CHAPTER TWENTY #3
He was quiet for a beat too long. I watched the calculation move behind his eyes: reassessing, adjusting, filing away. This was a man who stored information the way a miser stored coin. Everything useful, nothing wasted. “It’s not my cell.”
I looked at him. “It might as well be.”
I didn’t know how long we were silent after that. It could have been a minute or four.
“I find something interesting about you, Corvin of Blackhollow.”
I didn’t bother looking up at him. “Do you?”
“I do.”
“And what would that be?”
“How well you know this castle,” he said then. His voice had changed, the lightness gone.
“You forget I served Arthur for many years.”
“True, but you’ve also been away for many years. And in those years, things here have changed as they’re wont to do. And yet.” He moved a pawn with one finger. “As I understand it, you entered through the eastern ward.”
I kept my expression still.
“The eastern ward gate has a blind spot. Twelve feet of it, where the guards’ sight lines don’t overlap during rotation.” He tilted his head. “Most people don’t know that.” He paused. “Especially people who have been away as long as you have.”
The approach to Camelot had been fast, and I’d taken the route automatically, the way you took familiar roads: not thinking, just moving. Years of knowing these walls in my bones, and I’d let them carry me without checking what I was revealing.
Fool.
“As I said, I spent many years here when I was in service to the crown.”
“Mmm.” Kay moved a rook. “And the ward-stones on the western wall. The one below the old garrison barracks. Someone moved it, perhaps eight months ago, creating a gap in the suppression field roughly fifteen yards wide.”
That was interesting because the ward-stones had nothing to do with me, so I could only assume they’d been Morgan’s handiwork.
Kay looked at me in that assessing way of his, and something shifted in his expression. Like a hypothesis gaining weight.
“I wouldn’t know anything about that,” I answered honestly.
“Interesting. I mean, that you know as much as you do, for a man who’s been in the enchanted wilds these past years.”
I moved my queen again. Took his bishop.
“Check,” I said.
Kay looked at the board. His mouth curved.
“You’re going to lose eventually,” he said.
“Everyone does.”
He studied the board for a long moment. Then he began moving the pieces into a little sack he’d placed on the ground, methodically and unhurried, and I understood the game was over in more than one sense.
He stood when the board was cleared and tucked it under his arm. Then he knocked twice on the door for the guard before turning back to face me.
“I’ll tell Arthur you weren’t cooperative and that I didn’t get anything I came here hoping to get,” he said.
“He’ll be surprised by that, will he?”
“I don’t know—will he be?”
The door opened. Kay stepped through it without looking back, and the door locked. The rune-light hummed against the stone walls, steady and inescapable.
I sat in the middle of it and thought about the ward-stone, the eastern gate, and the way Kay’s eyes had moved when he’d said interesting. I thought about the way he’d been quiet and unhurried, the way a patient man stored something he expected to use later.
He’d come here fishing. That much was obvious. But I feared he’d left with more than he’d brought.
I pressed my thumb against the floor, felt the grain of the stone, and let myself think about what that meant. Then I counted the seconds between the flicker at the next shift change.
Two and a half.
Still not enough.
-GUIN-
Galahad paused at the door.
“Percival is here to relieve me for the next hour,” he said, but he didn’t bother looking at me when he said it. He was already checking the latch, already somewhere else in his mind.
“Where are you going?”
“To the chapel for my prayers,” he answered but still didn’t bother turning around. “Don’t mistake Percival’s kindness for weakness.”
Then he was gone, and the door closed with a sound that felt somehow like an ending.
I sat on the edge of my cot as Percival came in quietly, the way he did everything.
There was never any announcement, never any performance to anything he did.
Instead, he took his post beside the door and the room rearranged itself around him.
Where Galahad’s presence had weight and cold authority, Percival’s had something harder to name.
He was simply there, but in being there, he was blank even if he was entirely present.
But he was present the way a witness is present.
He didn’t look at me, wouldn’t look at me.
I watched him settle into his stance: his shoulders loose, hands clasped behind his back, and his eyes on the door. Surprisingly, my chest did something I hadn’t given it permission to do.
I suddenly remembered a moment I hadn’t thought about in a long while.
This was back when I’d been Lioran, and the two of us had passed a whole evening together, Percival teaching me the names of the stars.
Not because I’d asked him to, exactly. More because I’d mentioned, offhand, that I’d grown up in the hills and never had anyone to teach me the names of the stars.
Percival had pulled me out to the eastern wall walk after the evening meal, and he’d pointed at the sky for an hour as he’d regaled me with stories of the gods and the stars they were named for.
I remembered how he’d had this way of describing them like they were old friends he was introducing.
That cluster there: that’s the Goddess Trinad’s belt. And that one, the three in a line: that’s called the Shepherd’s Crook, though Kay calls it the Drunkard’s Staff, which I think is unkind to both shepherds and drunkards.
“Percival.” I only said his name. But I said it the way I used to say it, and I wondered if he noticed that.
“My lady.” Two words in response, but his eyes remained on the door.
I let the silence sit for a moment. Then I tried again because I was me, and I couldn’t help it.
“Do you remember what Kay called the Shepherd’s Crook?”
A pause.
“Yes.” One word, and his eyes never left the door.
The room was very quiet. Outside, somewhere down the corridor, two guards were talking about a horse, and I heard every word of it. And I wished just a few of those words would come from Percival instead.