I didn’t linger. I’d learned years ago that the men who crowded Arthur after meetings were the men Arthur trusted least.
I was already in the corridor when I heard Kay behind me.
Not following me because Kay didn’t follow. He simply existed in the same direction of travel, which was different enough that a man watching wouldn’t have noted anything.
“Lance.”
I slowed without stopping, and he fell into step beside me.
“The king seemed agitated after the morning patrol briefing,” Kay said. His voice was pleasant, conversational even. “Something in the northeastern report, I thought. Did you notice?”
I kept my eyes forward.
The flagstones were uneven here, just past the second arch. I’d known that for fifteen years. As such, my boot found each dip without thought.
Kay already knew. That was the thing that made the back of my neck tighten beneath my collar. He wasn’t asking because he lacked information; he was asking because he wanted confirmation that I would give it.
“Arthur has a lot on his mind,” I said.
Kay nodded, and it was a small, considered nod, the nod of a man who had just received exactly what he’d come for. Kay had asked a question that had a simple, innocent answer available to any knight who wasn’t paying special attention. But I’d instead given an answer thatagreedwith what Kay was saying, simply because I hadn’t argued the point.
“Of course,” he said. “These are complicated days.”
And then he peeled away at the next branching corridor. No parting remark. No acknowledgment of what had just occurred. Just the sound of his footsteps going quiet in the opposite direction.
I kept walking.
My pace didn’t change. My expression didn’t change. A knight passing me in the hall would have seen nothing: just Lancelot du Lac moving through a castle he’d lived in most of his life, jaw set, eyes forward, the same as always.
But something had shifted. Something small, the way a single stone displaced from a wall looks like nothing until the water gets in.
I’d given Kay the confirmation he wanted. I’d done it reflexively, without drama, without any of the moral theater I’d been running privately in my head for days. I’d just opened my mouth and handed him a piece of Arthur, and it had cost me nothing visible.
I stopped at a window. The courtyard below was midmorning quiet: stable hands crossing with buckets, a pair of hounds sleeping against the warm stone. Ordinary.
I pressed my thumb against the edge of the windowsill until the stone bit back.
The thing Kay was good at, the thing I hadn’t properly accounted for, was that he never asked for much. Each individual request was defensible.Arthur seemed agitated. Arthur has a lot on his mind.Nothing there that would condemn me if I’d been overheard. Nothing that would read as betrayal in a court of law or a court of honor.
But that was the mechanism. That was exactly the mechanism.
I’d spent my life being precise about what I would and wouldn’t do. I had lines I didn’t cross. I had a sense of myself as a man who understood the difference between political maneuvering, which every man at court engaged in, and genuine betrayal. I’d been certain of that distinction for so long I’d stopped questioning it.
But Kay had just shown me the distinction was softer than I thought.
Below, one of the hounds lifted its head, looked at nothing, and settled back down.
I pushed off the window and kept moving.
-ARTHUR-
The afternoon council didn’t happen.
Kay had taken the northern raid reports. Mordred was somewhere in the lower halls, still picking apart what had occurred the evening before in the Great Hall when the candles had extinguished themselves, and there had followed a sense of too many people in the room. Some people had seen ghosts (I,for one), but most hadn’t seen anything other than the candles going out for no apparent reason. Mordred had first approached Tristan, since he was the most obvious place to start, but once Tristan had convinced Mordred of his innocence, Mordred had turned to other possibilities.
I’d left the subject of just what had occurred with Mordred because I had no better option. Mordred understood things I didn’t, which was one of his virtues and his greatest leverage, and he knew both.
Lance had taken the knights to the training fields, no doubt to work through whatever each of them thought and felt regarding the events of the evening before.
