“You’re waiting for me to be afraid of you.”
I nodded. “Most people are.”
“I know.” She tilted her head slightly. “I think you’ve grown so accustomed to that response that you’ve forgotten other responses can exist.”
I nodded again, and then she asked after Galahad, how he was.
“I don’t know,” I answered, which was true.
“It was a shock,” she continued, “that she protected him.”
“Yes.” I nodded. “For the life of me, I don’t know why she did… after everything he’d done to her.”
Isolde looked at me with something mild in her expression. “Because she’s a good person, regardless of whose side she’s on.”
I didn’t respond to that. Instead, I asked: “The gown she was wearing... That was a gift from you, I’m assuming?”
A small pause. “It was.”
I nodded and didn’t pursue it, and she let me not pursue it.
Then she asked: “How long have you carried this secret, Arthur?”
Not,“What is it?”or,“How does it work?”Not,“Is it dangerous?”or,“Are wesafe?” Just: “How long have you carried it?” The question landed differently, possibly because there was only concern in her expression. I turned around fully from the window so I could look at her properly.
“Seven years,” I said.
“How did you come to have it?”
I told her the real version, not the court version, which was vague and gestural and implied inheritance, something passed through blood and lineage in ways that excused the choice from ever having been a choice. The real version was shorter and uglier.
“Uther had been losing the battle against the dragon. If it had broken free, there would have been nothing left of Logres to govern. I took it because someone had to, and there was no one else who would.”
She was quiet for a moment, doing the arithmetic, I suspected: imagining what it meant to have had seven years alone with the thing, seven years of maintaining a shape against the weight of it.
“Does it have its own mind?” she asked.
“Yes.”
“Like a separate person? Or more like a hunger that thinks?”
I considered that. It was a better distinction than most people would have known to reach for. “Somewhere between. It has wants. Preferences. It calculates, in its way, and it remembers. But it isn’t a person.”
“Is it a spirit?”
I cocked my head to the side as I considered it. “That’s probably a good way to think of it, I suppose. Whatever it is, it’s old.” I looked for the words and found only approximate ones. “It predates language. Predates the idea of a self, for whatever that means.” Merlin had told me something similar once,when he was trying to explain what the dragon was. I hadn’t understood what he meant then and I didn’t understand it now. I wasn’t even sure why I’d said as much.
She nodded slowly.
“Does it cause you pain?”
I thought about the question as the fire in the grate shifted and the wood settled.
“Not in the way you might be thinking.”
“In what way, then?”
“It’s not so much pain as it is a pressure,” I answered. “It’s always present. Always pushing. The effort isn’t in fighting it; it’s in maintaining the shape of myself against the weight of it. Continuously. Without interruption.” I paused. “Every day.”
