In years of carrying this thing, I’d learned its patterns. I knew its hunger and its fury and its territorial obsession and the specific texture of its jealousy. I knew what it felt like when it wanted something destroyed. I knew what it felt like when it was simply waiting.
This was neither.
This was the dragon looking at Tristan with a kind of wary acknowledgment. As if whatever Tristan was, the dragon had encountered its like before. In some other age. In some other war.
I pressed the heel of my hand against my chest.
What is he, I asked again.
The dragon stirred, finally, but only to offer something that was not quite words and not quite feeling. The closest I could translate it was “old.”
Not old in the way men were old. But old in the way certain things were old. Stones. Rivers. The particular darkness at the bottom of very deep water.
Old like what, I thought.
But the dragon had gone still again, and I was left alone with the lavender smell bleeding through the wall and the sound of Mordred beginning the binding in the next room and the knowledge that, for the first time in as long as I could remember, the dragon had watched a man touch what it called its own and had chosen to simply watch.
That terrified me more than anything it had ever demanded.
-ARTHUR-
I sent for Tristan at first light.
Not through a page. Not through Lance or Kay or the usual chain of command. I sent one of the King’s Guard directly to Tristan’s quarters with a single instruction:now.No title attached. No formality. Just the word, which was the point.
He arrived seven minutes later, which was fast enough to tell me he’d already been awake. He was dressed but not armored,wearing a plain dark tunic, his curly hair still damp. He came in without knocking; I’d left the door open, and he stopped in the center of the room and looked at me with that quality of attention he had, the one that was neither deferential nor challenging. Just present.
I didn’t invite him to sit.
I was standing at the window with my back to it so the light was behind me, which wasn’t accidental. I waited until the door clicked shut behind him. Then I turned to face him and said:
“What happened in Galahad’s bedchamber won’t happen again.” I cleared my throat. “I am your king, but you didn’t address me with the reverence I’m due.”
Tristan looked at me. He didn’t shift his weight. He didn’t reach for anything diplomatic. His face didn’t close or harden. He just received the comment, the way he received most things, as if it had come from a long distance and he was simply noting its arrival.
“I did what I did because it needed to be done,” he said. “Not to take anything from you.”
“That’s not what I said.”
“No,” he agreed. “It isn’t.”
The silence between us held for a moment. Outside, the training yard was already filling with sound: the clang of steel and the low commands of the drill master and the particular rhythm of morning at Camelot that went on regardless of what had happened the night before.
“She responded to you,” I said.
It wasn’t a question either, but it required an answer. He knew it.
“Yes.”
“Why?”
He was quiet for long enough that I thought he was going to decline to answer, and I was already calculating what that refusal would cost him, when he said: “I don’t know.”
I looked at him.
“That’s the truth,” he said, without inflection. “I don’t know what I am to her. I only know that when I walked in, the magic recognized something and stopped. I didn’t plan it. I wouldn’t know how.”
“Your magic,” I said. “What is its relationship to hers?”
