“She sounds like Kay.”
“If Kay had better taste in wine and better taste in men.”
“Better taste in men?”
She laughed as she nodded. “My mother married my father, after all, and that man tried to trade me for tin tariffs.”
The laughter came easier the second time. And somewhere in the laughter, without either of us noting the moment, we arrived somewhere. The circling stopped, and understanding settled between us like the sun settling into the garden: warm, quiet, and certain.
This was real; I was sure of it. Whatever had been building since Corbenic, since the letters about foals, since the afternoon in the stables, all of it was real. Not diplomatic choreography. Not strategic positioning. Just two people who had found in each other the thing Isolde had just described: a partnership that makes you more.
I didn’t know when my hand had moved toward hers on the stone, but I noticed it the way you notice something that has already been true for a while: her hand on the wall beside mine, our smallest fingers touching. The contact was so slight it could have been accidental, but it wasn’t accidental. And we both knew it wasn’t accidental. Neither of us moved.
I looked at our hands. Mine scarred and calloused, the old scar running from wrist to elbow white in the morning light. Hers calloused from reins, brownish from the sun. I thought about how easy this was, and then I thought about the terrifying simplicity of it. There was no suppression required, no monster to manage. What I felt was legible to me because it was mine, and it was human. Yet the legibility was so unfamiliar that I sat with it for a moment just to confirm it was real.
Isolde turned her hand over on the warm stone, palm up. She didn’t look at me; instead, she watched the river and left her hand open and waited.
I looked at her upturned palm, and I saw the life in it: ordinary, clear, possible. The horses, the orchards, and the woman who asked about my dog. The evenings. The partnership. The life that was real, good, and mine for the choosing.
I reached for her hand, and my fingers closed over hers. Her palm was warm from the sun-heated stone, and her fingers curled around mine almost instinctively. The contact was permission and promise at the same time and the gentlest thing that had happened to me in longer than I wanted to count.
She turned toward me at the same moment that I turned toward her. The distance between us was a breath, less than a breath really. She leaned in, and I met her halfway. The distance between us closed.
And the dragon detonated.
Not a slow escalation, not the manageable tide I’d learned to meet and redirect. This was an eruption: a full-body convulsion of heat and possession that rocketed up my spine and locked every muscle simultaneously. Gold flooded my vision, the dragon’s fire bleeding through my sight the way it did when the creature’s emotions overwhelmed containment and the line between its perception and mine dissolved.
WE WILL NOT BETRAY OUR MATE!
The command hit my nervous system like a fist and I was stunned over the fact that the dragon hadn’t seemed to care that I’d taken countless women to be, but it cared about this almost kiss?
Perhaps because it knew Isolde was a real threat to Guinevere? Whatever the reason, the dragon reacted not in a whisper, but an imperative. A physical fact. Every instinct in my body reoriented in the same instant: the magnetic north of the thing in my chest swung from wherever I was to the corridorwhereshewas in Galahad’s room, and the swing was so violent it nearly took me off the wall.
I jerked back. My hand ripped from Isolde’s as my feet found the ground. The dragon was pulling me southward, through the garden wall, through the castle stone, toward her, and staying where I was required planting my feet and gripping the warm stone and using every containment technique Merlin had ever drilled into me, and still the gold wouldn’t clear from my vision.
“Arthur—”
I heard Isolde’s voice the way you hear voices underwater. Present, meaningful, but impossible to fully receive.
“I’m sorry.” The words came out cracked, and they weren’t spoken in my voice but something rawer underneath it. “I have to... there’s something I have to—”
I couldn’t finish. There was no sentence that ended honestly.Something inside me that is not mine just detonated against the idea of me kissing you and is now demanding I leave you here.
I stumbled out of the garden.
I didn’t look back because I knew if I looked back, I’d see her face, and her face would do something to me that I couldn’t afford right now, couldn’t afford in the corridor, couldn’t afford while fighting the creature for control of my own legs. So I kept walking: through the garden entrance, into the cool shadow of the castle wall, and the dragon quieted by increments as I moved toward what it wanted me to move toward.
Behind me, the garden was warm, still, and empty except for Isolde on the wall.
But I didn’t look back. I kept walking. The dragon pulled, and I followed because the alternative was worse, because containment required compliance on days like this, because the king couldn’t afford to be seen convulsing in a garden over a prisoner in a knight’s custody.
I told myself all of this, and I kept walking.
The gold faded from my vision by the time I reached the south corridor. The dragon settled: a deep rumble of possessive contentment that I despised. It had what it wanted. It didn’t need to fight me any longer.
I stopped in the corridor, put my hand on the stone wall, and stood there for a moment with my forehead almost touching the cold surface.
All I could think about was the garden, the wall, the morning light, and Isolde’s palm, open and warm from the sun-heated stone.
