“Corvin.” Her voice was flat and tight when she finally spoke. “What are you going to do with him?”
“He’s going to the dungeon,” I answered. “Where traitors belong.”
“He isn’t a traitor.”
“He broke into my castle, breached my wards, and removed my prisoner.” I kept walking. “What would you call it?”
“Rescue.”
“Same thing, from where I’m standing.”
She stopped walking. I took three more steps, as much as the rope holding her wrists would allow me, before I stopped as well. Then I turned slowly as I looked at her standing in the middle of the courtyard with her chin up and the sunlight catching all that white hair, and the dragon stirred.
Ours.
I breathed through it.
“What are you going to do with him?” she repeated.
The question landed with a kind of quiet force that told me she already understood how little ground she stood on, but she’d decided not to care. I studied her face for a moment: the high color in her cheeks, the set of her jaw.
“That,” I said, “is not your concern.”
“It is my concern. Whatever consequences—”
“—you don’t get to negotiate.” I took a step toward her, my temper getting the better of me. “You forget your fucking place. You’re a prisoner of the crown. You have no fucking standing here. You have no rights here. You don’t get to make demands of me.”
Her eyes didn’t waver. “I’m not making demands. I’m asking a question.”
“You don’t get to do that either. All you do get to do is obey me because I’m your fucking king.”
Something moved through her expression then. Something that looked like irritation.
“You aren’t my king,” she said, glaring at me, a repeat of the same thing she’d said in the Great Hall, in front of so many witnesses. “You never will be.”
My hand came up. Fast. Instinctive.
But I stopped it.
The air between us went very still. My palm was level with her face, but she hadn’t flinched. We stood there for one long, precise moment in which I saw myself from the outside and found the view unpleasant.
I lowered my hand, but I held her gaze and kept my voice absolutely level.
“You should be less concerned with Corvin’s future,” I said, “and considerably more concerned with your own.”
Then I turned and walked forward, yanking her behind me, all the way to Mordred’s tower. As soon as we walked inside, the smell of brimstone and old parchment hit me. The stairs wound upward in a tight spiral, and I climbed them without touching the walls, still pulling her behind me. She was quiet now. And I welcomed the fucking break.
At the upper landing, I stopped and faced the door. It was a heavy oak thing, with iron hinges. The triangular crystal mounted above the frame threw a faint blue light downward, and in that light, Mordred’s handwriting was visible across the doorframe in sigils so small they might have been carved by a man with a very thin knife and a bigger grudge.
I knocked once.
Mordred opened the door immediately, which meant he’d known we were coming. His eyes moved from my face to Guinevere’s, and that careful, evaluative expression arranged itself behind his features the way it always did: orderly, precise, performing neutrality with professional skill.
“Your Grace,” he said. “And our prisoner returns.”
“She needs containment,” I answered. “I need her power bound.”
Something shifted behind the black eye. A small recalibration.
