The doors opened, and Isolde walked in.
I’d been braced for it. Had given myself the walk from the Council Chamber to the Great Hall to prepare, to lock everything behind the usual fortifications. And yet it still landed.
She was wearing Corbenic’s green and gold. Her auburn hair was caught back from her face, not elaborately, not in the fashion that required a team of attendants to construct, but practically, with the ease of a woman who understood that her face didn’t need scaffolding.
She was just as beautiful as she always was, with a sort of regal loveliness that was rare. The freckles across her nose were still there. She’d never powdered them over. I’d noticed that the first time I met her and registered it as a certain type of confidence that required no performance.
She moved with the unhurried certainty of a woman who’d been trained to ride, hunt, and manage three hundred acres of working estate before she was sixteen. This wasn’t court movement, which was a learned art of calculated grace, but this was actual movement, the kind that came from knowing what your body could do.
Her eyes found mine the moment she entered.
What passed between us in that half-second wasn’t diplomatic.
She knew that I was uncomfortable. The moment she saw my face, she was reading it, and she was finding things she hadn’t been sent to find.
Protocol said she should have crossed the hall to me, to her king. Yet, I was the one who stood and left the dais.
I was three steps down before I realized what I was doing. Kay’s expression flickered, just barely, the twitch of a man noticing a deviation. Lance said nothing. The court watched with the careful non-attention of people who were very much paying attention.
I kept walking.
We met in the middle of the hall, and I took her hand and bowed over it and said the words she no doubt expected me to say. I welcomed her to Camelot, asked about the journey, her father’s health, Corbenic’s friendship, all of it. Isolde received the dutiful conversation with the composure she always carried by smiling. Then she responded with her own formal courtesies in the clear, measured voice she used for public occasions, and none of it said anything close to what either of us was actually thinking.
“Camelot is more beautiful than I remembered,” she said.
“Corbenic’s envoy does it considerable honor,” I answered.
Diplomatic language performing the function of a bridge. We were very good at it. We’d had practice.
I received her father’s envoy after: a thin, precise man named George who had been managing the Corbenic-Camelot relationship since before I was king and who treated every meeting like a document to be filed. He was here to discuss the trade agreements, the grain tariff, the border clarifications along the northern reach where our territories met in a strip of contested farmland that both sides claimed and neither had the resources to fight over. All of it was scheduled for this week, allof it now sitting in the middle of a crisis that had nothing to do with grain tariffs.
I told George the negotiations would begin tomorrow. He seemed satisfied. Kay walked him out.
The court thinned. Lance drifted away toward the training grounds.
I should have gone back to the council chamber or busied myself with Corvin’s interrogation or the resistance reports. I could have busied myself with the hundred urgent things that were waiting for me. Instead, I fell into step beside Isolde, who was being shown toward the west corridor and the guest quarters.
The steward glanced back at me, and I dismissed him with a look.
Isolde turned to look at me with a faint, private smile. “The king doesn’t personally escort visiting envoys to their rooms.”
“We both know you’re considerably more than a visiting envoy.”
She said nothing to that, but the smile remained.
We walked in silence for a time.
The upper corridor was quiet at this hour; servants were moving through the lower halls, the knights were at practice, and the court had dispersed to its various machinations. Up here it was just the two of us and the sound of our footsteps on stone and the pale light coming through the narrow windows.
Isolde walked beside me. And it was so ordinary a thing, a person walking beside me, yet so rare in practice that I felt the absence of it in every other moment of my life.
“You look tired, Arthur.”
NotYour Grace. Just ‘Arthur’.
She’d used my name in private since that first evening in the garden. I’d given her that permission without thinking about it, the way you give a thing away before you understand its value.Hearing it now, in her soft voice, in that register she used when she was being direct with me rather than diplomatic, put a pressure behind my ribs that had nothing to do with the dragon.
I opened my mouth. The impulse to tell her everything was so strong it made my throat close.I’m drowning. There’s a spy, my enemy, who my dragon has claimed and my sword responds to, and I can’t stop circling her, and I don’t know anymore whether what I feel is mine or the monster’s, and you deserve a man who is whole—