm men or very practiced ones. I hadn’t yet decided which he was.
I let the silence stretch. Mordred didn’t move. The fire in the grate ticked.
“You sat with her last night,” I said. “At dinner.”
Tristan’s expression didn’t change.“I did.”
“She talked to you.”
“She did.”
“She appears to be comfortable with you.” I turned my cup once on the desk. “That’s unusual.”
He said nothing and his expression conveyed the fact that he believed there was nothing to say about it.
“I find it interesting,” I continued. “That she appeared to…trustyou when you’ve given her no reason at all.” I set the cup down. “As far as I know, you’ve given her no reason.”
He nodded, as if to agree with me.
Then it was my turn to nod as I leaned closer to him. “You came to Camelot because your power is useful to me. Ihaven’t forgotten that, and neither should you. The arrangement persists as long as you continue to make yourself useful.” I looked at him directly. “Complicate it, and it ends.”
There was no change in his expression. “I understand.”
No argument. No clarification, justI understand,delivered flat and clean, like a man confirming a route he’d already memorized.
