“Galahad.” My voice came out just right, the king’s voice. It was even, absolute, and carrying without effort. “Your custody ends tonight.”
He went very still.
“She nearly killed you,” I continued. “I have no interest in giving her a second opportunity.”
“My lord—”
“—I’m not finished.” I looked at him until he closed his mouth. “You were correct in what you said: the demon is too strong. Thus, I don’t trust her with any other man in this castle.”
I was looking at Tristan when I said that last bit, and he held my gaze, neither of us looking away.
The look I gave him said:I know what you want. I know why you want it. She is not yours.
He didn’t flinch. He also didn’t put her down.
“Guinevere will be taken to a guarded chamber,” I continued. “Not anyone’s quarters as I do not trust her. After what happened here, she is much... stronger than we gave her credit for. As such, I will see to it that Mordred reapplies the binding on her magic and makes it stronger than it was.” I looked at Galahad again. “No man will enter her bedchamber until I decide what happens next.”
The silence in the room held for a beat.
Then Tristan said, “Which chamber?”
“The one beside mine.”
The room absorbed that. I watched it land on Galahad’s face: there was a compression around his mouth. I hoped he didn’t feel as if he’d failed me. He hadn’t.
Tristan shifted Guinevere’s weight in his arms and moved toward the door.
Ours, the dragon said.
Quiet, I thought back.
Tristan carried her out. I followed. The dragon tracked him through the corridor with that same terrible stillness, that same focused quiet that was starting to feel worse than its rage had ever felt. At least rage was legible. At least rage was something I knew how to manage, to redirect.
This, I didn’t know what to do with.
He laid her on the bed in the chamber beside mine, then pulled the coverlet over her shoulder. He touched her hair: one pass, brief and careful, his fingers moving through the white of it, and I stood in the doorway and waited for the dragon to tear through me like a fire through dry grass.
It didn’t.
It just watched.
Then Tristan turned to walk out of the room. I stopped him in the corridor because I needed an answer, and because the dragon’s silence had been going on long enough that I needed to understand what it meant.
“You walked into that room like the magic couldn’t touch you.”
“It couldn’t,” he said.
“Why?”
He looked at me. The accent was there, that eastern lilt, and whatever he read on my face he apparently decided warranted honesty.
“Some things recognize their own.”
Then he was gone, and I was standing there with a dragon in my chest that had just watched another man touch her and said absolutely nothing.
I went to my own chamber. Closed the door. Stood in the dark with my back against it, breathing.
The dragon was still quiet. Still watching something I couldn’t see.
