The chains were wrapped around my wrists, which the guard then pulled behind me. I let them do it without resistance because resistance at this stage was theater, and I had no interest in theater. I had more interest in reserving what energy I still had.
They walked me out of the dungeon.
The sun hit me first, before the warmth, before anything else, just the raw brightness of it, and my eyes watered immediately. I hadn’t seen real midday light in a long while now, and even though my cell was bright, it wasn’t this bright. My shadow fell directly beneath me, compressed and useless, offering nothing about the guard on my left, nothing about the one on my right, nothing about angles or distances or what was between us and the next wall.
Yes, the sun wasn’t my friend right now.
We crossed a courtyard and then walked into a second tower that was lower and broader than the first. The stone in this dungeon had been absorbing water for decades, and the iron was rusted and smelled of a strange tang. There was something underneath that smell that wasn’t rot, exactly, but was adjacent to it.
I knew that smell, and as the room resolved itself slowly as my eyes adjusted, I was aware of Arthur standing there, even before I could see him clearly. I blinked twice, carefully, and kept my face composed through both blinks.
He was standing with his back to me, looking at the wall.
There was a length of rope threaded through an iron ring in the ceiling beam. I didn’t need to guess at its purpose. I’d seen this configuration in three different kingdoms, and it worked the same way in all of them.
I took the room in sections: there was the door behind me, guarded; one window that was high and narrow, and completely impractical; two guards inside the room, plus the two who’d brought me here. And there were no exits. I didn’t look at the long and stained table that sat in the center of the room, and I definitely didn’t look at the instruments that sat atop it. Looking directly at them would be a reaction, and reactions were information I wasn’t willing to give.
Arthur turned, and his expression was the same one he’d always used for tasks he found neither pleasant nor interesting but considered necessary. I’d watched him wear that expression through siege negotiations, through the sentencing of men he’d served with, and through the particular quiet of a battlefield after the killing was done. It wasn’t coldness, necessarily; it was efficiency. That had always been the more difficult version of Arthur to deal with: not the one who was angry, but the one who had already moved past anger into calculation.
“This can go easily, or this can be difficult,” he started. “I probably don’t have to tell you that the difficult path is also the painful path.” He was right: he didn’t have to tell me. I already knew.
“What do you want to know?”
“Many things.” He clasped his hands behind his back as he began walking around me. “We’ll start with Merlin’s contacts inside Camelot and whether anyone at my court is compromised.”
He asked the question (which wasn’t phrased as a question) the way you ask something you’ve already half-answered in your own mind. He was watching my face more than he was listeningfor my words, and I understood that because I would have done the same thing.
I said nothing. I just held his gaze and let the silence sit between us, and he looked at it the way you look at a door you already knew was locked. He nodded once. Then he said something quietly to the guard on my left.
I didn’t have time to brace myself. They’d looped the rope around my wrists before I understood what they were doing, threading it up through the iron ring that was bolted to the ceiling beam. Then one of the guards put his full weight into the other end and hauled.
The floor dropped away. My arms, already chained behind my back, were wrenched upward at an angle the shoulder isn’t built to accommodate. Both joints screamed at once, the tendons stretched past their tolerance, as my own body weight worked against me. I hung there with nothing beneath my feet. And while I hung there, the pain didn’t build. It arrived complete, white and total, shooting straight up through both shoulders and into the base of my skull and behind my eyes.
For one full second it simply erased everything. There was no thought, plan, or even the careful blankness I’d been maintaining since they’d walked into my cell. My breath left me in a rush I couldn’t control even though I refused to scream. Instead, I found the ceiling beam with my eyes, I locked my jaw, and I didn’t make a fucking sound.
Arthur waited. It was something he’d always been good at. I remembered that about him, from years ago, from the long nights before a battle when other men paced and he just sat with his back to the fire and watched the dark.
When they let me down enough that my feet found the floor again, my legs nearly didn’t catch me. I straightened as I looked at him and wondered if both of my shoulders were dislocated or perhaps it was just one.
He asked again about the contacts, and more specifically, for names. The silence was the same as the first time he’d asked me. He took a deep breath as if my silence was frustrating him, but no one hoisted me up by my already busted shoulders. That was a small mercy but I knew it was one that wouldn’t last.
“Merlin and the Northern Rebellion,” he started. “Is he leading the rebellion? Directing it from a distance? Something else?”
I held my expression and still didn’t say a word.
“You realize you’re making your choice at this very moment?” Arthur asked. “Every silence is a choice, and every choice has a consequence attached to it.”
I still didn’t say anything.
He rolled up one sleeve slowly, crossed to the table, and lifted the candle from the shallow iron dish.
Then he looked at me.
The guard’s grip caught my arm before I’d finished the breath I was drawing. The burn was brief and precise: inside of the forearm, held still, just long enough. My jaw locked so hard my back teeth ached. I breathed through my nose, four counts in, four counts out, but I gave him nothing, just the silence, the sound of my breathing, and nothing else.
He set the candle down and rolled his sleeve further back.
“What is Merlin doing with his magic as it pertains to the veil?”
