Chapter 13: The Price of the Kingdom

The poison pill documentation ran to forty-one pages. Arthur had read it three times on the flight back from a shareholder call in New York, and each time his eyes had snagged on the same clause — the one that would make any acquisition of more than fifteen percent of Camelot's outstanding shares prohibitively expensive without board approval, a mechanism so legally standard that its bluntness felt almost insulting given everything else happening around it. He set it on the conference table and looked at his board.

Eleven faces. Merlin had not come. He had sent a message at eight forty-seven a.m. that said only: "I should not vote on this one. You'll understand why later." Arthur had read it twice, filed it in the part of his mind currently operating on delay, and continued preparing.

The conference room was the formal one, not the Round Table room. That distinction had been Bedivere's suggestion when Arthur proposed the emergency session, and Arthur had agreed without quite understanding why until he was standing at the head of a rectangular table and realized that rectangles had a head. Whoever sat at the narrow end was already making an argument.