“I know.” I almost smiled. “But I was glad it was here. Just as I’m glad you are here.”
He smiled at that, smaller than his usual smiles, but more real somehow, and reached the door.
“Goodnight, Guin,” he said when he reached the door.
“Goodnight, Tristan,” I responded.
-ARTHUR-
By the time I came to a conclusion, the fire had been reduced to ashes. As to the decision I’d reached, it was a sound one.
I’d been sitting in my chair for two or even three hours. The candle had gone out, and I hadn’t tried to relight it. There was now no source of light except the fire, which was gradually dying too. I watched the last log being consumed by the flames.
Not for the first time, my mind turned to thoughts of Lance. He would have been the one I’d called. Not Kay, not Mordred, but Lance. That was the reflex, even now: to turn toward him. We’d spent enough years working through problems side by side that the habit of it had worn grooves into me, and even now, sitting in a dark room with the fire gone to ash, the instinct was still there.
He would have sat down across from me without being invited, would have poured two cups of ale without asking, would have listened to the full problem before he said a single word. That was one of the things I’d valued most about him. He didn’t rush toward answers. He had patience for the shape of a problem.
But that was the man I’dbelievedhim to be.
The man I’d believed him to be hadn’t looked me in the eye repeatedly and said nothing. That man hadn’t stood in this room, at my table, in my counsel, and let me make decisions about her based on information he knew to be incomplete. Lance had known what he’d done. He’d also known the shape and the weight of it. And yet he’d said nothing. All of that steadiness I’d trusted had been built on a lie of omission so significant that I didn’t yet have words for the specific quality of it.
It wasn’t the act of him fucking her itself. Or it wasn’tonlythat. I wasn’t so naive or pigheaded as to think that men didn’t make choices in the dark that they wouldn’t make in the light. But Lance had made his choice, and then he’d come back and stood beside me, and I’d trusted him with things I trusted no one with, and the whole time—
I stopped the thought there.
The dragon stirred, just barely, a low shimmer of heat that I recognized as something adjacent to satisfaction. It had never warmed to Lance. I’d always assumed that was jealousy, the dragon’s territorial instinct misreading a friendship for a threat. Now I wondered if it had simply known something I hadn’t.
I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes until the thought dissolved. Lance was in the dungeon. That was where he’d stay until I decided otherwise, and I wasn’t going to sit here in the dark and grieve him like a man who’d lost something precious, because the man I was grieving hadn’t existed. Or if he had, he’d made his own choices about what to do with the trust I’d given him.
Then I remembered the way she’d looked at me when I’d asked her if she loved him and she’d said she did.
Then we destroy him.
No.I thought back.I can’t do that.
Regardless, I was done thinking about Lance.
My mind then turned to thoughts of the problem that was still standing in front of me, which was laid out as plainly as a map. I was good at problems. That was the thing no one understood about what I’d built here: they saw the executions, the restrictions, and the iron rule, and they called it tyranny, and perhaps it was. But every decision I’d ever made had logic behind it. Every body that had swung from my gates had been a calculation. Not cruelty, but calculation.
And so I calculated now.
The dragon reveal had happened in front of three hundred people. By tomorrow, it would be double that. By the end of the week, every village within riding distance would have a version of it, worse with each telling. It didn’t matter what edicts I’d enforced. Gossip traveled no matter what laws were in place to make sure it didn’t. They’d speak in whispers of a king whowasn’t entirely a man, a king who breathed fire and moved like something older than the crown on his head.
Fear was a currency. I’d always understood that, perhaps because my father had spent years drilling that exact lesson into me. Regardless, I’d spent years learning to spend that currency wisely. But fear had a ceiling. And what sat beneath fear, what outlasted it, what built something that could survive the death of the man who wielded it… that was legitimacy. It was the story people told themselves about why a king deserved to rule. It was the sword in the stone. The prophecy. The bloodline reaching back through centuries to something hallowed and true.
I stood and walked to the window, noting how the torches burned, steady in the windless night, and the stones glistened faintly from the earlier rain.
She’d pulled it.
Even though she’d pulled the sword that had only ever responded to my hand, she hadn’t returned for it since. Well, as far as I knew, anyway. I’d warned Nimue, and apparently that warning had stuck. As to what I thought about the fact that Guinevere hadn’t returned to the lake to uphold the prophecy? I didn’t know. Mainly because I hadn’t allowed myself to think anything of it.
I pressed my knuckles against the cold glass. The factions against me already existed, and they had, far before she’d ever come to Camelot disguised as a man. There had already existed Merlin’s network and Carlisle’s army, the scattered lords who paid their taxes with one hand and sent coin to Caer Gwyll with the other. They had grievances, soldiers, and enough hatred between them to keep a war burning for a decade. Now I had a new enemy faction to add: Galahad’s.
But what none of my enemies had was a figure who could stand before them and say: the land chose me. The sword chose me.
She didn’t even know what she was. That was perhaps the most dangerous thing about her. As far as I could tell, she had no ambition for the crown, no hunger for power, none of the obvious marks of someone building toward something. Which meant she couldn’t be bargained with in the usual ways, couldn’t be managed by giving her something she wanted, couldn’t be used as a pawn in any arrangement that required her cooperation. What was more, she’d always be more useful to my enemies than to me the moment they got their hands on her.
She’d already escaped once: Corvin had walked into my dungeon and walked back out with her. And she had Merlin’s ear. What was more, she had water magic that was powerful enough to crack Mordred’s binding when sufficiently provoked. I’d seen what she’d done to Galahad and to his bedchamber. I remembered the frost on the walls, the buckled stone.
