Then she raised one hand and brought it down, and the water came with it.
The wave wasn’t large, but it didn’t need to be. It came down over Galahad in a single precise column, dense and fast, and the blue fire went out with a sound that was almost a shriek, the flames collapsing inward as the water hit them, steam billowing outward in a rolling white cloud that swept across the floor and erased the nearest six feet of the room from view.
The silence that followed was total.
When the steam thinned, Galahad was on the floor. Based on the gentle rise and fall of his chest, he was still alive, butbarely. He was breathing in ragged, shallow pulls. His robes were destroyed, scorched to black rags in places, and the skin of his arms and throat was black. His golden hair was completely gone, leaving only his scalp, which was as blackened as the rest of him. But he wasn’t dead.
Only because she’d made a choice. She’d had two seconds, and she’d used them to savehislife. After everything he’d done to her, everything he’d put her through... everything he’d planned to see through this morning... she’d rescued him.
The dragon processed this with something I couldn’t name. Not confusion, exactly, but a recalibration. A slow, enormous shift in attention, the way a very large animal turns its head toward a sound it hasn’t heard before. It was surprised, just as much as I was.
I stood in the center of the hall with the cracks still spreading slowly beneath my boots, the shadows still pooling at my feet, my jaw still armored with scales, and my hands still not entirely my hands, and I looked at her.
She was standing in the dissipating steam, her white hair loose and her borrowed gown darkened at the hem where water had soaked the fabric. Her eyes came back to find mine with an expression I couldn’t read.
She held my gaze.
And the dragon beckoned me forward. It wanted me to cross the room and stand beside her to keep her protected. It wanted me to wrap my shadow around her and let the whole room see what she was to me. I could feel the pull in my chest like a hook, but I didn’t move. Instead, I pushed back because I had to get control again.
It wasn’t a fight that looked like anything from the outside. From the outside, I was simply motionless, my jaw clenched, my hands shaking slightly. From the inside, though, I was somewhere dark, vast, and furnace-hot, and there wassomething in there with me that was the size of a cathedral, and I was pressing against it with everything I had.
The shadows thinned.
The torches steadied, one by one, guttering back to their natural positions. The temperature climbed: slowly, grudgingly, as if the cold were reluctant to leave. The stone was still cracked. That wouldn’t change. But the darkness pouring off my body subsided, retreated, and finally disappeared.
I blinked twice. By the third time, when I opened my eyes, I could see color again: Mordred’s midnight blue robes, the gold of the candelabras, the violet of her eyes. And then I saw three hundred people, on their knees or pressed against walls, all of them staring at me.
The secret was out; there was no version of this where I suppressed what they’d seen. Not in a hall this full, not with a herald present, not with Galahad’s unconscious body lying on the floor in front of everyone. By evening, the truth of what happened here in this hall would be in every tavern between here and the coast. By the week’s end, all of my enemies would know the truth.
So. Control what you can.
I let the silence sit for one more breath. Then I spoke.
“The dragon lives within me.” My voice was my own again. Both registers gone. Just my voice, which I kept measured, which I always kept measured because the alternative was unacceptable. “It has been mine since I took it from my father. Uther couldn’t hold it. It would have broken free and burned Logres to the ground. I took it instead, and in so doing, I kept all of you safe. I am still keeping you safe.”
Nothing moved in the hall. There wasn’t a sound, not even a shifted foot.
“It has lived inside me for many years.” I looked at the room, not at any one face, but at all of them, moving slowly,deliberately, so that each person felt the weight of my gaze. “If I die, the beast is released. Unbound, uncontrolled, with no vessel to contain it. And if that happens, you all die with me; all of Logres dies because the dragon is that powerful. You have some sense now of what that force looks like when it is merely provoked.” I let them sit with that image for a moment. “Consider carefully,” I continued, “who you threaten in my presence.”
-ARTHUR-
Two Hours Later
Although I hadn’t called for Mordred, he appeared all the same, as if his presence had been summoned by the stench of trouble. The door opened quietly without the sound of knocking, and I didn’t even bother looking up to see who it was, since I knew very well who it was.
“Your Grace.”
His voice was the same as always: precise and calibrated, as if he hadn’t just seen his king turning into a beast.
“Mordred.”
I heard him cross the room, heard the quiet displacement of air as he stopped somewhere behind my left shoulder. Outside, the courtyard was empty.
The dragon was quiet.
That surprised me. After what had happened in the Great Hall, I’d expected it to still be writhing, crowing, satisfied with itself for having made a spectacle of us both.
Instead, it lay low, coiled somewhere beneath my ribs as if it were waiting for something.
