The crowd parts to let them through. Regent Gabriel’s eyes narrow as he comes closer. “You do not even speak like the girl, and yet here she stands.” He glances at his Seneschal. “What do you think, Tacitus?”

Tacitus stops several paces from me and leers, ringed fingers twitching at his sides. “I’d like to take a tour of that mind.” His fangs show his age, and his eyes burn nearly as dark as the Shadow King’s.

“Bree, what are they talking about?” Greer says, faltering. “Why are you cuffed?”

“That’s not Bree,” says Victoria. She uses Tristan’s speed to dart forward, reaching me before the other Legendborn do to peer closer. “Can’t you tell?”

Her Squire reaches her side in a blur. “Is that…?”

“I am King Arthur Pendragon of Britain.”

A mocking voice calls out from the east. I pivot on my heel to see Lord Regent Aldrich stride down the stairs from the south toward our group, eyes bright. “Son of Uther Pendragon. The first wielder of Caledfwlch, the blade Excalibur, and first-ranked of the Round Table in the Shadowborn holy war.”

“You recognize your king, Aldrich,” I reply. “All the better to cede leadership to me, and with haste.”

“Bree—” Greer calls.

“She’s not in there!” Victoria shakes her head, shouting back at the Legendborn. “That is not our Scion of Arthur! She’s closer to a demon than Legendborn. Look at her! She’s possessed by a ghost. The Regents should have kept her drugged and locked up!”

“Victoria, my dear,” Aldrich says with a furrowed brow. “Give us some credit. We did try, but there were traitors in our midst.”

“Tor…?” Sarah steps back from her girlfriend. “The Regents told us that Bree had gone into hiding with William for her own safety. All those weeks trying to figure out if they were lying and you… you knew what really happened to them?” Similar gasps from the group.

Victoria raises her chin. “Camlann has come, and Bree has no idea what she’s doing. She shouldn’t even be here, Sar!”

Sarah’s face is a tumble of emotions—shock, fear, then a haunted type of disgust. “You spied for them? This whole time?”

As the girls argue, I notice the cloth-wrapped blade Aldrich has kept hidden behind him. Even without seeing it bare, my hands and my fingers itch to claim it. Briana’s body knows the blade because our shared blood calls for it, even when cuffed. “You have Caledfwlch.”

“This?” Aldrich raises the sword by the wrapped flat of the blade, pulling at the strings as he talks. As he unravels it, the weapon becomes exposed for what it is when it is not held by the blood of the Pendragon: a narrow, thin, old metal longsword of no remarkable feature and no greater strength than any other metal-forged blade.

Except that it has been broken in two.