The Next Day
I’d learned later that Galahad’s faction: six guards, two priests, and four men of lesser rank, had crumbled inside of ten minutes.
The two priests had attempted to leave through the side door and found it already blocked. The others just stood there cowering.
I’d ordered all of them to be sent to the dungeon. Galahad was the only exception and that was purely due to the state he was in. I hadn’t bothered to visit him but the reports Kay had given me were bleak. He’d said burns covered the majority of Galahad’s body and he was still unconscious and unresponsive. There was a part of me that hoped he’d die because then I wouldn’t have to bother with him or his zealots but the other part of me didn’t want to turn him into a martyr.
After the dragon had announced itself, the hall had cleared in under twenty minutes. Under Kay’s orders, the court had returned to their rooms and were told not to leave. The knights were guarding all the gates in and out of Camelot. Kay had giventhem a quick briefing but I knew I needed to call a council meeting to explain what they’d seen, what everyone had seen.
Guinevere had been returned to her bed chamber and two guards had been placed outside it. Of course, I’d ordered Mordred to immediately reapply the binding, because I didn’t trust her without it.
Ours,the dragon had said.Our treasure is safe.
It was satisfied, content in a way it almost never was.
I ignored it.
What I couldn’t ignore was the fact that the entire court had seen my truth. The stone that had fractured beneath my boots would be walked over every day from now on, and no one who’d been in that room would ever again forget what they’d seen, nor what I was.
Not a king with a sword, but a king with something inside him that could end everything.
I’d spent so many fucking years making sure no one knew, and now? Now everyone did.
-ARTHUR-
The knock was soft.
Not Mordred’s non-knock, that barely-there tap that was really just his knuckle grazing the door while he was already pushing it open. Not Kay’s either, which was usually missing entirely. This was something else: considered and patient.
“Come.”
Isolde entered, and she was wearing dark green silk that contrasted beautifully against the red tones of her hair. Shedidn’t apologize for the hour or the intrusion but simply looked at me and asked if she might sit.
“Yes.”
I turned back to the window as I tried to find the energy for this conversation. I understood why she was here: I owed her an explanation. I knew that, but I was exhausted all the same.
The courtyard below was mostly empty. The castle had gone quiet in the hours since the events of the Great Hall and I supposed I couldn’t blame it. So much had happened, so much had been revealed, and so much was still coming.
As I remembered the events, I realized I hadn’t seen Isolde in the throng of people who had crowded the interior of the Great Hall. I searched my memory for her face but still couldn’t locate it. I could remember three hundred faces, the rows of torchlight, the weight of what had happened, but I couldn’t remember her. I knew she’d been there. I’d been told she was there...
I understood why a moment later, and the understanding arrived without drama, the way the worst recognitions always did. From the moment the dragon had fixed on Guinevere, nothing else had existed. Not the hall, not the watching faces, not the sound of Galahad’s body hitting the floor or his screams after the dragon attempted to incinerate him. There had just beenher. Just that point in the center of the room that had become, without my permission, the only thing in the world that mattered.
“You were there,” I said without turning back around. Mostly, I didn’t want to see the fear in her eyes or the accusation.
“I was,” Isolde said, and I could hear her settling into the chair across from my writing table. “I watched the whole of it.”
I waited. Everyone else I’d seen since that moment had carefully constructed the appearance of not being afraid, which was its own kind of fear. Kay with his tactical assessment thatwas really just anxiety dressed in strategy and Mordred with his clinical dissection that kept the thing at arm’s length.
“It was rather... remarkable.”
At that, I turned to look at her. “I don’t believe anyone has used that word to describe what they witnessed.”
A smile crested her lovely lips. “Well, I wouldn’t say it was a comfortable situation certainly,” she continued. “But, yes, it was remarkable. I don’t think I’ll see anything like it again.”
There was no frame for that response in my repertoire. Every response I’d constructed across the last several hours had assumed a particular shape of conversation: concern, fear, political calculation, loyalty demonstrations. None of them fit what she’d just said.
I said nothing, because I didn’t know how to respond.
