Mordred was quiet for a moment. Then: “May I ask why?”
And there it was. The question I had to answer carefully, because the true answer was something I couldn’t afford to say aloud.
“Because she’s leverage,” I said. “Over Merlin. While she lives and breathes in this castle, he can’t and won’t move against me. He won’t risk her. The moment she’s dead, that changes.”
“There are other ways to hold Merlin in check.”
“None as effective.”
“She is a liability that grows more dangerous by—”
“—She’s a spy who knows his plans, his network, the structure of his operation.” My voice was steady and deliberate. “I don’t want to waste an opportunity by putting her in the ground.” I turned from the window then, finally, and looked at him. “She’s worth more to me alive than she is dead.”
Mordred watched me with those eerie eyes. He had the quality, sometimes, of looking at a thing from two angles simultaneously and seeing the lie in both.
He said nothing.
“That will be all,” I told him.
He bowed, shallow and precise, and left.
I turned back to the window. The courtyard was still empty.
She is worth more to me alive than she is dead.
It was a strategic statement, rational, a king’s calculation. I let myself stand in it for a moment, and then I let myself look at what was underneath it. I’d stood in that Great Hall and watched the dragon come pouring out of me as three hundred people pressed against the walls with their mouths open and their eyes white. I’d felt the moment the dragon locked onto her, the way its attention had sharpened, narrowed, zeroed in, and I’d feltwhat came with it: possessiveness and a fierce need to protect her.
Ours.
But what I felt now wasn’t the dragon. What I felt now was quieter than that. And it had nothing to do with fire, beasts, smoke, or shadows.
I was thinking about a girl who had stood in front of the men of the court, stripped to her own nudity, but she hadn’t made a sound. Then I began thinking about the training yard and the way she came at me without hesitation even with bruises yellowing across her ribs that she hadn’t mentioned and I hadn’t asked about, because asking would have meant admitting I’d looked. And looking would have meant I cared.
I was thinking about what she’d said to me when I’d asked why she’d come here.Because Camelot is worth saving.
She’d said the words like she’d meant them, like she’d looked at everything I’d built through fear, bloodshed, and an iron grip on a kingdom that hated and needed me in equal measure, and she’d found something in it worth preserving. And I thought about the fact that of all people, she had been the one to rescue her own torturer.
I couldn’t order her death. Not because the dragon wouldn’t allow it, and not because of leverage or utility or the long strategic game against my oldest enemy. I couldn’t do it precisely because she hadn’t begged, because she’d fought with gritty determination, and because she’d told me the truth when she didn’t have to. I couldn’t harm her because she’d chosen to rescue someone who hadn’t deserved it.
The young man I’d been, the one who’d pulled a sword from a stone and believed that belief was enough to build something good, he would have recognized that.
I’d spent so many years trying to bury him, but the truth was that he was still there inside me. Because the choice I was making was the same choicehewould have made.
I closed my eyes and I could see Camelot, see the spires, the stone, the torches, and the darkness beyond it. I heard the silence that reigned in my kingdom because of me. And in some corner of the Lake of Aeloria, Excalibur lay quietly, cold and patient as it awaitedherto claim it.
I remembered the last time I’d held it, remembered its hum, the way it felt to hold something that knew you: not the king, not the crown, but the man behind both. And how that had been the most terrifying thing I’d ever experienced.
I pressed my hand flat against the cold glass of the window as I wondered when I’d become the very thing I’d always vowed to myself I would never become.
The dragon stirred, just once.
Keep her, it said.
For once, we agreed.
CHAPTERFIFTY-SIX
-ARTHUR-
