Not smiled. Grinned. The kind of expression that reaches the eyes before it reaches the mouth.
I stood there, watched it, and didn’t open the gate.
Her footwork was different. That was the first thing I’d noticed. Her footwork with me was deliberate, every placement considered. She was always thinking three steps ahead when wesparred, which made her good and also made her easy to read, because thought creates hesitation, and hesitation is a tell.
With Tristan she wasn’t thinking; she was just moving. Her back shoulder dropped in a way it never did with me, and her grip on the hilt was looser.
She wasn’t unguarded. But the truth was that she was never unguarded. Yet she was... less guarded now.
I lifted the latch and walked in.
Tristan stepped aside.
He gave me no bow, and there was no sudden attention to his posture. Instead, he nodded at me the way you nod at a man who’s entered a room you both have reason to be in, and then he rested his sword point-down in the dirt and watched Guinevere with the same mild interest he’d probably been watching her with before I arrived.
He doesn’t fear us.
The dragon’s voice came low and flat, stripped of its usual hunger. It was observational, and that was strange because it usually was beyond judgmental or demanding action of some type.
Every man in Camelot was afraid of me. Not all of them showed it the same way. Lance’s fear lived in his jaw, in the way it tightened when I gave an order he disagreed with but would follow regardless. Mordred’s fear was intellectual: not of me precisely, but of what I represented, of power without his careful architecture around it. Even Kay, who’d known me since I was a boy who couldn’t sit a horse, carried something watchful in the way he chose his words.
Tristan wasn’t afraid. Not with contempt and not with the performed fearlessness of a man who was trying to prove something. He simply didn’t carry any fear towards me at all, almost as though he felt fear didn’t apply to him.
I didn’t know what to do with that.
All I did know was that if he didn’t fear me, he had no reason to stay away from her.
I walked to the center of the yard and didn’t look at Tristan again. That was the only gift I’d give him: the pretense that his ease hadn’t registered. It had registered.
Guinevere had already reset. Her back was straight, and both of her hands were on the hilt. Her eyes were on me.
“Come at me,” I said to her, and my voice came out level.
She advanced without hesitation, which was the one thing she always gave me: she never hesitated. I didn’t let myself examine why that mattered.
She moved well. Better than well. Galahad’s time with her hadn’t broken her the way I’d half expected. She was thinner; yes, that was true. The hollows beneath her cheekbones were more pronounced than they’d been, but her footwork was clean, and her eyes tracked my movements with the patience of someone who’d been properly trained.
That bothered me more than I let show.
I pressed her left, and she pivoted, redirected, and came back at my ribs with an elbow I only barely deflected. The wooden practice sword cracked against my forearm instead.
“Did Corvin teach you the elbow redirect?”
“Does it matter?”
I circled; then she circled me. The dirt shifted beneath our boots.
“Yes, it matters because I asked.”
“Then it matters only to you because it doesn’t matter to me.”
I felt myself blow out my own frustration. “You never make this easy.”
“I could say the same to you.” Nothing moved in her expression. Those violet eyes gave me precisely as much as she chose to give and no more. I’d hoped she would have been a bitmore...malleableby now. What was more, I’d hoped that the time she spent with me would prove more preferable to the time she spent with Galahad and his less-than-easy company.
I switched my grip and came in fast.
She blocked twice, lost the third exchange, and ended up with my practice blade at her throat. Neither of us moved; we just stood there staring at each other while her chest rose and fell. Her hair had come loose on one side, silver-white against flushed skin.
