He said nothing for a moment.
“Caer Gwyll’s ward system,” he said finally. “How is it maintained?”
We were back on solid ground, it appeared. “A rotating council of three senior mages holds the active structure,” I lied. The warding system of Caer Gwyll was completely operated by Merlin himself. “They work in overlapping cycles so there’s never a full handover gap. And the anchoring stones are built into the outer wall, so the castle is basically incapable of being infiltrated.” That was partially true. There were anchoring stones in the outer wall, but the structural anchors were interior and buried in the foundations where an invading force would never hit them in the opening push of a siege. But, again, not something Arthur needed to know.
I had no idea, though, if Arthur fully believed me or believed me at all. Instead, he kept his expression schooled intosomething that revealed nothing. He paused a moment before asking me his next question.
“Does Merlin want me dead or removed?”
On this one, I didn’t mind being honest. “If he wanted you dead, you’d be dead.” I knew this to be true, but it also happened to serve me because Merlin framed as a political actor rather than an assassin made Arthur’s total-war posture look like overreach. Further, it made him look like the aggressor in a conflict that didn’t require blood.
Arthur’s eyes didn’t move. “What does ‘removed’ mean to him?”
“Probably what it means to you: that you’re no longer sitting on the throne.”
“And who would be sitting on the throne then? Merlin?”
I shook my head. “No, Merlin has no interest in ruling.”
“You?” he asked, nearly interrupting me, and his eyes narrowed as he asked the question.
I looked at him, and he looked back at me for a long moment. Then I shook my head. “As I’ve told you countless times before, I have no interest in your throne or your crown.”
He didn’t respond to that.
“The rebellion in the north,” he continued. “Are they working with Merlin?”
“I don’t know.”
The flat disbelief in his expression was immediate. “You were his operative.”
“As you well know, Merlin is nothing if not secretive.” I held his gaze. “He tells people exactly what he thinks they need to know, and nothing beyond it.” I paused. “You know that’s true. You knew him better than I did once.”
Something moved across his face at that. It was something quick: the kind of thing that would have been invisible to anyone who hadn’t been watching him carefully. His throat moved ashe swallowed, and his eyes cut sideways, just for a moment, to something in the middle distance that wasn’t in this room.
It was the expression of pain, and it was pain that was cut from an old wound but was still very real.
He looked back at me before I could do anything with it.
“You’ve been careful about what you’ve given me,” he said, his lips tight and the comment delivered with the same equanimity he applied to everything else.
“You’ve been careful about what you’ve asked me,” I replied with another shrug.
He didn’t say anything to that, but stood. The movement made the decision for both of us: the conversation was finished because he’d decided it was finished, and the sequence of his body made that fact unmistakable.
He looked at me once more with that expression of inventory again, those blue eyes moving over me like he was categorizing something he’d need to find later.
“You told me at least one lie.”
He didn’t say which one, and I found that part interesting. I wasn’t sure why. Regardless, the silence stretched between us. All the while, I held his gaze and kept my hands still in my lap but said nothing at all.
He nodded once, then walked to the door and opened it. The guard stepped in as Arthur stepped out, and he didn’t look back.
-ARTHUR-
I walked the long corridor from the dungeon stairs to my solar, two guards falling into step behind me at the appropriate distance. The whole way there, I turned over the conversationwith her from the day before. What was more, I couldn’t stop returning to the fact that during the whole interrogation, during that entire hour, there hadn’t been a whisper from the thing in my chest. Not a flicker of heat beneath my tattoo, nothing.
It was quiet when she was afraid. It was quiet when she lied. It was quiet when she looked at me with those fucking eyes and calculated, visibly calculated, what to give me.
