Chapter 267: Good evening, Morgana

It was the kings’ private dining chamber, the one with the fire.

She had eaten here before, with all three of them watching her over the rims of their goblets, and she had barely tasted a mouthful. It looked different tonight. Someone had pulled the table closer to the hearth. The long white cloth was gone, and in its place lay plain linen and pewter, laid for four, with a single branch of candles at the center. The air smelled of roast meat and woodsmoke and baked apples.

It looked like a room one might eat in with family.

The kings stood when she entered.

All three of them. They had been waiting, she thought, a little too long. Kaelen was by the fire with a decanter in his hand. Thorne stood at the shuttered window with his hands clasped behind his back. Draeven was at the head of the table, tall and still in a dark coat, and his eyes found her and held.

“Morgana,” Kaelen said, much too loudly.

She blinked.

“You came. Good. Excellent.” He crossed the room in four strides and pressed a goblet into her hand before she had finished entering. “Wine. Sit. You must be starved. Lysander, don’t hover, man, you’ll put her off. Sit, sit.”

“Kaelen,” said Draeven mildly.

“I’m being welcoming.”

“You are being a siege engine.”

Kaelen opened his mouth. He closed it. He scowled at his brother and rubbed the back of his neck, and Morgana, to her own surprise, giggled.

Draeven came around the table and drew out the chair at his right. “Please,” he said, and his voice was low and warm and not at all a king’s. “Sit. You’ve had a long day.”

She nodded and sat down.

The chair was heavy and softly padded. Draeven pushed it in with a care so precise it made her throat go tight. When he straightened, his hand rested for the barest moment on the chair back behind her shoulder. It did not touch her. It only stayed there, as though it were reluctant to leave.

Thorne came away from the window.

He took the seat across from her, and the shadows came with him, though they stayed politely under the table. He inclined his head. “Good evening, Morgana.”

“Good evening.”

“You look well.”

“I look like a woman who has been told to eat.”

Something flickered at the corner of his mouth. “Agnes sent instructions to the kitchen. I believe the word was abundantly.”

“I’ve been warned.”

“By Agnes?”

“By Rowan. She said Kaelen would pour me a third glass of wine.”

“Did she?” Thorne looked at his brother, who was pouring a very large first glass. “How perceptive.”

Kaelen froze mid-pour. “I’m a model of restraint.”

“You are standing in a puddle.”

He looked down. A little red wine had overshot the goblet and soaked into the rug. He swore, quietly and fluently, and Lysander appeared at his elbow with a cloth, and for a moment the room was all motion and mutters. Morgana watched it with her hand pressed to her mouth.

Something was off.

She felt it as one feels weather coming. Kaelen’s laughter came half a beat too late. Thorne’s stillness was a shade too still. And Draeven, seated now at the head of the table, kept looking at her and then looking away, as though checking a thing was still there.

It’s the study, she thought. I said nothing, and they know I said nothing. They’re being kind about it.

The knot in her stomach tightened.

Don’t ask, she told herself. Don’t ask and they won’t.

Soup arrived, clear and golden, with a swirl of cream. Bread followed, still warm, and a plate of honeyed carrots, and a platter of roast pheasant with plums. The servants set everything down and withdrew without a sound. The door closed. The fire popped.

Draeven lifted his goblet.

“To the end of a long day,” he said.

“To the end of it,” said Kaelen.

“To the dinner,” Thorne said dryly, “that none of us is certain how to eat.”

Morgana laughed. She could not help it. She lifted her own goblet, and they touched the rims, three clear notes in the quiet room, and the knot in her chest eased by a thread.

It was Kaelen who started it.

He had eaten half a pheasant in the manner of a man who had not seen food for a week, and he put down his knife with a clatter and pointed it, quite accurately, at her.

“I want to say something,” he announced.

“Please don’t,” said Thorne.

“It’s not about you.”

“That is what worries me.”

“Morgana.” Kaelen leaned forward, elbows on the linen, and his blue eyes glittered with mischief. “I flew you over the whole of the palace in the dark, on my own back. You did not scream. You did not clutch. You relaxed. I was very proud of you.”

“Thank you?”

“And then,” he said, with the gravity of a man reading a charge, “you went to the stables, climbed onto the one horse in the realm that has put three men in the infirmary, and bolted over the horizon.”

“I didn’t bolt. He did.”

“You were on him.”

“I was a passenger.”

“A passenger.” Kaelen threw up his hands. “I have been a dragon for two hundred years. I have never once bolted over a horizon without my own permission.”

“That,” said Thorne, “is not the boast you think it is.”

“It is a perfectly good boast.”

“It is evidence that you take no direction.”

“It is evidence of autonomy.”

Morgana was laughing now, helplessly, with a hand against her ribs. “At least yours let me stay on the whole time.”

Kaelen stopped.

He stared at her. Then his face broke into the widest grin she had ever seen him wear, and he slapped the table so that the pewter jumped.

“Hah. Did you hear that? Did you hear what she said?”

“I heard,” said Draeven.

“She prefers me. As a mount.”

“I said no such thing.”

“She said I’m a better steed.”

“I said you didn’t throw me.” Morgana tried to correct him.

“A better steed!” Kaelen screamed out loud.

“Gods,” Thorne said, to the ceiling. “Someone stop him.”

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