I grit my teeth and draw my palm down in a quick jerk. The cut is so quick, there is no pain, no wound, and then blood swells.

“On my heart…”

Blood flows in a bright red line down my wrist, across the shining gold of my mother’s charm bracelet. I lift my bloodied palm to my chest to wrap around the Pendragon coin.

“To unite the Table in spirit and in flesh.”

For the second time in this cave, time slows, twists… and a vision swallows me whole.

No Scion of Arthur has ever written down or shared with anyone what they saw during their Rite. Not to the members of the Table, not to their bonded Squires, not to their Kingsmages. Not even to their own children. This part of the ritual is for kings and kings only.

I am in a great hall with a ceiling so tall that all I can make out are a swirl of shadows in grays and blacks. The floor is so dark that it devours light. And in the middle of this massive room there is a table.

I do not need to follow its curved edges to know its shape.

A dim light grows at the table’s center. By the time I reach the sole empty wooden chair and stand at its back, the blue-white wash has spread just enough to illuminate a dozen pairs of gloved hands and gauntlet-wrapped forearms that rest atop its surface.

To my left, bathed in deep shadow, a man sits still as stone save for slow breaths that lift his chest in a steady rhythm. Wisps of light glint from the metal of his chain mail. When he inhales, his tunic rises just enough that I can glimpse the sigil in its center: the tawny yellow lion couchant of Sir Owain. The man to his left breathes in, out. His tunic bears the deep orange three-banded circle of Sir Bors. There is another man beside him, and another, and beyond that the light does not reach and there are men I cannot see, but I feel them still.

Listening. Waiting.

This is the Round Table. An echo of the final twelve knights of Arthur’s army who were bespelled by Merlin so that their spirits could live forevermore. Their spirits have been waiting for me here. Something tells me that they will not move, will not speak, until I do.

I blow out a slow, calming breath. Unite the Table in spirit, then in flesh.

I grasp the back of the chair to pull it from the table’s edge—and freeze.

The hands wrapped around the wooden chair back are not mine alone.

Flickering between my own fingers are the faint silver outlines of fingers broader and longer than mine. A wide, shimmering palm engulfs my own.

No. No.

Me. Arthur. My body. His.

Not again.