Now, I stood in my chambers for a full minute, not knowing what to do with myself.
The dragon was quiet. Not absent; it was never absent, but it was subdued. Strangely, it hadn’t reacted during the shock of the evening before. And now it just felt like a low pressure behind the tattoo on my chest rather than the usual clawing.
And that meant I could think. The clarity was almost disorienting. I’d grown so accustomed to fighting the creature for possession of my own thoughts that the absence of the fight now felt like a missing tooth: the tongue keeps finding the gap.
I didn’t plan to go to the east gardens, and yet my feet decided on that exact location without consulting me.
Perhaps it was because the east gardens were Camelot’s only honest space, or at least I thought of them as such. They were comprised of three walls of old stone, weathered past the stage of wanting to repair them. On the fourth side, there was nothing but open air and a long drop to the river valley below. Beyond that, the hills rolled green and brown toward the horizon, indifferent to ghosts, violet eyes and white hair.
The gardener was a man named Gruben who was old enough to remember Uther and deaf enough not to careabout Arthur, and the two of us had maintained an unspoken arrangement for years: I didn’t ask him to bow, and he didn’t ask me why I kept coming here.
When I arrived, Isolde was already there, and I was pleased. I’d hoped she would be. Perhaps it was why I’d come?
She sat on the low stone wall at the garden’s edge, her legs hanging over the drop, a book open in her lap that she wasn’t reading. Instead, her eyes were on the river below. The morning light caught her hair and turned it copper at the ends, something I found quite beautiful, mostly because it wasn’t white.
She didn’t hear me walking towards her because she was entirely somewhere else. I could tell by the expression on her face, an expression that was unguarded, and her shoulders were easy. Just a woman watching water move.
I let myself watch her watching the river. It was just a few seconds, just one private moment before she knew I was there.
She was beautiful. Not the way Guinevere was beautiful, not that arresting winter sharpness that made something inside me snarl and strain, that dangerous brightness that the dragon tracked like fire tracks oxygen. This was a different type of beauty. It was quieter. The kind of beauty that asked nothing from you in return, the type of beauty that invited rather than demanded. Guinevere’s type of beauty was the kind that slammed you over the head, then kicked you when you were down.
I thought, standing in the garden entrance:a man could live beside this type of woman without burning.
My footsteps landed on the gravel, and Isolde turned to face me. Her expression did that thing it always did, an unguarded brightening that arrived before she could compose it. She was caught off guard, and she looked it: legs dangling, book forgotten, expression open. Sitting as she was now, she appearedyounger than the woman who navigated my court with such practiced fluency.
“The council ran short?” she asked, shifting on the wall to make room beside her.
I sat, and because the wall was narrow, our shoulders touched, but neither of us remarked on it.
“The council didn’t happen,” I answered.
“Because of what happened last night?”
I was surprised she’d brought it up, but then I thought about what I knew of Isolde, and then I wasn’t surprised.
“If I said ‘no,’ would you believe me?”
She laughed as I faced her. “No.”
I nodded.
“What did happen last night?” she continued as she looked up at me.
I shook my head. “I don’t have a bloody idea.”
“Everyone seems happy to accept the explanation of drafts.”
I looked at her. “Do you believe it was a draft?”
She shook her head and laughed again. “No. Do you?”
“No.”
And that was all we said about it, which pleased me because I didn’t have a thought in my mind that could explain what in the hell had happened in the Great Hall the previous evening.
In an obvious attempt to change the subject, Isolde held up the book in her lap, allowing me to read the title.On the Breeding and Keeping of Horses in the Southern Territories, it read, by some scholar from Corbenic whose name I didn’t catch before she tucked it under her arm.
“Your stable master,” she said, with the mild disapproval of a woman who had found a problem and was already solving it, “keeps his records in his head.”
