I made a choice about what to give Arthur.
“He told me you were brilliant,” I said. “But ruthless,” That Camelot runs on magic it claims to have outlawed, and that you knew that. That you’d always known it, and the ban on magic was never about fear. It was about control.”
Arthur’s expression didn’t change. He turned the practice sword once in his hand, a slow rotation, and then set it against the rack.
“And do you believe he was wrong?” he asked me.
“No.”
He looked at me sidelong.
“But?”
I shouldn’t have paused. The pause was the tell, and he caught it immediately, the way he caught everything, with that quiet, total attention that had nothing performative in it.
“The briefing was thorough,” I said.
“That’s not an answer.”
“No.”
He waited again. That patience of his was silence with an edge, and the longer it lasted, the more the empty space demanded to be filled.
I set my own practice sword back on the rack and kept my eyes there for a moment: on the worn wood grain, the places where other people’s hands had smoothed it down.
“What did you expect when you arrived here?” he asked.
I opened my mouth with something ready, some version of what I was supposed to say: a prisoner giving calibrated intelligence, keeping the real things locked down, offering just enough to keep the exchange alive.
What came out instead was: “Someone easier to hate.”
The words arrived before I’d decided to release them. Simple and flat, they were in the air between us, and there was nothing I could do about that.
Arthur went very still.
I held his gaze because looking away would have been worse, would have confirmed something I wasn’t ready to confirm.
His jaw shifted once. A muscle along it tightened and then released.
“And now?” he asked.
The question was so quiet I almost missed it.
My chest pulled tight around Mordred’s binding, and I thought about Corvin in the dark below us and Galahad. I thought about the cold water baths, the witch’s mark I didn’t possess, and Galahad’s roaming hands. I thought about the weight of a mission that had cost me everything because a man I’d trusted had told me it was necessary and that I was made for it.
I thought about the arm across my chest and the heat of Arthur and the thing that had moved in me like a tide given no permission.
“I don’t know,” I said.
“You don’t know?”
I nodded, and I couldn’t say why, but the truth was suddenly pouring out of me. “I dislike you exceedingly,” I answered as he smiled. “But there’s more to it than that... between us. And we both know it.”
“Do we?”
I nodded. “We do. And even if you won’t admit it, you know it as well as I do. And that’s all I can say because that’s all I know.”
He held my gaze for three full seconds. Then he looked away first, out toward the far end of the yard, and whatever had opened briefly in his face closed itself again. The king reasserted himself over the man, that familiar composite of control, distance, and absolute authority clicking back into place.
