“I’m not speaking to offend you. I’m telling you what I saw.” I turned back to him. “I believe Lancelot was the only one who wouldn’t look at her.”
Silence.
“Most men couldn’t help themselves,” I continued. “Perhaps they tried to look away. But that beauty...” I kept my tone measured, observational. “Lance was the only one who refused to look.”
Arthur’s hand, the one at his side, curled slowly. “That only means his sense of chivalry runs deeper than anyone else’s.”
“Or... it could mean something else entirely.”
He frowned. “What?”
I shrugged. “Perhaps he’d seen it before?”
He was quiet for a moment as something fierce burned in his eyes. “That’s a very hefty accusation to deliver at the feet of the King’s First.”
I nodded. “Yes, it is.” Then I breathed out. “Tell me, did you know he visited her in the dungeon? Before the escape. Before she was recaptured?”
“No, I did not know.” A pause, then: “What passed between them?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t hear it.”
A technically true statement. I hadn’t heard it.
I had, however, been told of the duration of the visit and the fact that Lance had returned from it in a state of considerable agitation, which wasn’t something Lance experienced with regularity. He was accustomed to victory, occasional boredom, and the particular smugness of a man who’d never lost a fight. He didn’t, as a rule, experience agitation which meant something must have agitated him.
I left all of that unspoken. The silence was doing better work than I could.
“That is yet another example that doesn’t point to much,” Arthur said, frowning at me. “Lioran was a friend to all the knights. Thus, each of them carries his own disappointment. That could simply be an example of Lance broaching his.”
“True, true,” I answered and watched as he moved away from the window. He crossed to the fireplace, which was cold, not yet lit, and stood with both forearms braced on the mantle and his head bowed. “Or perhaps he had other reasons. I suppose we will never know.”
The dragon tattoo shifted again across his back beneath the linen of his tunic, subtle as breathing.
“Why did you come here?”
“I came here to tell you that you have one person in this castle who knows your secret but has done nothing with it.” I let that settle. “I came here to remind you what that’s worth.”
He lifted his head and looked at me over his shoulder, and I held his gaze.
Then Arthur turned to face me fully. When I met it, his expression was impossible to read, which was rare; usually, I could find the shape of what a person was thinking behind their eyes. With Arthur, it occasionally went opaque in a way that reminded me the dragon was in there too, and the dragon didn’t have expressions I recognized.
“There is more on your mind,” he said.
“I have an offer.” I kept my voice level.
“An offer for what?”
“Let me watch. That’s all. You have Mordred for magic. You have Lance for warfare.” Something flickered briefly in his eyes at the name. “You could have me for this: for the quiet work, the observation. You could have me for the things people say when they think no one important is listening.”
I waited.
“You’ve always been good at that,” he said.
“Yes.”
Another silence. Longer this time. “And in exchange?”
“Nothing.” I met his eyes. “We’ve been brothers since we were seven years old, Arthur. I don’t want an exchange. I want you not to fall.”