CHAPTER TWENTY-ONE #3
I sat in the Council Chamber and didn’t go to the dungeons where I still needed to interrogate Corvin. I just... fuck, I didn’t have the energy for it. Outside, the winter light shifted, and the castle moved around me.
All I could think about was the garden in Corbenic. The moon full in the sky and a woman’s hand on my arm.
I told myself it was the last time I’d think about it. But I’d be thinking about it for the rest of the day, and I already knew it.
-GUIN-
Galahad’s bed chamber was better than Arthur’s dungeon. But that was the most generous thing I could say about it.
There was a window, but it was small, iron-barred, and set high in the stone, so I had to stand on the table to reach it.
And once I did, it revealed nothing but the sky.
But it was still a window. Light came through it in the mornings, pale and thin, and I’d learned to track the day according to where the sunlight fell on the floor.
This morning I found myself alone, except for the guard who was stationed outside the door. Galahad was attending a council meeting, and I was beyond glad for it.
The room had been holding the usual noises: distant footsteps in the corridor, the faint groan of the keep settling, a draft moving through the gap beneath the door, but then all of it stopped, the way sound stops when snow begins to fall, and my eyes went to the window before I understood why.
The first moth came through the bars and landed on the sill. And I recognized it immediately, recognized the particular way it settled, wings flat and still, no flutter, no adjustment, like it had arrived exactly where it was meant to be.
Then there was another one and three more in quick succession, dropping through the gap in the iron and scattering to different corners of the room. One found the bedpost, one found Galahad’s writing table, and one landed on the stone floor two feet from where I was sitting and didn’t move.
I was on my feet by the time I counted nearly twenty of them.
They had distributed themselves around the room with an evenness that made my heart speed up because they weren’t clustered the way moths cluster around light or warmth. Instead, they were spread out, and all of them were facing the same direction.
Facing me.
I crossed to the nearest one and crouched down.
The skull on its back was exactly the same as the ones I’d seen in the dungeon: the same two hollow points where the eyes should have been.
And the same deliberate symmetry, sitting right at the edge of what a natural thing could produce and then just slightly past it, into the territory where intention lives.
It looked back up at me, and I straightened, backing away.
The rational explanation I reached for wasn’t there.
Moths don’t move in groups, and they don’t follow one another.
The dungeon cell had been underground, deep underground, with no window, and no reasonable way in, and I’d been moved since then to a completely different floor of the keep.
There was no route that connected those facts into something sensible.
I stood in the middle of the room and waited for meaning to arrive.
But it didn’t. Instead, Galahad did. The door opened in a single controlled movement, with no hesitation and no wasted effort. Galahad entered the room and stopped.
His eyes immediately found the moths, and he just stood there for a second, maybe less. But I’d spent enough days watching him to know exactly how long his normal stillness lasted, and this wasn’t it.
His eyes moved as he counted them. I could see him doing it, the small systematic sweep of a man taking inventory, moving from the bedpost to the writing table to the floor, and the moths didn’t scatter.
They didn’t flinch. They sat exactly where they’d settled, wings flat, facing me, and acknowledged his presence with the same indifference they’d have shown a draft.
That was what did it, I thought. Not the number of them, not even the skull markings on their backs. It was the fact that they didn’t care that he’d walked in that spurred him into action once more.
He pulled himself together. I watched that happen too, watched the way he took a breath and released the sharp hold of his jaw, then his shoulders. Then he took another breath that reset everything back to where Galahad kept it.
But I’d already seen the gap in the mortar.
When his eyes finally came to me, something in them had rearranged.
It wasn’t the assessment he usually gave me: that cold, methodical inventory of a threat he’d already categorized and filed.
This was harder and less settled. It was the look of a man who’d been solving a problem one way and just found a piece that didn’t fit the frame.
His right hand moved, his fingers pressing briefly to his chest as his thumb touched the hollow of his throat in a motion that signified protection or the asking of it.
“Did you call them?” he asked.
“No.”
“Do you know what they are?”
“No.”
He looked at me the way you look at a lock when you’ve just tried the only key you own and it won’t turn. He frowned.
“You expect me to believe you have no part in them being here?”
“Yes, because that’s the truth.”
The room was quiet around us, twenty pairs of wings holding still. I could hear the faint draft moving under the door.
Something crossed his face. Irritation, maybe? It was always so hard to tell with Galahad. He was like trying to read a blank wall.
He moved to his side of the room and put his back to the stone as he faced me, and the quality of his attention was nothing like the vigilance he’d kept before. Before, he’d watched me the way a guard watches a prisoner, but this was different.
Now he watched me the way you watch a threat you don’t know anything about, with fear deep in your eyes.
The candle on the table burned down by a finger’s width, but neither of us said anything, and the moths didn’t move.
I was suddenly highly aware that whatever ground we’d been standing on before he’d opened that door, whatever careful, hostile, structured distance we’d built between us, it was now gone.
The moths had dissolved it simply by existing, by arriving, by circling me, and refusing to even notice Galahad at all.