The Problem King Read online

  “No, it’s fine,” Guinevere said, and waved her in. Adwen snuck the rest of the way over, squeezing the letter this way and that, mangling the paper badly. She seemed reluctant to speak. Conflicted.

  “You know I adore being in your service—”

  “You’re not in my service, Adwen. You’re my friend.”

  “Yes, milady. But it’s...” She looked down at the paper, shaking her head. “My brothers have written. About your... your...” She looked at Eleanor, uncertain.

  “Oh, come off it,” Eleanor snapped. “You know I know everything.”

  Adwen still didn’t seem sure, so Guinevere mediated with a simple: “Speak freely, please.”

  Adwen gripped the letter. “My brothers wrote to say the final shipment’s en route, but they... they’ve yet to receive the second half of their fee. And... and I know your ladyship has been under duress these last months, so I completely understand if there have been issues with—”

  Guinevere had her hand up, confused. “Wait, say again? The final shipment?”

  “Yes, milady.”

  “When did the first go out? Out of how many? And to where?” She looked to Eleanor, who shrugged.

  Adwen looked shocked and pained; she obviously hated being the bearer of bad news, and now she was stuck being the bearer of surprising and bad news...

  “The... I thought you knew... it was arranged so I thought—”

  “Knew what?” Guinevere said, trying not to snap at Adwen, but falling short. And then, in a flash, she realized what Adwen was talking about: the original instructions, given to Ewen in a fluster of dangerous exuberance, back before everything had gone so, so wrong: “They’ve been shipping to London.”

  Eleanor frowned. “Shipping where in London?”

  Guinevere sank, sitting at the edge of her desk. “To the castle.”

  “Oh God...” Eleanor gasped.

  “That’s every penny I’ve got left, gone up in smoke,” Guinevere said, voice hollow.

  To Adwen, though, that was an even more horrifying thought: “But not every penny, surely? Because my brothers are quite insistent I get a guarantee from you that the balance will be paid, and soon. Th-they’ve taken on a risk, and they... they need a guarantee.”

  Guinevere’s fingertips dug into the desk, her mind racing ahead in days and weeks and years. Her heart was out of control in her chest, screaming at her that this is a disaster, you fool! This is the end! And she couldn’t help but believe it, too, because there were no solutions, only problems.

  “There are too many issues,” she breathed, so tense she felt like she might pop. “I can’t move with the King smothering me, and I can’t work around him without money. And for all we know, Rufus’s tax collectors have fallen into one of those rancid troughs and drowned, without collecting a single shilling.” She looked up at Adwen. “How long until the shipment arrives in London?”

  “A fortnight. At most, they say.”

  Eleanor drew a circle in the air with her finger. “Maybe they can divert, deliver to Lyonesse instead?”

  “Not while Gawain runs the place, no,” Guinevere said, anger boiling hotter and hotter. “And Cornwall’s out of the question, too.”

  “Bors?” asked Eleanor.

  Guinevere shifted, thought, shook her head. “No, I can’t. He’d... he wouldn’t understand. It’s too risky.”

  “But surely he wouldn’t—”

  “The thing with Bors,” Guinevere said, working it all through in her mind, herself, “is that you never can tell what he’ll do. Self-righteous, self-interested, or selfless, he’s got too many modes to gamble with.” She ran her hands through her hair, frustrated all over again. “No, too much depends on London. It can’t be ignored any longer. It needs to be fixed.”

  “But how, Guin?”

  Guinevere shrugged at her. “It’s time for the King to let me go.”

  Twenty-seven

  Lancelot looked up from his writing. “The answer is no.”

  Guinevere took the seat across from him, trying her best not to lose her composure right away. “You don’t know—”

  “You want to leave the palace.”

  “Yes, but—”

  “Then the answer is no.” He went back to writing. His office was a tiny thing, wedged into the space too small for much of anything but a meagre desk and a stool to sit on. He had a stack of papers on one side, writing paraphernalia on the other, and his sword hanging from a hook on the wall. She imagined the papers were to and from others, the quills were borrowed, and the sword went with him whenever he left. So when he was away, his office was, more or less, empty. The life of a roving mercenary, transposed into a royal setting.

  They’d kept a careful distance from each other, since she moved into the palace, though in the moments they were together, the tension was palpable. She had to be mindful of her relationship with the King; never consummated, or even reciprocated, he still had a powerful devotion to her, and she had no idea how she’d react to her tentative love affair with his security chief.

  But more than that, she was trying to put a damper on what she knew was a dangerous weakness of her own: Lancelot was a thrilling distraction, and one she could not afford. But still, there was something about the fruitless chase that made him utterly irresistible to her. It was the closest she could get to true living anymore, and that made it dangerous.

  Once, a month earlier, in an out-of-the-way alcove in a quieter wing of the palace, a chance encounter had devolved into loosened clothing and impassioned gasps while they both forgot themselves for three blissful minutes... until Sir Ector ruined the whole thing by calling out for Lancelot.

  She’d done her best to avoid him since then. But this was business, not pleasure. She couldn’t avoid him forever.

  Guinevere tapped a fingernail on the desk, waited for him to grow impatient. Finally, he looked up, gaze a steely kind of cold.

  “Still no.”

  “I know you don’t agree with this imprisonment.”

  He laughed. “Oh, you think your richly-appointed quarters are a prison, do you? Trust me, milady, I’ve been to prison. You don’t get to order custom dishes thrice daily. And when was the last time you were flogged?” The look in his eye said he was open to an invitation.

  She frowned. “The threat against me is passed, and—”

  “Which threat? Because by my count, there are now sixteen credible threats in the making, and more every day.”

  “How? Where?”

  “Every time Council releases a new report, you’re the main focus. You and your mystery assailants, whoever they might be. And the King won’t see reason about it, either. As soon as he hears the news, he works himself up into this kind of paranoid hysteria until...” He caught himself, glared at her instead: “Do you know how much manpower I have to waste, daily, to protect you against a threat I know is false? It’s absurd. It’s a drain on the palace resources, and it’s a drain on the kingdom, too.”

  “Gawain is using the King’s concern to keep me out of play,” Guinevere said, bitterly.

  “That much is obvious. But what am I going to do about it? You can’t disprove a specious theory built on rumours. No matter what I say, there’s always the possibility someone’s trained crows to attack you with poison-tipped claws.”

  “You can’t be serious.”

  “And now you see what I’m up against. He spends so much time worrying about you that he’s neglecting his subjects, as a whole. It’s rumblings, still, but things are not going well outside these walls.”

  Guinevere winced. Arthur, the golden king, the chosen king, suddenly unpopular with his subjects? That was a dangerous proposition, not just in terms of peasant revolts, but for the nobility as well... one thing tended to lead straight into another. And worse, an unstable Camelot could make an appealing target for an ou
tside player, hoping to fill their coffers.

  “The mess at the coronation would’ve knocked anyone off-balance,” she said.

  “Aye, but whatever goodwill was there for him, he’s burned it all away. What he needed was a show of strength, but all he seems to want to do is cower at shadows. Because of you.”

  She sat closer to the desk, trying to force him to see her point: “So let me out. Solve all our problems with one decree.”

  He laughed. “It’s not mine to make. If you want out, you have to convince him.”

  “Well,” she said, standing up and flattening out her skirts. “Then let’s go.”

  He frowned. “Go where?”

  “To convince the King to let me go.”

  Lancelot smiled, and grabbed the sword from the hook on the wall.

  Camelot was a curious place. At its core — and its actual core, geographically as well as politically — was the Council Chamber, and more specifically the Round Table. The rest of the kingdom was built around that one piece of furniture. And not just figuratively, either; the design of the thing — with its concentric circles eventually subdivided into thirteen even slices in the outer third of the design — was like a blueprint for the city that surrounded it.

  The Capital District was a ring made up of five key buildings: Council in the centre, surrounded by the Palace, the High Court, the Cathedral and the Office of the Chief Engineer. These four formed the second circle in the design; a perfectly-maintained roadway connected them all, flawlessly engineered to withstand whatever weather came its way, without cracking or flooding or breaking. The Palace was connected to Council by an immaculately-sculpted garden, cutting across the road to the north; whether one saw that as a symbol of the King’s supremacy over Council, or the other way around, was a matter of where one tended to stand.

  At the outside, and bleeding into the surrounding landscape, were the thirteen original districts, each given an identical parcel of land emanating out of the core like spokes in a wagon wheel. Carved from the original kingdom Pendragon had forged, they’d been given as a token of thanks to those who had helped his ascent. Most were secondary estates for powerful noblemen with massive tracts of land under their control, elsewhere. Mercia was easily six times the size of Camelot, and yet Wiglaf lived in a walled garden to the west of the Palace. Lothian proper, to the south-west, went clear to the sea, with more lumber and ore than could be used in ten lifetimes... and yet Gawain’s manor was a fraction the size of the Cathedral. The symbolism was key, both to Pendragon, and to the noblemen he enticed to join his mad venture.

  The exception? Lyonesse, which gave up land to the new kingdom of Camelot. Just as wild and overgrown as the day her father pledged his fealty, it was the one and only home to her family. A striking state of affairs, and a painful one, too.

  Sandwiched between the core and the thirteen districts was another ring, home of the supporting services: a hodgepodge of buildings housing diplomatic stations, the Office of the Exchequer, a fire brigade and barracks for the Royal Guard. This ring was also home to the recently-renovated Export Office, which was housed countless scribes, accountants, lawyers, negotiators and couriers. If the Palace was an example of everything Pendragon imagined Camelot to be, cast in stone, the Export Office was what Camelot had become. Mercilessly efficient, imposing and clinical, in the afternoon it cast a dominating shadow over the Cathedral, like a warning of things to come.

  The Export Office was the brilliant sceptre of the Capital landscape, but the Foundries were the tools by which it was born. Made of heavy stone, long since shifted by one explosion or another, these were the guts of Camelot, where ideas were put to the test again and again until they died an ignoble death, or burst from the embers to reshape the world. To say there was conflict between the engineers and the accountants... well, day and night have more common ground.

  And so, as if trying to keep their two worlds from colliding, Pendragon had built a small courtyard between them. Geographically, due south from the Council building; walk it, and you’d find it was exactly the same number of paces from the centre of the Round Table to the courtyard as it was from the courtyard to the river’s edge. And more specifically, the landmark in the middle of the courtyard: a large, craggy boulder that not too long ago held a sword.

  Guinevere had only seen the boulder once, back before they’d built a small shrine around it to protect it from the elements. And even then, it had only been in passing, on her way into the Export Office, with her father. Back then, the Foundries scared her; now they just worried her.

  But they hadn’t scared Pendragon, obviously, because in a city this elaborately architected, there was only one underground tunnel in play, and it extended from the south wing of the palace, down below Council, and into the south-east block of the Foundries. The King and his engineers had shared a special bond in the old days, and it appeared that was the one thing Arthur had in common with his predecessor.

  Lancelot still made Guinevere wear a heavy cloak to get from one place to the other; the tunnel was only known to a small group of palace staff — not even Guinevere had known such a thing existed — but if Arthur saw her appear un-protected, he’d lose his mind with worry, and all this would be for naught.

  Guinevere had seen her share of dungeons in Paris, hearing last-ditch pleas from hopeless dukes and would-be kings. She knew the stench of sweat and blood and desperation, and it never fazed her much. But the Foundry was something altogether different; the desperation different, somehow. The men here weren’t waiting to die, they were waiting to succeed. Too many hours and days and weeks spent hammering away at a problem, trying to find the angle that would unlock a mystery they could feel but not touch.

  She passed a room where an emaciated man, skin blackened by soot, was plying a thin sheet of metal just so. Something went wrong — she couldn’t tell what — and he cursed, spat, threw the metal at his feet, where it joined at least two dozen other attempts. To her, they looked identical, but he seemed disgusted by their very existence. He kicked them out of the way and picked up another flattened sheet of metal, pristine and untouched. He went back to work without a word. A prisoner to his own dreams.

  This was how Camelot was made.

  At the end of the hall was a low door, tucked around a corner Guinevere might’ve missed but for Lancelot’s guidance. He bent down, pounded on it twice with his fist, and waited. The air was too noisy to make much out, but after a few seconds, a faint chime rung out, and he took the handle, pushed the door open and ducked inside. He held his hand back out for Guinevere, who struggled to crouch low enough to make the journey.

  Inside was... a whole other world. Long tables down the length of the room, the walls covered in sheets of parchment, scribbled and drawn upon like a whirlwind had a quill, yet arranged so carefully it was like bricks in the palace wall. Along two of the tables were more tools than she could comprehend, dozens that looked so similar to one another, she couldn’t tell if they were getting smaller by imperceptible increments, or it was just her vision playing tricks on her. And far down at the end of the room, studying what seemed to be a long metal tube, were Arthur and Merlin.

  And Merlin’s eyes were alive.

  They froze when they saw her; Arthur scrambled to the close the distance, face alternating between worry and excitement. He took her hands in his, but glared at Lancelot: “She might’ve been followed,” he said, worry obvious in his voice.

  “She wasn’t, milord,” Lancelot said. “We took the tunnel.”

  Arthur screwed up his face like he wanted to believe, but couldn’t quite bring himself to do it. But then he saw her again, and a broad smile burst forth.

  “You’ve never seen Merlin’s workshop, have you?” he asked, though it was more of a statement.

  “I’ve never seen any workshop, milord,” she replied, and without warning, he pulled her down the room like a child show
ing his parents that he’d discovered ducks for the first time. They paused before an open space, and he dusted it off with his palms, turning to Merlin with a manic grin.

  “Show her,” he said. Merlin’s expression had reverted to stubborn neutrality, and it didn’t shift for Arthur’s request. He seemed more comfortable pretending he didn’t hear. Arthur kept at it, though, without a hint of impatience: “You know, the...” he nodded, and Merlin finally seemed to take the cue. He set the tube down, pulled open a heavy drawer and removed an object Guinevere couldn’t identify. Not even when he brought it close and (reluctantly) put it in her hand.

  She looked down at it, baffled. It was flat on one end, but vaguely cylindrical; half the length of her forearm, with a squarish gap at the far end. It looked like someone broke the hilt off a crossbow and mucked with the result.

  “Sire,” she said, “we need to discuss—”

  He didn’t seem to hear her. “Merlin was tasked with... with shrinking—”

  “Miniaturizing,” corrected Merlin, dispassionately.

  “—yes, sorry, miniaturizing. Before I became King, I mean, he was tasked with miniaturizing crossbows, making them lighter, easier to carry, and what have you.”

  Guinevere turned the thing over in her hands. “This is a crossbow?”

  “Oh no, no it’s not a—” laughed Arthur. “You see...” he nodded to Merlin, winked. “You tell it better.”

  “No,” said Merlin.

  “Right,” said Arthur, “so the way the crossbow loads a new bolt is a... it’s a cycle, I think, yes? The same action that pushes one bolt out, pulls the previous wire back into place for the next shot. Push, pull, push, pull, yes?”

  Guinevere worked so very hard not to roll her eyes at him. She’d been in similar situations, too many times over the years... some fool soldier just learned the mechanics of his crossbow for the first time, and felt compelled to explain it to her like she was too stupid to speak in anything monosyllabic words and grand romantic imagery. Normally, she’d cap the conversation by cracking open the casing and swapping out the trigger wire like she was tying a bow... but being a smarmy show-off seemed a bad idea, when directed at the King.