Arthur didn’t speak. He didn’t move. He only looked at me, and what was in his face was so unguarded and so devastating that I had to work to keep my eyes on his. Because it felt like I was witnessing something a king should never have to show another man.
He was still holding it. That was the thing that undid me. And when he finally crossed the distance between us, giving me time to step back, I didn’t.
The first blow came without announcement. There was no shift in his stance, no drawn-back fist. He simply hit me with his fist across the jaw, and I felt myself stagger backward against the stone wall. Because the force of that blow hadn’t been a man’s force; it was the dragon’s. I felt my teeth knock together, and I tasted copper immediately.
“No!” I heard her yell.
Somehow, I managed to stay on my feet.
“You.” He hit me again with the same fist and the dragon’s heat bleeding through it. “You.” Another time. This time, I went down to one knee. “Everything I gave you. Everything I fucking did for you.” His boot connected with my ribs, and I heard something pop; I bent double over it. “I trusted you!”
I got back up, not because I intended to fight him. I could have; he knew it, and I knew it. But, no, I got back up because I wasn’t going to stay on the ground. That much I could give myself.
He hit me twice more, and I stood there and took it because some part of me thought I deserved it. Some part of me believed I had this coming, but not for the reasons one might think. No, the voice that sounded in my head didn’t say Arthur’s name; it saidhers. I deserved this for the months of watching her suffer under Galahad while I kept my fucking mouth shut. What was more, I deserved this for the months of pretending she was nothing to me. I deserved it most of all for the moment I’d stood there and told her she was dead to me.
It was then that I heard her voice again. It was hard to see her, owing to the blood that was coursing down my face from the busted skin above my left eye.
“Stop it!” she yelled as she threw herself on him when he held his fist up, ready to hit me again.
“Don’t fucking touch me,” Arthur growled in response as he turned his wrath on her.
She released him and took a step back, fear suddenly resident in her eyes. At the same time, I tried to move forward, tried to intervene in case he attacked her.
“He’s not fighting back—” she insisted.
“—this is your fault,” he roared at her, and by now, his eyes were glowing red.
I straightened as best as I could, which caused my vision to do something unpleasant. One eye was already half-swollenshut, and the other was a close second. “She has... nothing to do with—”
“—she has everything to do with it,” he spit the words at me as he then advanced on her. “You walked into my court, and you looked at my men, and you—”
“—I didn’t do anything to your fucking men.” Her voice was entirely level, the stillness of something past the point of fear. “You have only yourself to blame.”
He backhanded her.
The sound of it moved through the yard like something breaking that couldn’t be put back. I didn’t remember deciding to move. One moment I was standing apart from it, and the next I wasn’t. My body had made the decision before my mind could weigh the cost of it.
The cost was immediate.
I pushed between them, and the movement pulled everything that was wrong with me into sharp, screaming focus. My ribs ground against each other in a way that made my vision go white. Arthur had cracked at least two of them, maybe more, and I felt all of them now, felt the exact location of every break as my body registered what I’d just asked it to do. My left knee nearly buckled on the first step, and I locked it through sheer stubbornness, blood still running freely from my mouth where something had split inside it.
I stood between them because I wouldn’t allow him to take out his anger on her. She didn’t deserve it. My love for her wasn’t her fucking fault. It was mine.
It was, objectively, the worst I’d felt standing upright in recent memory. My body was cataloging the damage in real time: the ribs, the knee, the deep ache in my side that suggested something beyond bruising, and underneath all of that physical accounting was the other thing, the thing that had no cleanname, the thing I’d laid open in the yard not twenty minutes ago and hadn’t had time to put back.
I was still bleeding from that, too. Just somewhere Arthur couldn’t see.
But I was standing. I made sure of that. I was standing as tall as I could get, which wasn’t as tall as I wanted to be, because my ribs had opinions about full extension. I put my hand on Arthur’s forearm: not a grab, not a restraint, just placement, just contact; and I looked at him.
“Enough.”
The word came out wrecked. My mouth wasn’t working properly, and I could taste copper, and I was aware, acutely, painfully aware, that there was nothing left in me that was whole, clean, or capable of making this look easy. I had nothing left to perform with. Whatever he saw when he looked at me right now, it was the actual truth of me, stripped down to the bone.
Behind me, I could feel Guinevere going still. She hadn’t moved away. She was still close enough that I could sense the warmth of her at my back, and some part of me that was past the point of wisdom was glad she was there. Was glad to be between her and his rage.
Even now.Even now.
Arthur’s attention dropped to my hand that was still on his forearm. He looked at it for a long moment: at the blood on my knuckles, at the way my grip wasn’t entirely steady, at the evidence of everything I’d already spent to get to this moment.
