A clean lie. My best kind.
Arthur studied me, and the scrutiny lasted long enough that a less practiced man might have shifted, or added something, or tried to fill the space. I didn’t move, didn’t even blink at a rate that wasn’t natural.
Finally, something in his face settled.
Not trust, exactly. Arthur didn’t have trust left, not the uncomplicated kind anyway. But this was something adjacent to it, something that looked like a man who’d been standing alone too long and was too tired to keep refusing the company.
“Watch then,” he said.
He turned back to the cold fireplace.
I took that as my dismissal and moved for the door.
“Kay.”
I stopped.
“If you’re playing me,” he said, without turning, “I’ll know.”
“Of course you will,” I said. “You always have.”
I left.
The corridor outside was still dark and still cold. The young guard with the ill-fitting armor didn’t meet my eyes as I passed. Alexander did, briefly, professionally, and I gave him a nod that meant nothing except what he wanted it to mean.
I walked back toward my own chambers at the same measured pace I’d used coming.
The throne room lay at the far end of the eastern corridor. I didn’t look at it as I passed. There was no point in looking at things you intended to have. Such things made men sentimental, and sentiment was the rust that seized the gears of a well-made plan.
Arthur would fall.
Not today. Perhaps not this year. Perhaps not even next. The timeline was flexible; it depended on variables I was still tracking: the girl, Lance, the thing inside Arthur’s chest that he couldn’t fully control and that was, from what I’d now observed at close range, getting harder to contain rather than easier.
And when he fell, there needed to be someone standing in the right place. Not someone who’d grabbed for the throne, but someone it simply fell to.
I turned the corner and let the darkness of the corridor close behind me, and the throne room disappeared from sight, and I kept walking.
Patient as I’d always been.
Patient as I’d always have to be.
-GUIN-
The guards arrived unannounced.
There were two of them, and the sound of their heavy boots pounded on the stone flooring as a swinging torch illuminated the path before them. The locks clicked, and the door opened, revealing a burly guard with a lantern, whose jaw was the same shape.
“The king’s called for ye,” he declared.
I was on my feet before he finished the sentence. Not because I was eager to see Arthur; far from it. More because sitting still and alone in the cell for as long as I’d been here had started to feel like rehearsing for burial.
The corridor outside the cell was narrow, low-ceilinged, and smelled of mold, sweat, grime, and filth. But I didn’t care. I was just glad to stretch my legs, which were beyond stiff.
We turned a corner, and the passage widened slightly, the ceiling lifting. A long window opened in the far wall. It was more of an archer’s slit, really, but it was still wide enough to see through. The guards stopped just short of it. Some disagreement had broken out between them, and now they were loudly arguing: something about which route the king had specified. The square-faced one was certain it was the east corridor. The other was equally certain he was wrong.
I opted for whichever route would take the longest: let the king wait for his prisoner. I was in no hurry to see him.
As the guards continued to argue, I inched toward the window, catching the sounds drifting in from outside. The courtyard below was alive with movement. As far as I could see from the very narrow slit, a procession was moving throughthe main gates. Not a military procession, but a more... curated one, something more refined. This was a group of riders in silk livery, their horses groomed until they shone, pennants flying in colors I didn’t recognize. Someone important must have been arriving. Just behind the riders was a carriage. But not just any carriage: with its white wood and gold accents, this one screamed expense.