Chapter 30: The Round Table Holds — The Long War Begins

The speeder made the transport in twenty minutes.

The crossing back to Coruscant took four days.

Arthur spent most of them sleeping, which was not a thing he had done easily since Camlann, and which he understood as his body's belated accounting of what the Tatooine encounter had cost it. The Sith apprentice had been precise in ways Maul had not been — less spectacle, more architecture, targeting the spaces between Arthur's defenses with the methodical patience of someone who had studied the geometry of breaking things. Excalibur had held. Arthur's ribs had not held quite as well, and the Camlann wound had announced itself with a sharpness that reminded him it was still there, still waiting, still the thing that would eventually settle the account Merlin had deferred.