Arthur didn’t keep someone alive without purpose, and he didn’t look at something he wanted without that want showing. I’d seen both tonight. Yes, he might pretend I was a filthy prisoner: a spy and a witch, but I knew better. I’d seen that heat smoldering just beneath the disgust. It was the same heat that had always been there, from the moment we’d first locked eyes on one another at the lake. The truth was that we were drawn to one another like moths to flame, and we always had been. I was beginning to believe there was nothing either one of us could do about it.
The strip of torchlight shifted as the guard passed in the corridor. I tracked the shadow across the floor by pure instinct. Then I leaned my head back against the cold stone wall andbreathed in deeply, dragging the back of my hand across my damp cheeks.
No more self-pity. It wasn’t going to do a damned thing for me, so this was where it stopped.
No. More.
The words echoed in my mind with the finality of a blade dropping. I’d allowed myself this moment: this brief, stolen pocket of grief for everything I’d lost, everything that had shattered around me in the span of a single night. But moments like these were luxuries I could no longer afford. Not here and not now.
The time for tears was well and truly over.
Now, it was time for planning.
CHAPTER TWO
-ARTHUR-
The eastern gate guard didn’t ask questions. Smart man.
I’d lowered my hood even before I left the courtyard, and I now I rode through the darkness, with only the horse below me and the beast in my body that had left me no peace for three fucking days straight. Coiled and restless, the dragon pushed against me as though it was testing its cage.
I let it press, pretended like I didn’t feel it.
We must know who took from her what was ours to take.
Her fucking maidenhead. The dragon never let that particular subject go.
And when we learn of the man’s identity, we destroy him.
The path was empty at this hour, which was the point. I required no escort, no announcement, no chamberlain trailing behind me with a list of the day’s appointments written in that cramped little hand I’d come to despise.
No, this was an errand I was doing alone. Purposely.
The trees began where the path ended, which was sooner than I remembered. Regardless, the path through the southern wood had always been narrow, but it felt even narrower now,the branches overhead stitching together into something close to a ceiling. Roots pushed up through the dirt at irregular angles, and Cabal slowed without my asking, picking his way between and around them carefully. I let him set the pace until the track thinned to nothing, and even he understood we’d reached the limit of what he could do. That was when I dismounted and tied him to an oak that looked old enough to remember Uther.
Then I started on foot.
All around me, the woods were silent in a way that had nothing to do with quiet and everything to do with the otherworldly. There was no wind here, no twittering of birds, no distant creak of branch against branch. There was just the sound of my own boots and the slow, deliberate rhythm of the dragon pulling breath through me as though it owned my lungs.
We must go to her. She rots in our dungeons. She is where she should not be.
I didn’t answer it. I just kept walking.
The lake appeared between the trees without ceremony. One moment there was undergrowth and shadow, and the next there was open space and a huge expanse of water. But this wasn’t just water. No, The Lake of Aeloria was something else entirely. There were no ripples to break the surface, no insects that skated across it, and no fish that swam beneath it.
The lake was wrong in the same way that sacred things are wrong, both operating under different rules. I stopped at the edge where the water meets the earth and results in mud. The mud held my boots for a moment, then slowly exhaled them. Even though I didn’t want to, I remembered the first time I’d seenherhere. Guinevere.
How completely taken with her I’d been... Yes, I’d also been shocked and suspicious, but it was the desire that had left its imprint because it was a desire for which I’d never known an equal. And now? Now, I didn’t know what to think of her.
You’ll use her to your own ends,I told myself,and she’ll deliver everything you ask of her; that’s all that matters.
She is our queen,the dragon argued, but I shut it down.
Would I use her body the way I’d wanted to from the moment I’d first set eyes on her? I wasn’t sure. The fact that another man had spoiled her, had taken her maidenhood from her... well, it still rankled me. Whether it upset me or it upset the dragon within me, it was difficult to tell as its hunger had become my hunger. Regardless, part of me thought it a foolish and stupid thing. I’d bedded many women who weren’t virginal, and I’d enjoyed them, perhaps even more. But there was just something about Guinevere’s innocence that I’d wanted to take for myself. It was a crime I didn’t imagine I’d get over any time soon. And the dragon would never get over it, I was convinced.
I looked down at the surface of the still waters of Lake Aeloria, and only my face looked back at me. But it was darker than it should have been. Not only that, but the angle of the reflection was wrong. The depth behind my face was completely off, which didn’t make any fucking sense. The lake should have been reflecting the charcoal sky above me, but it wasn’t. Instead, it showed something else entirely.
Darkness. Not the clean darkness of a moonless night, but something thicker. Something so dark, it was difficult to make out exactly what it was. A forest, perhaps? At least there was the suggestion of tall shapes that could have been trees if trees grew without branches, stood too close together, and shifted when nothing touched them.
