She sat with that for a moment. “Who else knows?”
“A very small number, and all were bound to silence in ways that made silence in their best interests.”
“And yet you never told me,” she said, though not in accusation. She was just naming a fact.
“No. Not you.”
“Was there anyone you told because you wanted to? Not because strategy required it?”
I breathed in deeply.
“No.”
She nodded as if she’d expected that answer. Then: “Are you lonely because of it, Arthur?”
I gave her the king’s version: that the nature of power, the price of it, the necessity of distance, is required from those you rule. I gave her the whole polished architecture of it, and she listened without interrupting, and when I finished she looked at me and said:
“I didn’t ask about power. I asked if you were lonely.”
I gave that question the long moment it deserved.
“Yes.”
She nodded. Like she’d known as much but needed me to say it.
Then she swallowed hard, and I could tell she was about to get to the point that mattered to her most. “Is the dragon,” she started, “the reason you never pursued me?”
The question was asked without bitterness, without theater, without anger or self-pity. What was more, she’d waited long enough and she’d earned the right to the real answer, and we both knew it.
“Yes,” I said. “It was entirely the reason. How could I have let you close to me with this thing living inside me? I was afraid that if you knew the truth, you’d fear me, and I never wanted that from you.”
“I know the truth now, and do I look like I’m afraid of you?”
I swallowed hard. “No. I... underestimated you.”
She nodded.
“Regardless, I wasn’t willing to... put you into this situation, Isolde. I... respected and still respect you far too much to ever force you into a marriage with... me and this beast.”
“I have never been forced to do anything I didn’t want to do.”
I nodded, because that was true. She was quiet for a few long seconds, and when she brought her large eyes back up to mine, they were sad.
“Did you want to?” she asked. “Pursue me?”
There was a longer silence this time as words battled for prominence in my mind, bashing headlong against one another. I settled for the easiest and truest response. “Yes. In whatever version of my life didn’t include this... monster inside me. Yes, of course, yes. You’re exactly the kind of woman I would have chosen.” I said the words without decoration. It wasn’t flattery, and I didn’t want her to mistake it for flattery. It was just the truth.
Something moved across her face then: it was the expression of having a door confirmed shut that you’d spent years hoping was only stuck. She absorbed my response the way she absorbed everything, without letting it knock her sideways, without hiding her reaction to it entirely.
Then she said, “I noticed something in the hall.”
She paused then, clearly choosing her words with the care of someone who understood that words, once placed, couldn’t be retrieved.
“The dragon,” she said. “It didn’t respond to anyone in that room the way it responded to... the prisoner.”
I said nothing.
“I’m not asking you to explain it,” she continued. “I’m just asking whether you understand what I think I saw? Does it have some sort of connection to her?”
