My thirst for vengeance simmers, boils, but Arthur’s words keep it from spilling over the way I want it to. The fury I feel on behalf of Vera has nowhere new to go, but still it grows. Just as a flower turns toward the sun, my anger seeks a source to feed it.

“Yes.” Arthur hums. “There. I recognize your desire to fight. Bloodlust, with purpose. Our battles are more alike than you know. We both fight monsters, be they demons or humans.”

“Our battles are not the same.”

“But they come from the same wish. The desire to conquer death. I saw my friends fall by the dozens to the Shadowborn. ‘No more,’ I once said to myself. ‘No more deaths.’ ”

No more deaths. I said those words too.

“We are not alike,” I whisper.

“Then whose grief is this?”

Abruptly, I am drowning. What I’d felt at the funeral hits me over and over again, filling my eyes and mouth with the screaming agony of absence. The gaping hole of love without a beloved. The memory of waking in the night, wishing it was all a dream. Like my body in the Round Table vision, I cannot tell Arthur’s pain from mine. Where his leads, mine follows, and when I remember, so does he. Then, it’s gone and I am gasping for breath, for light, chasing the remains of my own heart.

“That was…”

“Ours…” His voice breaks, as ragged and hoarse as my own. Like grief had just devoured him, and left him hollow too. “What truly ties us together is not blood, but pain. When we love someone and lose them, that loss imprints itself on everyone else we love too. I see it in your eyes, Briana. Have you not envisioned the faces of those you love, slack with death? Not because you wish to see such a scene, but because your mind and heart give you no choice?”

I remember the vision of Nick, Sel, Alice. My mother. Deaths that I could not prevent.

“I think…you do as I did. You invoke grief now so that death will never surprise you again. You imagine how it could happen, so that you can imagine how it cannot. You wish to destroy it before it destroys you. Is this the right of it?”

I’d just felt Nick, I’m sure of it. Held his hand, seen his face. The idea of never seeing him again in real life skips sadness and sends me to numbing rage.

Yes, my carved heart says. Yes.

“The power of the Table, Briana, is to stop the Shadowborn from destroying human life. But the power of a king? We lead from our pain. We make the choice to defeat death before it finds us, steals from us again. Half a heart is not enough to live a whole life, is it?”