Percival was the only one who was actually listening. He had that look he got when absorbing information: his head slightly tilted, the unruly curls falling over his forehead, his blue eyes moving between the map spread across the table and my face.
The rest of them, I was convinced, had thoughts that ran elsewhere: to the two prisoners who were currently in the dungeon. Soon that exact subject was broached by none other than Kay, who never bothered to hide his interest or lack thereof.
“What’s to be done about the prisoners?” he asked, and everyone’s attention immediately turned to me.
Galahad spoke first, but that was no surprise as he always spoke first when he’d prepared a position, and Galahad was always prepared. It was both his greatest virtue and his most exhausting quality.
“The female prisoner should be tried under the Laws of Penetration.” He laid his opinion out with the calm of a man reciting liturgy he’d memorized young. “She is guilty ofespionage, magical infiltration, and impersonation of a knight of the realm.” He then not only cited the three separate statutes but their original authorship, the precedents set during Uther’s reign, and those set under mine. He wasn’t wrong about anything he said, but that was to be expected. Galahad was never wrong. The crime fit the statutes the way a blade fit a sheath: cleanly, completely, and without gap.
“The penalty prescribed,” Galahad continued, “is death.” A pause. “For both prisoners. Corvin above all: he swore the Round Table oath and broke it. He chose Merlin over his king. That cannot be forgiven. If it is, then the oath means nothing.”
His gray eyes were clear and still. There was no heat in them, no emotion. He wasn’t angry, offended, or even irritated. He was just certain.
Gawain looked at the map. Then at Galahad.
“We trained beside her,” he said.
Not an argument. Gawain knew the statutes as well as Galahad did. Regardless, he spoke the way a man sets a stone down in front of another man’s path: not to fight, just to make him acknowledge it exists. “She fought well. Not only that, but her magic is powerful.” He met Galahad’s eyes and held them without expression. “Putting her to death would be a waste of that magic.”
Tristan turned his ring over his knuckle, once, then twice. I’d quickly learned it was the tell he had when he was agreeing with something he didn’t want to be seen agreeing with too quickly. He nodded. “Gawain makes a good point. That kind of power destroyed...” He let the thought sit there. “Seems like a resource poorly managed.”
Of course, I agreed as well, though I didn’t say anything at this juncture. Instead, I wanted them all to feel as if they’d been heard.
Gareth said nothing. His hands were folded on the table in front of him, and he was busily looking at them. He’d been looking at them since before I started speaking.
Agravaine, beside him, was watching the room. And I knew that particular quality of Agravaine’s attention: the way his pale green eyes moved from face to face without appearing to move at all. He was calculating who was winning this argument, and his lean, barely perceptible, slight forward shift of one shoulder was toward Galahad. Not because he cared about the Laws of Penetration, but because he’d read the room and decided Galahad’s position had more structural support, and Agravaine had never taken a position for any reason other than structural support.
Kay hadn’t spoken. He was watching me, which was different from watching the room. Kay always watched me. Even now, even after everything, there was something in that expression that I recognized from childhood: the older boy monitoring the younger for cracks.
“She’s Merlin’s daughter,” I said. “Corvin is Merlin’s second. We’re currently holding both of them.” I let that settle. “That’s not a position we surrender.”
Lance exhaled once, beside me. A single breath through the nose, but he said nothing. I didn’t look at him.
Kay’s mouth shifted. Almost a smile. “Agreed.”
Galahad didn’t blink. “The law—”
“—is noted.” I looked at him directly, though not unkindly. “The sentence is deferred pending my assessment of her intelligence value.”
“My lord—” Galahad began to argue.
“—The Round Tableadvises.” My voice didn’t rise. It never needed to. “It doesn’t decide.”
The silence that followed had a particular texture to it, one that wasn’t resentment, exactly, but something close to it.Galahad didn’t like to be disagreed with, especially when he believed he was right. He looked at the table, and when he did, his jaw was set and his hands were still. I watched him fold the argument away with the discipline of a man who believed absolutely in the structures he operated within and who had just been reminded that the structure had a ceiling he hadn’t installed.
Gawain exhaled through his nose, and the sound was something between relief and discomfort. Clearly, he didn’t want her dead, but he also didn’t want to be the man who’d argued against it in front of witnesses.
Agravaine’s lean returned to neutral.
I let the silence hold a moment longer before I continued. “There is one further matter.” I looked around the table, and when I had all of them, including Galahad, I went on. “The female prisoner possesses water magic of a caliber we haven’t ever seen before. You all saw her when we apprehended the two of them in the tavern, and you’ve seen her magic when you trained beside her as Lioran. So you know that magic is precise, controlled, and destructive in a way that speaks to considerable power.” I paused. “I intend to understand that power before I make any final decision about what to do with her.”
Kay’s brow shifted. “Understand it how?”
“By testing it.” I held his gaze. “We will assess her combat capabilities in the structured environment of the training yard. We’ll consider her magic from a different perspective this time: looking at its range, its limits, stamina, and what she can and cannot do under pressure and under instruction. Before I decide what this asset is worth, I need to know what it actually is.”
The wordassetlanded the way I intended it to. Not harshly, but with clarity. She wasn’t a guest in Camelot, but she also wasn’t a condemned prisoner pending execution. She was aresource whose value hadn’t yet been fully calculated, and I was a king who didn’t discard things before he understood them.
“Were her abilities not decided already?” Gareth asked. “During the Shadow Trials?”
