It was a good question and one I’d expected. “The Shadow Trials were aimed at making certain each of the Knights of the Round Table had the magic required tobecomea Knight of the Round Table. Now it’s about understanding the extent of her magic and how big a threat she poses or how big an ally.”
“An ally?” Gawain asked with a frown.
I looked at him. “That is my end goal, yes: to turn her away from Merlin and convince her to honor our side instead.”
“I don’t believe that’s possible,” Lance said, and the others nodded their agreement.
“The option of death has a way of changing one’s loyalty,” I answered.
Gawain looked at the table. Tristan had stopped turning his ring.
“You’re planning to train her then?” Lance asked quietly from beside me.
“I’m planning onevaluatingher,” I corrected. “Training implies I’ve already decided she’s useful. I haven’t. This is an assessment. What she does with it is information. What I learninformsmy decision.”
Galahad’s jaw tightened once and then released, but he didn’t speak.
“She remains in custody throughout,” I continued. “The sessions will be supervised, contained, and reported to this table. If she is the weapon her father built her to be, I will know it. And then I will decide how to use her. Or whether to use her at all.”
I left what the alternative was unspoken. They all knew.
What I didn’t say, what I had no intention of saying to this table or to anyone, was that the assessment was only half of it.
The other half was simpler and considerably less noble, but it delivered a message all the same. And the message was that a king who could put a blade in his enemy’s hand and stand across from her in open court without so much as adjusting his footing wasn’t demonstrating military prudence. He was demonstrating something far more fundamental: that she was so completely within the boundaries of his authority that he could afford to play. That the woman who had walked into Camelot wearing another man’s face, who carried Merlin’s blood and Merlin’s power, could be handed a weapon in front of every knight, courtier, and lord who cared to watch and still not be a threat worth fearing. Every eye in that courtyard would understand what it meant, not that she was being trained, but that she was beingkept. That there was a difference between a wolf and a wolf on a leash, and that I held the leash.
It was, when reduced to its plainest form, a performance. And I’d always been very good at those.
Afterward, when the table had emptied and the servants had cleared the maps, I stood at the window and let myself think about just what had gone on in the dungeon the night before.
The way the dragon had risen. It hadn’t been the slow creep I’d learned to manage, the gradual heat at the base of my spine that I could breathe down and contain if I caught it early enough. This had been something else. This had been the floor dropping out from under the cage I’d spent years constructing.
I’d gone down there to prove something. To the dragon, to myself: the distinction had seemed meaningful at the time. If I forced Corvin to fuck her right in front of me, I’d demonstrate that the creature inside my chest didn’t own me. That I alone held all the power.
The logic had seemed airtight.
What I hadn’t accounted for was standing in that cell and watching the two of them react to each other as if the outer world not only didn’t matter but didn’t even exist.
Of course, I’d known the dragon would riot, that it would revolt against what it considered an absolute injustice. I just hadn’t been prepared for the level of that revolt.
I’d nearly lost control, and the beast had nearly overcome me. That couldn’t happen again.
I was the king of Logres. I’d held this crown through a succession war, two assassination attempts, and the calculated abandonment of the one man who had ever truly believed in what I was building. I hadn’t survived all of that to be unmade in a dungeon cell by a white-haired woman with violet eyes and her father’s ability to rearrange the inside of a room without appearing to do anything at all.
The dragon rumbled, low and satisfied, at the thought of her.
Ours.
“She’s not ours, and she never will be,” I told the bare walls of the tower, the window panes, and the gardens outside where the towers of Camelot stretched into the afternoon haze like they’d always be there, unmovable and unfaltering.
I looked away from the window.
She was my prisoner to manage, and that’s exactly what I’d told them around the table. I’d meant it too.
I just needed to figure out what managing her entailed.
-ARTHUR-
Hours later, I’d made the decision that I was going to interrogate her. Such was what I told myself as I dressed, as Idismissed my servant, and fastened my own buckles in the quiet. It was the same thing I told myself as I walked the corridor toward the dungeon stairs without a guard at my shoulder because I didn’t want one, and what I wanted was the only thing that mattered.
