I’d allowed her to keep her life when most other men in my place would have ended her the second they’d had the chance. What was more, I’d kept her alive while believing I could control the problem she represented.
But I was wrong. I couldn’t control her any more than I could control the wind or the rain.
The dragon stirred. A single, low pulse of heat.
Ours.
I ignored it.
This was the part that required clarity, and the dragon didn’t reason. It wanted, it hoarded, and it burned, and every impulse it had when it came to her was the exact opposite of what the situation demanded. I’d let it confuse me from the moment I’d taken her captive. I’d watched her across training yards and dinner tables, and I’d let the heat in my chest convince me that the path forward was simple.
It wasn’t simple. It had never been simple. And I’d been a fool to let myself believe otherwise.
There was the kingdom: built by my hands, paid for in blood, and I wasn’t about to watch it be dismantled. And there was a woman who’d pulled a sword from a stone and didn’t yet understand what that meant. Or maybe she did understand it, but she’d been telling the truth when she’d said she wanted no part of it?
Perhaps. Regardless, that wasn’t the main point. The main point was that other people would understand. Merlin understood. The moment he found a way to put her in front of a crowd with Excalibur in her hand, the story of my reign would end, and a new one would begin. And that was just a matter of time, I was certain, because even if she wanted no part of the ruling of my kingdom, Merlin did want it. He’d always wanted it. And in that story, I was the monster who had held her in my dungeon for a month, before handing her over to Galahad to commit his own unspeakable atrocities against her. I was the monster who had breathed fire in a hall full of screaming witnesses.
All that remained now were the facts. And the fact was that I was a problem solver; I’d always been a problem solver. And there was a solution: one I’d been circling for longer than I wanted to admit. One I’d been resisting, not because it was wrong, but because the wanting of it felt dangerous in a way I hadn’t yet learned to manage.
I went to my desk and sat down, then I pulled a clean sheet of parchment toward me as I trimmed the candle and lit it.
Ours, the dragon said again, its voice inside my mind even louder now. It felt like a low throb moving through my ribs.Our treasure.
I picked up the quill, and I wrote Mordred’s name at the top of the page. Then I stopped and sat for a moment with the quill hovering over the parchment. The candle flame bent in a draft I couldn’t feel, and the room was absolutely still around me.
Her face came without invitation, and not the way it appeared when she’d first arrived here: wary, guarded, all sharp edges and careful eyes. This was a memory of the face she wore in the training yard when she thought no one was watching her: open, the expression of someone who hadn’t been worn down yet.
The dragon’s heat surged, and I pressed my palm flat against the desk until the heat subsided.
Then I wrote the rest of the letter.
CHAPTER FIFTY-SEVEN
-MORGAN-
I came to Caer Gwyll by nightfall and proceeded straightway to the Great Hall.
Vaelen was at the far end of the long table, with a map laid out before him, anchored down with stones gathered from the yard. He looked up as I walked in, giving me neither acknowledgment nor recognition beyond an almost imperceptible nod. We’d agreed, years ago, not to perform our history in front of the others.
Hailey was standing at the far left of the table, one hand braced on the edge of it, her eyes already on the map. She didn’t look up when I entered, but I’d learned by now that this wasn’t inattention. It was quite the opposite. She was the kind of person who registered everything and responded to very little of it. There was a smudge of something dark across the back of her tattooed forearm that looked like it might be ash, or might be ink, and I found myself noticing it the way I’d been noticing things about her lately: without entirely meaning to.
Carlisle was already there, and looked like he’d been awake for a very long time.
Merlin sat at Vaelen’s left-hand side. It had been weeks since I’d last seen Merlin and he somehow looked older, like there wasmore weight settling on his shoulders. I sat down opposite him, placed my cloak behind me, and waited.
Hailey straightened when Vaelen began to speak, folding her arms across her chest, and I watched her eyes move across the map with the particular quality of focus she had: not scanning it, exactly, but reading. Like the map was saying something and she was waiting to hear the rest of it.
Vaelen began to explain the reports that had come in from seven provinces up north. Recruitment in the days since the reveal of Arthur’s beast had far surpassed any recruitment effort that the rebels had put together for eight months prior. There were now farmers, tradesmen, even two minor lords who’d been on the fence for years... they’d apparently decided the fence was no longer a safe place to be. Then there were thirty soldiers who had abandoned Arthur’s forces at Penric rather than swear a new oath that included language explicitly protecting the beast within the king.
Vaelen didn’t editorialize. He laid the numbers out flat, like they were stones.
“The Rebellion is no longer fringe,” he said.
Carlisle smiled, but it was humorless. “We were never fringe; we were merely insufficiently funded.”
“The thirty from Penric,” Hailey said, without looking up from the map. “How many of them are actually fucking useful?”
Vaelen glanced at her. “Eighteen.”
