“This isn’t banditry,” I continued. “This is an attrition campaign. It’s coordinated, patient, and so far... very effective.”
No one argued with that.
Mordred spoke next. He had the ward-stone figures laid out on vellum, annotated in his precise hand, each notation smaller than seemed necessary, as if he begrudged the parchment the space. One full cycle of maintenance materials had been intercepted. Not the stones themselves, just the materials to sustain them. He walked through the degradation timeline without raising his voice, but that wasn’t much of a surprise because Mordred never raised his voice. He discussed the perimeter junctions and the fact that we had two months before the outer wards would begin failing where the boundary lines intersected.
“I’m pursuing alternative sources,” he concluded.
I watched him. Mordred without visible alarm was a specific kind of signal. It meant he’d already passed through the stage where alarm was useful and he’d come out the other side. It meant the problem was large enough that panic had already been processed and then set aside like a tool he no longer needed.
Once Mordred had finished speaking, Lance stood for the military assessment. His hands were clasped behind his back, which he did when he was being careful about how he said something.
“We can’t match the Rebellion’s mobility with regular force,” he said. “Our infantry is too heavy. Not only that, but our cavalry requires supply lines the Rebellion has already demonstrated they can cut. Fixed position defense gives them every advantage... they simply choose when to engage and when to vanish.” He paused and cleared his throat. “What we need is a smaller strike force. Six to ten men... something lighter. Something with no supply dependency. We need to be mobileenough to follow disrupted routes and respond within hours rather than days... sometimes the response even takes weeks.”
Gawain waited until Lance sat down, and then he looked at Lance in a silent question of whether he was finished. Lance nodded, and Gawain faced me.
“The prisoner,” he started.
“What about her?” I grumbled, because this was the subject I liked least.
“I raise her as an operational question. If she has intelligence value to the Rebellion, and the assumption thus far has been that she does, when does the extraction begin?”
He said the words without challenge. Gawain would never challenge me in council. It wasn’t cowardice; it was method. He believed in process: that asking the right question at the right time achieved more than forcing a confrontation. Not that he would ever confront his king, but his question was a good one.
“The assessment is ongoing,” I answered. “And has been, hidden under the guise of training sessions.” I paused. “I daresay some of you have seen the two of us sparring in the training yard?”
There were a round of nods and a grunt or two.
Gawain’s mouth tightened at the corners and he nodded once.
He didn’t ask what ‘ongoing’ meant, or what ‘assessment’ meant, or why, after more than two weeks, I still didn’t have a more precise answer. But that was the truth. Where we stood now, I still didn’t have any idea (because she hadn’t admitted anything important). Furthermore, I still didn’t know for certain if Guinevere had anything to do with the Rebellion at all. For all I knew, the Rebellion and Merlin were two different entities. Regardless, Gawain was too skilled to ask such questions directly. But the tightening at his mouth said he’d heard the imprecision in my answer, and he’d remember it.
Agravaine spoke last.
He always let the others go first. I’d noticed this years ago. He collected information while others spoke, then used that information, and he timed himself like someone who understands that arriving last in a conversation is a form of leverage.
“If the prisoner is valuable enough to maintain,” he said, “one wonders whether the current supervision arrangement is...appropriate.”
He didn’t say Galahad’s name, but he also didn’t need to. Every man at the table heard it in what Agravaine didn’t say, heard the implication that something about Galahad’s custody was being questioned, that an alternative existed, and that Agravaine was positioning himself as a moderate voice raising a reasonable concern.
He folded his hands on the table and looked at me with the attentiveness of a man who expected to be agreed with eventually.
I didn’t respond immediately. Instead, I watched the reactions of the others. Across the table, Percival looked at Agravaine. He didn’t say anything, though; he just simply looked, with that quality he got when his gift was reading something he didn’t like. Percival’s empathy wasn’t telepathy; he couldn’t pull thoughts from a man’s head, but intention was another matter. Intent left marks.
Whatever he was reading off Agravaine at the moment hadn’t improved upon examination. He looked down at his hands again and said nothing.
The table waited.
I let it wait.
“The current arrangement serves multiple purposes,” I said finally. “The prisoner is being held by Sir Galahad for reasons that extend beyond her mere containment.”
She should be released to us,the dragon suddenly piped up. It had very little interest in matters of state and total interest in the white-haired witch.
I didn’t elaborate immediately. Instead, I watched the room calibrate itself around the pause, which told me things. Agravaine’s expression stayed pleasant in that way of his that meant he was listening harder than he appeared to be. Gawain had stopped drumming his fingers against the table, and Lance was looking down at it.
“We aren’t simply storing her,” I continued. “We areremakingher.”
Galahad spoke then. He’d been still enough through the council that it was easy to forget he was present, which was its own kind of skill even if he didn’t use it the way Agravaine did.
