He took one step back, then another. I watched him process what he was seeing, watched the calculation behind his pale eyes, the math of survival overriding the math of conviction.
“DO NOT TOUCH WHAT IS MINE.”
I reached out, and the shadows reached with me, moving towards him and wrapping around his body. All it took was a thought and the shadows acted. Galahad flew backward, and hisfeet cleared the floor by nearly a foot. He traveled eight feet before he hit the stone.
FINISH HIM!
Before I could think a rational thought, before I could talk myself down from this absolute need for destruction, another blast of fire billowed out of my mouth and caught him, erupting him into flames as everyone looked on in horror.
The screaming started immediately.
Galahad didn’t go down clean. He thrashed, both arms windmilling, his body turning in the flames as the fire climbed from his legs to his torso with a speed that was almost elegant. The tips of the flames were blue, and blue fire burned hotter than orange. I knew that. I’d known it when I’d opened my mouth. The blue fire was the dragon’s fire, and it didn’t negotiate. It consumed.
He hit the ground and rolled, and the fire rolled with him, clinging to his robes, finding the folds of fabric and following them inward.
The hall had fractured completely. People were backing toward the walls, pressing into doorways, some of them already through them. A nobleman near the east hearth knocked over his chair in his rush backward and didn’t stop to right it. Guards who were supposed to be holding their positions were gripping their halberds and looking at each other with the specific blank expression of men waiting for someone else to make the first decision.
“NO ONE LEAVES THIS ROOM!” I thundered, and in response, my knights took up sentry in front of both doors.
Mordred had taken five paces back from where he’d originally stood and was watching the fire as it left my mouth, his lips pressed together, both of his hands raised to chest height in the posture of a man who was ready to act but not yet certain which action was correct.
Let him burn.
The dragon was utterly calm about it, calmer than I was. It watched Galahad’s thrashing with something that wasn’t satisfaction exactly, more like completion, like a thing that had been promised had arrived on schedule.
The threat ends. She is safe. Let him burn.
The scales were still moving across my jaw, and I could feel the double-timbre still sitting in my throat, the dragon’s voice coiled beneath mine like a second instrument tuned a full octave lower.
Galahad screamed again, and the sound of it reached a register that shouldn’t have been possible for a man.
Then Guinevere did something that surprised me. She’d been on the floor where Galahad had thrown her, but she was on her feet now. Yet she wasn’t trying to run, and she hadn’t pressed herself against a wall, attempted to flee, or done any of the things three hundred witnesses were currently doing. She was upright, she was oriented, and she was looking at Mordred.
“Remove the binding,” she called to him.
Her voice didn’t shake.
Mordred looked at her. Then he looked at me.
I didn’t tell him to do it, but I also didn’t tell himnotto do it. The dragon was still present behind my eyes, still calculating, still watching Galahad burn with that cold reptilian equanimity, and some part of me was still enough beast that the idea of her unbound magic loose in this room was producing a sound low in my chest that wasn’t quite a growl.
She wasn’t looking at me. She was looking at Mordred, and her violet eyes had gone a shade darker.
“Now,” she said.
Mordred made his decision in the space of a single breath. He nodded, then raised both hands, palms outward, and the crystal pendant at his throat flared, a triangle of white-bluelight against his midnight robes. His lips moved in something fast and precise, the syllables running together in the way of a man who was reciting something he’d long since memorized, not performing it butexecutingit.
Then he made a fist.
The motion was small, both hands rising, fingers spreading, then curling inward with controlled force, like pulling a root from packed earth. A sound came with it that was somewhere just below audible, a frequency that pressed behind the eyes.
I saw it leave her.
The binding came away in a single piece, a silver-gray light that Mordred’s fist crushed immediately, the light fracturing between his fingers and dissolving into nothing before it reached the floor.
Guinevere turned to face Galahad, and what happened next took less than two seconds.
She breathed in once, and I watched the air change around her. Moisture gathered. It came from nowhere and everywhere simultaneously, pulling from the cold stone walls, from breath, from the damp that lived in the mortar between blocks, from the air itself. It gathered above and around her in a mass that had weight, presence, and it moved with clear intention.