CHAPTER TWENTY
-GUIN-
I slept in fragments.
The pallet was thin, and the stone sucked the warmth from me regardless of which way I lay.
I had pain in my hip, and I had pain in my shoulder.
Not to mention that Mordred’s binding felt like a stone I’d swallowed: it didn’t hurt any longer, but it reminded me of the absence of something that belonged there.
It reminded me of my magic that I could no longer call on.
I must have fallen asleep after at least an hour but before I knew it, Galahad was waking me.
“It is Orath’s Hour. It is time,” he said.
The candles had burned partway down. The room was dark except for them and the thin gray line of window that told me nothing about the hour.
I knelt.
“When the vessel is cracked, corruption enters through the fracture,” Galahad intoned.
“The woman who wields unnatural fire carries the crack within her womb, for it is through the womb that abomination enters the world. Her magic is the corruption’s breath. Her body is its door through which the demon enters.”
I listened to my body described as the entry point for spiritual contamination, but this time I didn’t get upset about it. I just let it enter one ear and leave the other. Then I imitated Galahad’s closing prayer, and I was done.
I slept again but was awakened maybe two hours later when I was told it was now Illara’s Hour. I knelt again, listened to a litany of my offenses again, repeated the closing prayer, and was done. Again.
By the third waking, my thoughts had gone thin, not with the clean sharpness of exhaustion that passes with a breath of cold air, but something more: like the threads pulling out of cloth worn past its usefulness.
I knelt, but the stone no longer registered as painful, mainly because I was numb against it.
I said the closing prayer and couldn’t have repeated whatever I’d agreed to.
I knew what this was.
Merlin had described it once, obliquely, in the context of something else: how sustained wakefulness undoes the structure of a person’s mind. The way the self becomes negotiable after enough hours without sleep. Merlin had been speaking about interrogation, but the point was still the same.
Whether Galahad knew this about what he was doing, I couldn’t say.
His face during the third waking was the same as it had been during the first and second: composed, earnest, no trace of satisfaction in it.
He seemed like he’d simply accepted the fact that prayer at this hour was required.
Not only that, but it was normal. He was already on his knees before I’d managed to sit up.
Between the third waking and the fourth, I dropped into something shallow that wasn’t quite sleep.
My body had stopped shivering from the perpetual cold in the room, and I was fairly sure it was just as numb as my knees.
The candles had burned to stubs, and they’d been replaced, but I hadn’t heard Galahad do it.
Regardless, the icons still watched from the walls.
This time, he hadn’t awakened me. I’d surfaced on my own, drawn up by a sound I couldn’t place. It was rhythmic and strangely wet, punctuated by sharp exhales through the nose: controlled, deliberate, the kind of breathing you learn on purpose.
I lay still and listened.
It came again. And again. The specific sound of leather on skin isn’t a sound you mistake for anything else once you’ve identified it. I’d heard it before: Merlin’s training had included enough unpleasant lessons that I’d learned to place sounds without having to see their sources.
I turned my head slowly. Galahad was kneeling near the window, his back to me, his tunic stripped off his shoulders.
The single candle left burning threw his shadow long and broken across the floor.
His arm moved, and the scourge caught the light on its downswing: a braided leather whip ending with numerous iron hooks.
“Strip from me what is unworthy, Drenath. Let the fire find the weakness and burn it clean. I offer this flesh: this vessel, this burden: to the refining flame. What remains when the burning ends is Yours. What was lost was never mine.”
He didn’t know I was awake.
That was the thing that held me still for three full breaths.
Then I was captured by the complete absence of performance in what he was doing to himself.
This wasn’t a demonstration because he believed I was still asleep.
His lips moved, and I caught fragments of what he was saying in the same desperate register as his prayers.
But now his voice was quieter, more intimate, like something said in a dream.
His breathing stayed controlled through each stroke, but at the edges of the control was something that wasn’t control at all.
I sat up.
I didn’t know why I did, but I was suddenly overcome with the need to stop him from harming himself.
It didn’t make any sense, of course, because he was my jailer.
Not to mention how he’d described my body to his gods as a vessel of corruption and how he’d structured the night specifically to dismantle me.
None of that was the thing I registered when I crossed the room, though. All I could see were the rivulets of blood that were trailing down his back, which was already a canvas of scars.
“You’re bleeding.” I reached for the scourge or his shoulder or some middle point between them. “Let me —”
Galahad moved so fast I couldn’t even track it. One moment I was reaching, and the next the wall was at my back, and my shoulder was ringing from the impact, and then he’d jumped a foot or so away with his hands raised as though he was warding off something that had lunged at him.
“Do not.” His voice shook. “Do not touch me... ever.”
His face in the candlelight was nothing like I’d ever seen before.
The usual calm was gone, something raw now underneath it, something he was working to contain even as I watched.
His chest heaved, and the scourge hung at his side, dripping with his blood.
I could see the welts across the tops of his shoulders, bright and wet, and it was all I could do to look away from them and back at his face.
“I was trying to help,” I started.
“I don’t want nor need your help.” The words came out wrecked as he turned away from me. “Go back to your pallet.”
I went. Then I lay with my face to the wall and listened to him pray. I had no idea what time it was, but the air outside had the tinge of early morning.
He was quieter than before, but urgent in a way the earlier prayers hadn’t been: those had the structure of liturgy, but this had no structure at all.
His voice caught on certain words but kept moving.
I heard my name once. I heard forgive several times.
Then I heard a long silence that had more in it than the words did.
My shoulder ached where he’d pushed me into the wall. I pressed my palm to the stone and felt the cold of it and thought about what Merlin had told me once about men who make war on their own bodies.
They’re not seeking pain, he’d said. They’re seeking proof. That the flesh can be defeated. That the thing inside the flesh can be made to submit.
He’d been speaking about someone else. Someone he’d known once, before the exile, before everything, but he’d never told me the man’s name.
I wondered now if that man had been Galahad.
I supposed I would never know. All I did know was that Merlin had said the words with his usual detachment, the scholar’s distance he kept between himself and emotion.
But his voice had done something strange on the word submit.
I hadn’t understood it then, but lying on my thin pallet in Galahad’s room while listening to him pray against the impulse to accept comfort from me, I understood it better.
Dawn came gray and mild through the window.
Galahad was at the table when I woke for the last time.
His tunic was already on, his face was freshly shaven, and his hair was combed.
The scourge was nowhere to be seen. He poured water from a clay jug into a basin and set out a cloth and turned to look at me with the same measured calm he’d had when he first showed me the room.
“You’ll wash,” he said. “Then we pray to Kaelthar.”
I sat up. My body was a catalog of complaints: the cold had settled into my joints, and the ache from Mordred’s binding had moved from my shoulder blades to somewhere lower. But all of that paled in comparison to my thoughts, which were still frayed from the night before.
I looked at the man who’d shoved me into a wall six hours ago. Then I looked at the tunic that covered the wounds he’d made in his own skin.
The calm on his face was real. That was the thing that stuck with me.
He hadn’t manufactured the calm for my benefit: he’d rebuilt it from the inside, laid stone on stone in the dark hours, mortared it with prayer, will and whatever else he used to keep himself sealed.
It was genuine, it was impenetrable, and underneath it was something that had shaken, cracked, and pleaded with its god for protection against a woman who had only tried to touch his bleeding back.
He wasn’t performing cruelty. He was losing a war.
The part that made my stomach drop was understanding that the battlefield was now me.
-CORVIN-
The light never went out.
That was the thing about Mordred’s cells. Every other dungeon I’d ever seen, and I’d seen a few, ran on shadow. Torches died. Guards forgot to replace them. Darkness crept in the way it always did, patient and inevitable, and if you knew what to do with it, you were never truly trapped.
Mordred knew that.
The runes were carved directly into the stone.
All four walls, the ceiling, the floor. They were pale gold script in lines so precise they looked printed rather than chiseled, and they glowed without heat, without flicker, without any of the small vulnerabilities that fire carried.
The light wasn’t bright enough to hurt, just bright enough to deny.
It sat at constant midday level, and it didn’t care what time it was outside, whether I’d slept or whether my eyes had started to ache from having nothing to rest against.
This was a cell built for a shadow worker. Mordred hadn’t needed to know my name to build it right.