I felt it before I understood what was happening. Something shifted inside my chest: not a thought, not a decision. It was something lower than that and something older. Like a fault line giving way.
Ours.
The word didn’t arrive in language. It arrived in temperature: in the sudden, total plummet of every degree of warmth I’d ever held inside my body. And it arrived in the image that came with it: her throat with a blade threatening it, and the pulse there that the dragon knew in the same way it knew my heartbeat, because it had recognized her from the first moment she’d stood in my presence.
DESTROY HIM!
A sensation, a vibration, moved through my bones like the reverberation of a struck bell, the dragon cycling through something that might have been panic if it were capable of panic.
OUR MATE! SHE IS—
And then my own voice was meeting the creature’s.
SHE IS MINE.
The torches nearest me guttered, but there was no draft because no window had opened. They simply bent away from me, the flames leaning outward like something was displacing the air, like the air itself was moving back, making room, getting out of the way of whatever I was becoming.
I was still sitting. I was aware of that much. Still sitting on my throne with both hands flat on the gold armrests, my crown on my head, and three hundred people watching. I was aware ofGalahad’s arm, the angle of his elbow, the specific and particular wrongness of the blade’s position relative to her neck, the fact that all it took was one motion and she would bleed out in front of me.
I would never let that happen.
The dragon was already doing some reptilian calculation of distance and trajectory and the precise number of seconds between now and irreversible, and underneath that calculation was a sound I could feel in my back teeth.
I was still sitting. But then I wasn’t still sitting, but I didn’t remember standing. I was simply upright, and the chair was behind me.
The dragon pushed.
Not against me.Throughme. It moved through my body the way heat moves through metal, finding every available channel, and what it brought with it was something anterior to rage. Something that had existed when the world was younger, when men were smaller and the things that flew above them were the apex of everything.
The stone beneath my boots cracked in a single sharp sound, like a branch breaking, and then a second crack branched outward from the first, fracturing the flagstone in two directions at once.
Mordred took three steps backward. I registered that. I also registered his jaw dropping as the shadows came off my body, shadows that were leaking from me, pooling at my feet, climbing my legs, threading between my fingers. They were dark, moving and alive with something that wasn’t darkness but wore it.
Get to her. Get to her. Get to her.
The dragon wasn’t giving me a command. It was stating a fact, the way a river states the fact of its direction, the way gravity states the fact of down. There was no version of the next ten seconds that didn’t end with me between her and that blade.The dragon had already decided this. I was simply the body it was going to use to accomplish it.
Three hundred people were in the room, but the only sound was my breathing and the slow, splintering advance of cracks spreading outward from where I stood.
I looked at Galahad.
Whatever he saw in my face made him hesitate.
That was a mistake. That hesitation was the only thing that kept him alive in the next three seconds, because it meant he hadn’t yet done the irreversible thing, and some thin civilized layer of me was still present enough to understand that the irreversible thing had not yet happened...
But it could. It could still. The blade is still—
That was my voice in my head, not the dragon’s.
Galahad’s blade was still raised.
“MINE.”
The word came out of my mouth in two voices: my own, which I recognized, and something else underneath it: something vast, rumbling, and very, very old. Like a sound that predated the language it was borrowing. Following it was a thunderous yell that started at the base of me and then rippled through my mouth. It didn’t echo off the walls; it pressedthroughthem. It pressed through everything: through stone, through bone, through the soft tissue of every mind in that room.
People went down.
Not all of them, not instantly, but in a wave, radiating outward from where I stood. Knees hit stone as hands flew up to cover ears. A woman near the door collapsed against the man next to her, and two guards dropped their halberds with a clatter. Someone was praying very quickly, the words running together.
