The dragon eventually took everything from me.
-ARTHUR-
The door to my chambers shut behind me, and I turned the bolt.
I hadn’t gone to Guinevere as the dragon beckoned. Instead, I’d retired to my chambers.
I crossed to the bed and gripped the post.
The wood was smooth under my hands from years of use; the carved oak had darkened at the top where my father must have done the same. The grain pressed into my palms now, and I held it until the pressure in my chest leveled out enough to breathe.
She is close. We can feel her. Go to her.
“No.”
I said it to the empty room: to the fire, to whatever lived behind my ribs and called itself mine.
The dragon said nothing back. It rarely argued in words. Instead, it just pulled, like a hook set deep in my chest, tugging in the direction ofher. Always fucking tugging me towards her.
I pressed my forehead to the bedpost. The carved oak smelled faintly of beeswax, which meant someone had polished it today or perhaps yesterday. It was a small, irrelevant fact, but I focused on it, regardless.
In the garden, the river had been loud and bright, and Isolde’s hand had been warm in mine. That was real. Her hand was real. The grass under our boots and the sound of the foal in the stables testing its new legs in the next paddock over... those were all real things. Solid things. Human things.
Isolde is ash. Our mate is fire.
I didn’t answer.
Isolde had asked me to name the foal. It was just a small, silly thing she’d asked, but I remembered the way she’d tilted her head when she’d asked. And I’d told her I would think on it. I’d been thinking on it for days.
There had been a name that had popped into my head, though. In the garden, with Isolde’s hand in mine and the sun coming off the water, the foal’s name had been right there, on the surface of my tongue, solid as a coin.
I’d felt it on my tongue, tasted the shape of it, the weight of it.
Then the dragon woke, and everything inside me went to fire and explosion, and the name was gone. And it was still gone.
I straightened and loosened my grip on the post because my knuckles ached.
There was no name now. Just a blank space where the name had been, smooth and unhelpful, like a word forgotten mid-sentence.
I poured myself a glass of wine I didn’t want and then stood at the window looking out at Camelot below. Thecourtyard was quiet, except for two guards at the far gate, their torches guttering in the evening wind. A black cat crossed the cobblestones, and I watched it until it disappeared into the night.
Isolde was probably in her rooms by now. I imagined she was reading, or writing letters home, or thinking about the king and the way he’d almost kissed her before something had happened to his eyes and his voice, and he’d immediately hurried away like a thief in the night.
I drank the wine. Tomorrow I’d send word to the stable master, and I’d tell him to allow Isolde to choose the foal’s name.
I set the glass down and noticed how the fire had burned low. The room was cooling, but I made no motion to stoke it. In the northeast corner of my awareness, the dragon still pulled, patient and implacable, like a compass needle that only pointed one direction.
I didn’t move toward the door. Instead, I stood at the window and watched until the torches steadied and the night settled into itself.
Still, I didn’t move. That was all I had. Not wisdom, not virtue, not the gold-plated righteousness of the king I’d meant to be. Just the bedpost, the window, and the long, grinding work of standing still.
CHAPTER FORTY-FOUR
-GALAHAD-
I’d memorized every line of the Rite of Abominations by the time I was twelve years old.
Brother Eamon had made each of us copy it out by hand, including every appendix, every footnote, every marginal notation the early scribes had added in cramped script. The Purging Rite was on page two hundred and fourteen, and I’d copied it seventeen times. I’d copied it so many times that I now knew its shape the way I knew my own name.
