The blood wouldn’t come out from under my thumbnail. I’d scrubbed my hands twice with the basin water and a rough cloth, and still it sat there, dark and dried into the crescent. Lance’s blood. I pressed my thumb against my forefinger and felt the dried flake of it and thought about nothing for a long moment.
Satisfied,the dragon murmured, somewhere beneath my ribs. It wasn’t a word exactly, but more like the feeling of satisfaction that had taken shape inside me like a coiled warmth.
I hated it.
I turned away from the fire and looked at my hands in the dim light. The knuckles on my right hand were still swollen, and I was sure a few of them had broken before the dragon had healed them. I hadn’t even been aware that the dragon was able to do such a thing, but there it was. My breaks were healing, but Lance’s weren’t. I thought about how I’d hit him too many times, especially when he hadn’t fought back. I knew that now, and I’d known it then. Even through the red of it, I’d known, but I hadn’t stopped.
Kay knocked on my door twice. I knew it was him because I recognized the impatience in the sound. When I didn’t make any move to let him in, he let himself in, which was his habit and one I’d long since stopped objecting to. He carried a folded stack of correspondence, and his expression was the one he wore when he was working: neutral in the way a blade is neutral, something shaped for a purpose.
He looked at my hands.
“Court is unsettled,” he said.
“I gathered.”
He set the correspondence on the table and began sorting it by some internal system I’d never bothered to learn. “Lord Mervaine and his son departed before midday. They gave no formal farewell, and their steward cited a family matter, but the timing—”
“—I understand the timing.” I took a breath. “It’s not customary for a king to attack his First Knight.”
Kay nodded. “No, it is not.” He paused. “The Corbenic delegation has requested an audience.”
I said nothing because the idea of facing Isolde right now... well, it was too much. In fact, I hadn’t left this room purely because I didn’t want to risk the chance of running into her.
“I will... deal with that later,” I said.
He nodded. “And what would you like me to say to those who keep asking what is being done with Lancelot?”
I looked at the fire.
Lance was confined to the dungeon because I wanted him in the worst possible place in this castle, next to the only other man who had backstabbed me. But the point was that Lance was still alive. That and he wasn’t as seriously hurt as he could have been or should have been. Still, I didn’t know what to do with him. I’d been asking myself that same question since I’d left the training yard with his blood drying on my knuckles, and I still had nothing that resembled an answer.
“Tell them,” I said, “that the matter is being reviewed.”
Kay wrote the words down even though we both knew he didn’t need to. Then he handed me Mordred’s report. It was longer than last week’s, which had been longer than the week before. The handwriting was precise as always, the language careful, the conclusions buried inside three layers of qualification. I read it twice. The containment seals on the lowerwards were degrading faster than the replacement rate. Three had failed entirely and been redrawn. The anomalies along the northern wall, the ones that had started as isolated incidents: candle flames bending toward nothing, shadows pooling in wrong shapes, were coming more frequently. Mordred used the wordconfluenceand then immediately qualified it aspremature speculation.
But Mordred didn’t speculate. When he used a word, he meant it.
I set the report face down on the table, because none of this mattered at the moment. All that did matter was everything else.
“Galahad was still at the chapel during everything... that happened in the training yard?”
Kay nodded.
“How many follow him now?”
“It’s hard to know for certain, but one of the guards reported that the entire chapel was full this morning.” Kay straightened the stack of papers with two precise taps against the table. “Many of them were among your guard.”
My guards and men-at-arms sitting in candlelight while Galahad prayed over them. Galahad, who had been humiliated in front of the other knights. Galahad, who had—
I stopped the thought. I’d been stopping that particular thought all day because it didn’t go anywhere useful.
“What is more...” Kay continued, before clearing his throat. “I have been told by a reliable contact that Galahad has now made his bedchamber in the chapel. He’s eating there and sleeping on the floor near the altar.”
I looked at my hands again. The thumbnail. The dark crescent of dried blood.
“He’s building something,” I said.
“Yes,” Kay answered. He didn’t bother with qualifications.