My tomb would go there, in that empty spot. Eventually. I’d had it measured and the stone selected three years ago in a moment of cold pragmatic clarity. It had seemed the sensible thing to do at the time. I supposed it still did.
I stood and looked at the empty space and thought about the sword.
When I’d drawn Excalibur from the stone, it had been in the presence of a hundred witnesses. I’d been just fifteen at the time, with Merlin by my side. I remembered the way the light had changed when the sword came free, the way the crowd had gone silent, the way the hilt had felt solid and right in my hand like something that had always been mine and had only been waiting for me to claim it. I remembered the sound they made: that crowd of lords, soldiers, and common people. It was a sound like one shared breath being released all at once.
I’d built the rest of my life on the memory of that sound.
And then a woman with white hair and violet eyes had answered the call from the Lady of the Lake, and in the dark, the sword had come to her.
I’d told myself it was a trick. Merlin’s work. A manipulation designed to destabilize me. I’d told myself the same thing so many times, I’d lost count. And every time I tried to rationalize Guinevere pulling the sword, I reminded myself that the sword recognized bloodlines and intention. Perhaps Merlin had prepared her to pull it with some enchantment, some false signal to fool the sword, to make it believe that she was capable and right. That was a reasonable consideration. In truth, it was the only explanation that left everything else standing.
The sword doesn’t choose tyrants.
Merlin had said as much. Years ago, in a different life, when I still listened to him, when he still offered his advice. His voice had been level and pedagogical, the way it always was when he said things he knew would take years to land.
I pressed my hand flat against the cold stone of the empty tomb space and held it there.
If the sword had genuinely chosen her, then everything the sword’s choosing had ever meant was either meaninglessor damning. Either it chose at random, something which collapsed the entire architecture of divine right that underpinned my rule, or it chose correctly, and what it had chosen was a twenty-three-year-old witch over a king who had bled, sacrificed, and ground himself down to nothing in service of this kingdom.
I didn’t toy with either thought for very long, which wasn’t much of a surprise because I was good at avoiding things I couldn’t afford to toy with. Yet I held onto the slab of stone longer than I meant to.
On the way back from the Hall of Lineages, I made up my mind.
I told myself it was nothing more than intelligence. That she was Merlin’s weapon: his child, his agent, his instrument. That understanding her capabilities meant understanding his strategy. If she had some connection to Excalibur, I needed to know the true nature of that connection, including its limitations, and whether it could be exploited or countered. Keeping her isolated in Galahad’s custody told me nothing useful. Yes, I found it amusing to know he was browbeating her with his onerous religious views, but beyond that, what intelligence was I really gaining? Nothing. At this point, Galahad was really nothing more than a sitter, just keeping an eye on her. And I supposed that was important as well, because if I removed her from his watch, what would I do with her? Who would keep track of her?
Regardless, I felt the need to be more involved, to observe her. Measure her. Map whatever it was the sword had responded to (or hadn’t responded to) and determine whether she posed a genuine strategic threat. Perhaps in the meantime, I could continue to attempt to gain more of an understanding of the threat Merlin posed against me. Thus far, Guinevere hadn’t exactly been forthcoming with suchinformation, but perhaps that was due to the fact that I wasn’t pushing hard enough.
That was what I told myself anyway as I walked back through the cold corridor with the dragon quiet and patient behind my ribs.
She calls to us,it said.We must answer her.
I did my best to ignore it.
-ARTHUR-
That night I sent for a woman. Fair-haired, not by any specific instruction from me, but because the chamberlain knew my tastes, or thought he did. She was pretty in a conventional way, bright-eyed and willing, of course. They were always beyond willing. She smelled of lavender and candle wax.
I was present for the fucking in the technical sense. That is to say that I was hard and took my enjoyment from her wet quim. But that was about all I could say for it.
The dragon went quiet the moment she entered the room. It wasn’t unhappy, necessarily, just uninterested, bored even. Like a hunting dog shown a piece of furniture it couldn’t care less about. As I rutted and came, the dragon waited in the way it had learned to wait during these encounters: with a bored detachment. Afterwards, it filled me with the understanding that this wasn’t the thing it was waiting for.
Shewas the thing it was waiting for.
Afterward, the woman whose name I couldn’t recall curled against my side, and I lay looking at the ceiling. There was a specific hollowness within me. It was the same feelingthat follows any action taken to prove something and then failing to prove it.
The candle burned down. The woman slept. I wasn’t certain why I allowed her to. Usually, I kicked them out as soon as I was finished with them.
We burn for her. Only her.
I pressed my thumb against the tattoo on my right pectoral until the pressure built to pain.
“Then burn,” I said quietly, to the dark, to nothing.
It said nothing back.
And not for the first time this week, I thought about her maidenhead, or lack thereof. I tried to picture which man of Camelot had taken it from her. And I tried to imagine whether or not she had enjoyed it. Had it only happened once or had this man enjoyed her body again? And perhaps again after that? Furthermore, was this man in any way compromised by fucking her? Had she turned any of my men against me? I didn’t imagine that was the case, though, because I couldn’t bring to mind any examples of knights or guards who were acting in any way contrary to the ways they usually acted.
All the while, the dragon’s anger surfaced hot and powerful. The creature was even more insistent than I was when it came to the subject of uncovering the man’s identity. And when I wondered whether her heart had been involved, something I imagined must have been the case, given the fact that she wouldn’t give me a name, the dragon’s anger burned even fiercer.
