“To say what? That your holy knight climbed on top of me and would have thrust himself inside me if I hadn’t been able to break Mordred’s binding in time?” Her voice cracked on the last word. She sealed it off immediately, swallowed it back down, but it had been there. Raw but gone before I could reach it. “You would have called it a lie.”
“I would have investigated—”
“—you would have called it a lie,” she said again, only quieter this time, more certain.
She was close enough that I could see the shadows under her eyes and the way her collarbones pressed too sharp against her skin. Galahad had fed her on air and prayer for weeks, and she was still standing here, chin up, not asking me for a single fucking thing.
She needs us,the dragon said.She has needed us. But you left her there. YOU left her—
“Enough,” I said out loud, my voice too sharp.
Her brows pulled together as I stepped closer. I hadn’t planned to, but the distance between us became nominal anyway, and I could feel the warmth radiating off her skin, could see the slight quickening of her breath, could see the exact moment she decided not to step back.
Tell her,the dragon urged. The pressure of its need built behind my eyes, behind my ribs.Tell her you would have—
No.
She looked up at me, and the violet of her eyes appeared more intense than I’d ever seen it before. The dragon roared something wordless, something that was enormous, and every muscle in my body pulled toward her like iron toward a lodestone.
“I go back to what I said earlier,” she continued, her eyes narrowing on me. “It didn’t matter what I would have told you, the truth or anything less, because you don’t care about me, Arthur.” She held her chin up even higher. “And that’s the cold, hard truth.”
I wanted to say:I should have never left you in Galahad’s care.
I wanted to say:I know what he did.
I wanted to say:It won’t happen again. I swear it on my blood.
My mouth opened, but those words didn’t come.
“You’re right,” I said. “I don’t care.”
Her face didn’t change; she didn’t even look hurt. She simply looked like she’d expected my response, and that was somehow far worse than any flinch she might have given me.
I turned and walked out, slamming the door behind me. The guards posted outside her door jumped slightly, and I suddenly felt like I couldn’t get far enough away. I hurried down the corridor, which was empty and cold. Once I was alone, I pressed my palm flat against the wall, dropped my head, and breathed hard.
Fool,the dragon hissed.Coward. She stood there bleeding, and you—
—shut up.
Go back. Tell her the truth.
“No.” I took a breath. “I told her the truth.”
No, you lied like the coward you are. You are weak.
“I said shut up.”
My hand curled against the stone, and the wall was cold under my fingers. I pressed harder against it, focused on the texture of the stone, how rough it was, how gritty and real.
The dragon didn’t stop. But it never stopped. Instead, it turned in my chest like a thing caged too long, furious and grieving in the same breath, and I breathed through it the way I’d learned to breathe through everything.
Slowly and without ever letting it show.
-GUIN-
I woke up to find the room dark, and the ceiling was wrong.
Stone, yes. But it was dry, and there were no watermarks threading the mortar, no damp that crept into the lungs. The pallet was gone. Beneath me was a mattress with actual give and sheets that didn’t rasp against the welts on my back. A fire was burning low in the hearth, now reduced to orange embers. Tapestries hung on two walls, faded and a little moth-eaten but present.
