CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO #4
She moved through the form Arthur had set for her: I’d seen it end, caught the tail end of whatever he’d been putting her through, and I noticed that there was something different in the way she carried herself.
It wasn’t confidence exactly, no... it was something harder than that.
She’d shed something, or acquired something, and I couldn’t parse which.
The distinction mattered, though, even if I didn’t know why I was still trying to make it.
Arthur crossed the yard away from her without looking back.
I knew that walk. I’d been reading the set of his shoulders for years, and what I read there now wasn’t indifference, even if that was what he was pretending it was.
Indifference would have been easier, but this was something he was holding by the throat.
I looked away and breathed in deeply, irritated with myself for even noticing as much as I just had.
Why Arthur was training her, I didn’t know.
I mean, I knew the reasons that he’d given us in the council meeting, but those reasons didn’t ring true somehow.
I believed the real truth was more along the lines that he just couldn’t keep away from her, but that was a reason he couldn’t face, so he’d called it something else.
I supposed I couldn’t even fault him for that. In truth, we both were having our own internal battles where she was concerned.
The guard was already moving toward her from the gate tower. In another minute, she’d be on her way back up to Galahad’s bedchamber, and I’d go back to whatever fiction I’d been constructing about having somewhere else to be.
I was already turning to busy myself with something else when Agravaine materialized at my shoulder.
He had a gift for doing just that: for appearing at the exact moment he was the least useful.
He came to stand beside me and looked out across the yard, his eyes landing on her.
The expression he wore was one of casual appraisal.
“Did you see the shape of her ass when she bent over just now?” His voice was conversational, almost warm. “Even though she’s our enemy, what I wouldn’t give to fuck that tight little ass. Maybe I could get her to side with us... with my cock.” Then he chuckled.
I went very still. And it wasn’t the stillness of a man exercising restraint. This was the stillness of a man who had just heard something despicable and was now letting all the separate parts of himself catch up to the same location before he moved.
There was the Lance who had oaths to honor and knew exactly what she was and what she’d done to earn her current accommodations.
Then there was the Lance who’d watched her across that yard for ten minutes he couldn’t account for.
There was also the Lance who’d spent weeks constructing an architecture of feeling nothing and had apparently done worse work on it than he’d thought.
All three of them arrived at the same place as I turned and looked at Agravaine.
I had no hand on a weapon and no particular change in my expression. All I gave him was the full weight of my attention, which I’d been told was uncomfortable even when I meant it pleasantly.
Right now I didn’t mean it pleasantly.
“You won’t ever speak about her like that again,” I said. “Not to me and not to anyone else, or you won’t like what happens next.”
My voice came out quiet. It usually did when I meant something.
Agravaine blinked just once, quickly, and then he had the expression of a man who was recalibrating.
“You’re surprisingly protective,” he said, his beady eyes narrowing even further, “of a traitor.”
“I’m not protecting anything.” I held his eyes. “But as the king’s First, I’m informing you that if I ever hear you discussing the prisoner in such crude terms again, you won’t like the outcome. Am I understood?”
He tried to hold my gaze but didn’t quite manage it.
“Am I fucking understood?” I repeated, taking a step closer.
His eyes widened a fraction, and he held up his hands as he backed up a step. “Yes, you’re understood.” He made a small sound that might have been a laugh and then shook his head as he moved on.
I turned back to the yard.
She was halfway to the gate tower now, the guard a few paces back, her shoulders set against something I couldn’t see. I watched her go and told myself I wasn’t watching, yet I was aware that this particular fiction had stopped being convincing to anyone, including myself.
Agravaine had noticed that I cared too much. That wasn’t a good thing.
You could explain that you were just correcting a junior ranking knight on the importance of chivalry and conduct in Camelot.
Yes, that was true. But it was also true that Agravaine wasn’t someone you wanted as an enemy.
Fuck.
I stood where I was until she passed through the gate and the yard closed behind her.
Then I pushed off from the wall and went to find the men I was supposed to be drilling, carrying with me the flat, unexamined knowledge that there were apparently still things I wouldn’t permit where Guinevere was concerned.
Whatever she was or wasn’t to me, whatever she’d done or hadn’t done, didn’t matter.
There was a line. And Agravaine had crossed it.
I didn’t imagine he’d cross it again.