CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
-CORVIN-
On the third day of my imprisonment, I instituted the rule.
It would be fifteen minutes. That was how much time I gave myself. It was timed according to the beat of my own heart, which could drop to a steady pace of around fifty beats per minute. I’d done this back in Blackhollow, lying still in a trench as a raiding party marched overhead.
Fifteen minutes to think about Guin before I forced myself to think of something else.
Usually, I failed because I mostly worried that Arthur had done something...
permanent to her. Although I’d argued for the fact that keeping her alive made the most sense to him, the mind has a way of arguing with its own logic when you’re imprisoned with nothing more to do than argue with yourself.
Of course, Arthur didn’t want to keep us together in my cell.
That would have been a reward, especially after he’d seen us together in the heat of passion.
So he’d split us on purpose, immediately, before I’d gotten my bearings back.
That wasn’t an accident. That was someone who understood the structure of what he was dealing with, someone who understood that two people who mattered to each other are two separate pressure points,
and that a pressure point only works when you can apply it without the other person present to absorb the blow. He’d read the situation correctly.
My thoughts again turned to Guin, and gods, I wished more than ever before that I could hold her in my arms just one more time. No matter what happened to either of us, that was the one thing I focused on more than any other.
When my fifteen minutes were up, I thought about Kay.
He’d come to visit me again, bringing water I hadn’t asked for and information I didn’t want, and delivered both with the attentive care of a man who’d been waiting some time to have the right audience.
Kay had always been that way: capable of patience that read as indifference until the moment he chose to spend it.
I’d watched him dismantle men in a single sentence with exactly the smile he’d worn walking into my cell.
And even though I couldn’t stand Kay and I knew just what a snake he was, I found I looked forward to his visits because it was the only way I ever got any information about her.
She’s been moved, he’d said. Out of the dungeon. Into Galahad’s custody.
He’d watched my face while he relayed the news.
I gave him nothing. I was good at giving nothing, better than most, worse than some, but with Kay, there was an additional layer because Kay’s ability to read people meant he was always looking for the exact place the knife would do the most damage.
So I gave him less than nothing. I gave him the face I used for receiving intelligence I’d already suspected.
He left before he could tell whether his information had landed.
It had landed. But that wasn’t the useful part.
The useful part was this: Kay had come to get information from me.
Whether Arthur had put him up to as much or it was Kay just trying to win favor was anyone’s guess.
But it meant I was something that needed managing, which meant I was still a variable in the equation, which meant someone, Arthur or Kay himself or some calculation the two of them had made together, hadn’t yet decided what to do with me.
Undecided was better than decided. Undecided was still a gap, a question mark.
I set the subject of Kay down for a moment and focused on the guards’ rotation.
The man with the limp was approaching the turning point in the distant hallway. Forty-three steps. Every time he reached step number forty-one, he’d pause for three seconds to transfer his body weight off his damaged knee joint.
Even though my fifteen minutes were already up, I let myself have another three.
She was better in Galahad’s custody than she was in a dark, dank cell.
That was the one thing I kept returning to because it was the only thought that brought me any joy.
From what I knew of Galahad, I didn’t believe he was cruel.
He was pious, and he was dull, but that was all I really knew of him.
Even though we’d been Knights of the original Round Table together, I’d never sought out his company just as he’d never sought out mine.
It wasn’t a surprise that Arthur had picked Galahad. He was the only one who wouldn’t force himself on her, mainly because he would never undignify himself with the pleasures of the flesh.
Yet, Morgan had been correct when she’d said we all were essentially helpless to the call of water, to the call of the Lady of the Lake and Guinevere. And Galahad, when you stripped away his piousness, was just a man. A man spending most of his time with the most beautiful woman in Camelot...
My thoughts were interrupted when two of the guards appeared outside my cell.
I was on my feet before the door finished opening.
The taller one entered the cell and then moved behind me.
He was holding chains while the other held the door open, and neither of them spoke, which told me they’d been given specific instructions about engagement: Don’t talk to him. He’ll use it against you.
I’d given that same instruction myself, years ago, about other men. It was oddly flattering to hear it now.
The chains were wrapped around my wrists, which the guard then pulled behind me. I let them do it without resistance because resistance at this stage was theater, and I had no interest in theater. I had more interest in reserving what energy I still had.
They walked me out of the dungeon.
The sun hit me first, before the warmth, before anything else, just the raw brightness of it, and my eyes watered immediately.
I hadn’t seen real midday light in a long while now, and even though my cell was bright, it wasn’t this bright.
My shadow fell directly beneath me, compressed and useless, offering nothing about the guard on my left, nothing about the one on my right, nothing about angles or distances or what was between us and the next wall.
Yes, the sun wasn’t my friend right now.
We crossed a courtyard and then walked into a second tower that was lower and broader than the first.
The stone in this dungeon had been absorbing water for decades, and the iron was rusted and smelled of a strange tang.
There was something underneath that smell that wasn’t rot, exactly, but was adjacent to it.
I knew that smell, and as the room resolved itself slowly as my eyes adjusted, I was aware of Arthur standing there, even before I could see him clearly. I blinked twice, carefully, and kept my face composed through both blinks.
He was standing with his back to me, looking at the wall.
There was a length of rope threaded through an iron ring in the ceiling beam. I didn’t need to guess at its purpose. I’d seen this configuration in three different kingdoms, and it worked the same way in all of them.
I took the room in sections: there was the door behind me, guarded; one window that was high and narrow, and completely impractical; two guards inside the room, plus the two who’d brought me here.
And there were no exits. I didn’t look at the long and stained table that sat in the center of the room, and I definitely didn’t look at the instruments that sat atop it.
Looking directly at them would be a reaction, and reactions were information I wasn’t willing to give.
Arthur turned, and his expression was the same one he’d always used for tasks he found neither pleasant nor interesting but considered necessary.
I’d watched him wear that expression through siege negotiations, through the sentencing of men he’d served with, and through the particular quiet of a battlefield after the killing was done.
It wasn’t coldness, necessarily; it was efficiency.
That had always been the more difficult version of Arthur to deal with: not the one who was angry, but the one who had already moved past anger into calculation.
“This can go easily, or this can be difficult,” he started. “I probably don’t have to tell you that the difficult path is also the painful path.” He was right: he didn’t have to tell me. I already knew.
“What do you want to know?”
“Many things.” He clasped his hands behind his back as he began walking around me. “We’ll start with Merlin’s contacts inside Camelot and whether anyone at my court is compromised.”
He asked the question (which wasn’t phrased as a question) the way you ask something you’ve already half-answered in your own mind. He was watching my face more than he was listening for my words, and I understood that because I would have done the same thing.
I said nothing. I just held his gaze and let the silence sit between us, and he looked at it the way you look at a door you already knew was locked. He nodded once. Then he said something quietly to the guard on my left.
I didn’t have time to brace myself. They’d looped the rope around my wrists before I understood what they were doing, threading it up through the iron ring that was bolted to the ceiling beam. Then one of the guards put his full weight into the other end and hauled.
The floor dropped away. My arms, already chained behind my back, were wrenched upward at an angle the shoulder isn’t built to accommodate.
Both joints screamed at once, the tendons stretched past their tolerance, as my own body weight worked against me.
I hung there with nothing beneath my feet.
And while I hung there, the pain didn’t build.
It arrived complete, white and total, shooting straight up through both shoulders and into the base of my skull and behind my eyes.
For one full second it simply erased everything.
There was no thought, plan, or even the careful blankness I’d been maintaining since they’d walked into my cell.
My breath left me in a rush I couldn’t control even though I refused to scream.
Instead, I found the ceiling beam with my eyes, I locked my jaw, and I didn’t make a fucking sound.
Arthur waited. It was something he’d always been good at. I remembered that about him, from years ago, from the long nights before a battle when other men paced and he just sat with his back to the fire and watched the dark.