With no warning at all, exhaustion hit me like I’d just run full-bore into a stone wall. It wasn’t the type that came from battle or sleepless nights in the saddle. No, this was something that had been building since the moment I’d pressed my mouth against hers and lost myself completely.
The exhaustion wasn’t just toward the lie of omission; I was exhausted with the way Kay’s smile had become a permanent fixture on his face, exhausted with the fact that Arthur’s jaw ground against itself every time he looked at her, and I was exhausted with watching her stand in this yard, chin up, shoulders back, absorbing every barbed question and loaded silence like she’d been built for it.
She hadn’t been built for it. Neither of us had.
My feet moved before the decision had fully formed in my head. Kay’s eyes tracked me immediately, that smile sharpening into something concerned, something questioning.
I didn’t look at him. I was sick to fucking death of looking at him.
I walked to the center of the yard, past Percival, past Gareth, past Gawain and Agravaine, past Arthur’s coiled frustration, and I stopped three feet from my king.
Arthur’s eyes cut to me, and they narrowed as a muscle in his jaw flexed.
“It was me.”
I heard the words falling from my tongue before I’d fully realized I was going to say them.
My eyes quickly moved from Arthur to Guin where she stood behind him and the only thing I noticed was the color blanching from her skin. Her eyes went wide and she shook her head slightly.
Arthur didn’t do or say anything for the span of three heartbeats. That was the thing about Arthur in moments like these: he never moved quickly.
“What did you say?”
My jaw was tight. “You heard me.”
The yard had completely stopped breathing. I was vaguely aware of Guinevere, who was still shaking her head. But now there was fear in her expression. Fear for me.
Beyond her, Kay had moved in closer, and now I caught his expression cracking. Just slightly, but it was enough for me to see the calculation beneath it flickering, recalibrating. He’d had his leverage neatly arranged, and now I’d taken it from him and put it somewhere he couldn’t reach it. I watched him realize that, but it didn’t make me feel as good as I’d expected it would.
Arthur looked at me for a long time, and there was something in his face I’d seen before, not often, but enough that I recognized it. I’d seen it the night his father died and he’d taken the dragon, and I’d seen it once at the edge of a battlefield after he thought I was dead.
It was the look of a man absorbing an impact he hadn’t seen coming, the look of someone taking stock of damage before they allowed themselves to feel it.
“I want you to know that I never wanted to...carefor her.” The words came out rough, and completely inadequate, but I had to say something, had to try to make him understand. “I fought it. For longer than you know.” I paused, and when he still didn’t speak, I made myself hold his gaze. “Yes, I knew what she was to you, the obsession you had for her. And I told myself that was the whole reason I should never touch her. That I was—” I exhaled slowly. “I told myself that I was capable of being the kind of man who could look at her and feel nothing I wasn’t supposed to feel.”
Something moved across Arthur’s face. Not rage but something worse than that, something that looked like recognition, like he was listening for something he’d already suspected and hated himself for knowing it all along but never fully believing it.
“I wasn’t strong enough, Arthur.” I paused, keeping my eyes on his face because I couldn’t look at her. I knew that if I did, I would lose whatever courage was currently driving me. “No matter how fucking hard I tried to keep away from her, Icouldn’t. I failed not only you, but I failed myself. But fuck I tried. I tried to be the man I wanted to be, the man you wanted me to be. Gods know how hard I fucking tried. I want you to believe that I did, Arthur, because it’s the only true thing I can offer you right now.”
The yard was still holding its breath. I could feel it at my back: none of the men moving, not coughing, not even shifting their weight. There was only the distant sound of a horse in the stable, restless, unaware.
“You wanted her.” My voice dropped and my heart was already in my throat. “I knew that. I knew it every time you looked at her, every time you stood in the same room with her and went quiet in that way you go quiet. I knew it, and I understood it, and I still—” I stopped, took a breath, then started again. “I still couldn’t make myself be what I should have been, what you deserved me to be.” I took another breath and even though I was staring at his face, I could feel her eyes on me. From my peripheral vision, I could see the shine that was overcoming them. But I couldn’t look at her.
Arthur’s jaw was a locked thing now, a held thing. The muscle at his temple ticked once. I watched his throat move as he swallowed.
I’d seen Arthur kill men with less emotion in his face than this.
“This was by no fault of hers. It wasn’t her failing,” I continued, and I meant that more than I’d meant anything in some time. “I want that to be clear. She didn’t come to me. I—” I cleared my throat. “It wasn’t her failing. It was only mine.”
His eyes were still on mine; they hadn’t moved. But I couldn’t look at her; I couldn’t do that to Arthur. So, my gaze remained fixed on his. I wasn’t sure he’d even blinked.
There was something happening in his expression, something that lived between grief and fury and somethingrawer than either of those, something that a man who wore a crown had probably learned very young to keep below the surface. I watched it press against the inside of his face now like floodwater behind cracked stone, and I watched him hold it.
I owed him the truth and I owed him this too: the full weight of it, without flinching.
“I’m sorry.” The words came out quiet. They weren’t desperate, and they weren’t performed. They were just the stripped-down fact of it. “I know what it’s worth, which isn’t much. I know what it doesn’t undo. But for whatever it is... for whatever it means... I am sorry, Arthur.” I paused. Took another breath. “You have no idea how many times I’ve wished I could have been stronger. That I could have been a better man than I was and am.”
The silence after that was different; it was heavier in a way I couldn’t explain.
