“What will we tell the Regents?” Sarah asks.
Tor strides back into the room. “Not sure, but I just called their emissary. They’re on their way.”
“You did what?” Sel roars incredulously.
“I had to!” Tor yells. “I’m in charge now, Merlin, and I say we have two dead Squires, a dead Scion, a goruchel who murdered a Squire and infiltrated us—for months! You heard that thing, there are others embedded in the Order. What do you think will happen if we try to hide all of that?”
“That was not your call to make,” Sel says between his teeth. “And you are not in charge. Bree is—”
“Bree is what?” Tor demands. “Our king? By accident? This is a mistake!”
“Accident?” I growl. “Mistake?!”
Alice is on her feet already, fists clenched. “Is that what you’re calling chattel slavery? Three hundred years of accidents?”
Tor’s face turns red. “You know what I mean.”
“I don’t think I do!” I spit. A flash behind my eyes of Vera’s face as she spilled her own blood into the earth. My fingers curl, nails cutting deep into my palm. William’s eyes—and Sel’s—stare down to my fist and the strength that lives there now. “What that man did was not an accident. He knew exactly what he was doing. He liked owning her life. Her body. And he wasn’t the only one. She wasn’t the only one.” Suddenly, I want nothing more than to launch myself at Tor. Would the Legendborn stop me? I wonder. Could Sel even stop me?
Tor catches sight of my growing anger and takes a step back, but she won’t shut up. “People gave their lives for the cause last night, and you what? Just showed up at the last minute?”
I take a step forward, and Sel’s arm shoots across my chest. “Tor!” he booms. “Bree is your king!”
“Not my king.” Tor shakes her head, staring at me accusingly. “Not when she doesn’t even want to be.”
“I—” The memory of Whitty’s and Fitz’s and Russ’s bodies rises up before me, blood spraying into pools so red it was black. “I…”
Alice steps in front of me, arms crossed. “Scion of Tristan, right? Bree doesn’t have a choice in any of this, as far as I can tell.” She looks Tor up and down. “And neither do you, third-ranked.”
Tor lunges so quickly that only Sarah can catch her around the waist. And only Sel is fast enough to move in front of Alice.
Alice doesn’t even flinch. She’s catching on fast, all right. She’d been up early learning all she could from William.
But William’s had enough. “Everyone, calm down!” he yells. “Tor, back off!”
Tor’s heaving in her girlfriend’s arms. She pulls away, glares at me and Alice both, and speeds out of the room in a gust of wind.
In the ensuing silence, William orders, “Take a breath, all of you! Before I sedate you myself!”
I do, but it doesn’t keep the world from tilting. I wonder if I’ll ever see it tilt back in the right direction or if I need to learn a new way to move through it. A way without Nick. A way where I’m in charge of all of… this.
Does a king imagine strangling her own knight?
The events in the ogof showed me answers, even if those answers are hard and ugly. Those same events only gave Nick questions. And we didn’t get a chance to talk about them and what they’d mean for us, for the Table, for everything we both have known.
Soon, Sarah’s, William’s, and Sel’s predictions and plans swirl around me, peppered with occasional references to my new title and rank. Alice holds her own, interjecting with logical questions and demanding answers on my behalf.
Sel is adamant that we stand our ground against the Regents and start the search for Nick ourselves, but even he doesn’t sound so sure of our success without outside assistance; the Order’s network can cover more ground than we can, and they’re better equipped for a manhunt. Sarah wants to wait for the Regents’ instructions, but Sel says they’ll waste time debriefing all of us about what happened here, me especially. I will have to share Vera’s story again. The Mage Seneschals will want to know about my other abilities, maybe even run tests on me. Sel won’t allow it. He thinks I need to select a Squire as soon as possible, before I take the throne. William argues I need to recover before taking the Warrior’s Oath. In the meantime, the Regents will need to confirm Arthur’s presence before they transfer power to me and alert the whole Order that Camlann has come. He says that, as king, the Regents will expect me to promote calm among Order members instead of panic. Then I can gather the Table and designate members of the search committee myself. The discussion goes on and on… and right now I don’t want any part of it.
“What if the Line of Morgaine and the Shadowborn working with them get to Nick first?” My own voice floats up and around me like mist over a pond. I didn’t realize I’d possessed the question until it had made itself known. For a fleeting moment, it makes me a little worried that the question didn’t come from me at all. “What will they do to him?”
Silence. Anxious glances.
No one knows what to make of the Morgaine-Shadowborn alliance that we now know exists.
I squeeze Alice’s hand and stand. “I need some air.”
She lets me go, and no one else stops me, because I am their king.
* * *
I know without looking that it’s Sel who eases the door to the balcony open and then closes it behind him. Even before I felt the prickle of his gaze on my back, I knew he’d be the one to come to me. Aside from Alice, he’s the only one who looks at me like I’m still just Bree.
“I’m sorry.” His voice is quiet, cautious.
I nod and grip the wooden railing until it creaks in protest under my fingers. Arthur’s strength is terrifying.
“Are you going to ask what I’m apologizing for?”
“No.”
The evergreens stand like the last hope of life in the crowded wood, pines like needles and blades against the sky. I envy their readiness. Soon, the Regents will arrive with questions that I can’t answer and some that I don’t want to.
His approach is silent, as always, and then he’s beside me, leaning forearms on the railing. “I don’t know how much time we have, but the Regents and their Mage Seneschals will be here soon. We need their resources and intel to find Nick.”
“I know.”
“We will find him, Bree. I swear it.” Sel turns toward me, pulling my attention from the trees to his golden eyes. My gaze travels across his dark hawkish brows, the aquiline curve of his nose, and the inky-black hair that curls like feathers over his ears.
I nod. “We will.” My chest clenches. “What they did to his mother, his father’s abuse… all of it was for a lie, Sel.”
He regards me with solemn eyes. His sacrifices were based on a lie too.
“Your mother…”
He sharpens, tenses. “What about my mother?”
I tell him then—my small lie of omission from inside the Lodge. I tell him that I’d seen his mother in my memory walk, that she and my mother had been friends, and that she’d been there that night at the hospital—in mourning. That she’d posed as the Merlin assigned to my mother’s case, if that Merlin had even existed. That his mother watched over my family for who knows how many years to ensure that we were safe from the Order. Our mothers were friends. Allies. Like Nick, our bloodlines are connected in ways we’d never imagined.