Arthur studied me for a moment. “Noted,” he said, and moved on.
That was when I let myself glance toward Kay.
He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the table, one finger tracing an idle circle on the wood near his cup. His mouth held the faintest curve, but it wasn’t a smile. Perhaps just the ghost of one, the kind a man wears when something confirms what he already suspected.
He didn’t need to look at me, because the almost-smile wasn’t for me. It was for himself: a small, satisfied noting of the fact that I’d done it again. I’d put my voice behind her welfare infront of Arthur, in front of everyone, and Kay had watched me do it the same way a man watches a dog walk willingly into a snare.
The discussion continued. I listened. I contributed where contribution was required, kept my responses spare and tactical, and gave Arthur nothing he could interpret as anything other than strategic counsel. Gareth asked about troop rotations. Agravaine raised the question of the northern watchtowers. Tristan said something about supply inventory that drew a low laugh from three men who were still capable of laughing.
Kay said nothing. He never needed to say anything. That was the thing about him that most men failed to understand: they were always waiting for the blade, but what they didn’t realize was that the blade had already been positioned. He was just waiting to see how long you’d stand in front of it.
-ARTHUR-
Lance looked at me for a long moment without speaking. The stillness in him had shifted. It was harder now, set differently. Even though he didn’t say anything, he kept his eyes on me, not in challenge, or notonlya challenge. There was something underneath his gaze, something closer to a question he already knew I didn’t have a clean answer to, and he knew I knew he knew it, which was the specific kind of conversation Lance and I had been having for years without ever actually having it.
I held his gaze.
The dragon said nothing. It was watching, the way it did when something nearby smelled like territory being tested.
I picked up my tankard and drank. The ale was old, stale, almost as old and stale as this conversation.
I’d just told him the subject of Guinevere was something I was leaving to Galahad’s discretion and Lance clearly hadn’t liked the answer. He’d looked away first. Then he sat back in his chair and directed his attention somewhere past the window, past the courtyard wall, somewhere I couldn’t follow and didn’t try.
Galahad inclined his head, and his expression was composed, clear-eyed, still, and entirely convinced of what he’d just said. That was the thing about Galahad that I found simultaneously useful and difficult to look at directly. He believed everything he said. There was no performance in him, no calculation beneath the piety, no layer of self-interest humming quietly underneath the doctrine the way it did in Agravaine, the way it did in me.
He believed the prisoner was improving; he believed the process was working. He believed, with the serene and immovable certainty of a man who has never had reason to doubt his own framework, that what he was doing to her was the correct and righteous thing.
I’d given her to him.
And that was your first mistake.
The fucking dragon was relentless.
After a bit more discussion on the Rebellion, I closed the council. Chairs moved, men gathered their papers, and the room emptied. Lance remained after everyone else had left (except Mordred) because he was the one who always wanted to say something privately. Today I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to hear about Galahad starving her. I wanted to hear that she was broken and ready to be rebuilt, ready to switch sides and vow her loyalty to the crown and to me. Anything short of that, I wasn’t interested in. I shook my head at him to tell him as much,and he left with a small tension in his jaw that he controlled by the time he reached the door.
Then it was just Mordred.
He was still seated, his annotated vellum squared neatly in front of him, the triangle pendant at his throat catching a thin line of the morning light. I waited until the door had been closed long enough that no one was standing on the other side of it.
“The wards,” I said. “The perimeter junction degradation. Is it purely the missing materials, or is something else affecting the outer wards?”
Mordred was quiet, and in that silence, I read a man deciding how much of the answer to give.
“There is an anomaly,” he said at last. “In the bedrock readings beneath the northern junction.”
“What kind of anomaly?”
“I’m still characterizing it.”
I looked at him. “How long until you know more?”
“I should have a clearer picture within the fortnight.”
“Mordred.”
He met my eyes. His were, as always, difficult to read because they seemed to be reading two different things simultaneously.
“Know sooner,” I said.
