“Yes.”
She nodded, and I felt the need to further explain. “I don’t understand it entirely, but Guinevere is a... sort of catalyst to the beast. Her magic and the dragon’s nature are in some kind of alignment. Though, I haven’t fully mapped it yet. All I know is that the creature responds to her.”
Isolde looked at me, and she wore the expression of a woman who was listening to a man describe a painting with perfect technical accuracy while missing entirely what the painting wasof.
She didn’t push. She just said, “I see.”
And then, mercifully, she moved to something else and didn’t return to the subject of Guinevere, probably because she could see that it unnerved me.
After we had discussed the particulars about the dragon and my relationship to it for another few minutes, she stood and walked to the door. When she reached it, she turned back to me.
“I’m glad it was you who took it, Arthur,” she said. “You’re the only person I can imagine who is strong enough to keep it subdued. And... what’s more, it wasn’t only a huge sacrifice on your part, but you did so to save us all. And, of course, for that I’m extremely grateful to you.”
No one had ever said those words to me before. “Thank you.”
“And...” she paused. “I don’t think of you as changed, necessarily. I think of you the same way I always thought of you: as Arthur.”
Then she reached for the door.
“Isolde.” She paused. “Were you planning on returning to Corbenic?”
She seemed genuinely puzzled for a moment. “Did you not order everyone to remain here?”
I nodded. “I did, but I’m asking if you’d prefer to return home. I’d make an exception… for you.” I paused. “Only for you.”
She looked at me for a moment with something quiet and deliberate in her expression; then she shook her head.
“No,” she said. “I want to stay here, just in case you need someone to talk to.”
She gave me a quick smile; then the door closed behind her, soft, the same way her knock had been.
I stood at the window for a long time, looking at everything and seeing nothing. The courtyard was empty. Both guards had made their circuit and disappeared around the far tower. The torches burned alone.
I thought about what it cost to be known, even partially, even carefully, by another person, the specific exposure of it. Then I thought about the way Isolde had held the things I’d told her: not tightly, not possessively, just steadily. I remembered the absolute lack of fear in her eyes.
The fire in the grate burned low.
I didn’t let myself continue to think of Isolde because thoughts of Isolde led to thoughts that had no business taking up space inside my mind.
-GUIN-
I stood by the window and looked down at my hands.
Mine.
The word had been said in Arthur’s voice, yet it hadn’t been Arthur’s voice at all, but something underneath it: the dragon. The sound had come up through the floor of him and growled through his lips. Every person in that hall had gone still the way animals go still when they hear something large moving through underbrush.
Mine.
And the worst of it, the part I kept circling back to and then flinching away from, was what had happened inside my chest when the dragon had spoken through him.
Something within me had responded, that part inside me that was me but also foreign to me. It was something that felt strangely old and also deeply embedded within me. For one moment, I’d felt it answer. Not with words, not with thought, just a deeply seated recognition. The way you know a sound you haven’t heard since childhood or the way your body knows a truth before your mind does.
I pressed my palms flat against my thighs.
The binding Mordred had placed on me again was a cold, tight thing that was wrapped around my center like iron wire. Yet during the reveal of Arthur’s dragon, during the moment when the dragon had decided to announce itself and Arthurhadn’t protested, something had pressed against the binding from the inside.
I was pulled from my own thoughts at the sound of a knock at the door.
