CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
-GUIN-
Today’s bread was just like yesterday’s, and like the one before that.
It was just a half of a crust that was starting to turn gray. In the cup next to the bread was water that had been left standing long enough that it picked up some of the stone cup’s taste. It was stale, cold, and slightly metallic, like licking a riverbed.
I looked down at the crust and then felt the bones of my rib cage beneath my tunic. I didn’t do so intentionally; my hand moved toward my ribs almost on instinct. The bones under the linen were more prominent than they’d been a week before. That was for sure.
Outside the narrow window, Camelot was waking up, and it was a sound I savored but one I also deeply resented because they were the sounds of freedom and I was stuck in Galahad’s bedchamber, confined.
I could hear the clank of practice blades from the training yard as someone called out a formation, and all I could think about was how each of the men had eaten a full breakfast before they’d started practicing their thrusts and parries.
Soon, the smell of wood smoke and roasting meat from the kitchens drifted under the door and turned my stomach inside out.
Galahad was in the middle of his pre-dawn prayer, and I was alongside him. Although I too should have been in the middle of my prayer, my mind was anywhere but.
He’d woken me at midnight, and at the second watch, and at the fourth.
Canonical hours, he called them, and then he continued on about the rhythm of devotion, as if it were some mystical god that was in the room with us.
The rhythm of devotion left me three, maybe four hours of broken sleep stitched together across a night, and my thoughts moved through it now like fingers through thick mud.
The crust sat there. I picked it up, studied it, and then put it back down again.
Starve the beast within her. That’s what he’d said this was when he’d prayed to his slew of gods. He’d said as much with his hands folded, his eyes level, and his voice carrying all the calm certainty of a man who’d never gone hungry. Well, unless going hungry was on purpose, like his fasting days.
The beast. As if what lived in me was separate from me, as though you could hollow out a person of whatever evil you believed was inside them and still leave the person intact.
I’d been trained by Merlin in Annwyn for three years. I’d infiltrated Camelot under a false name and a false face. I’d stood stripped in front of Arthur’s court, and I hadn’t begged. I’d made it through the Shadow Trials, and I hadn’t broken.
I wasn’t going to eat the bread.
-GUIN-
Galahad returned from breakfast as the morning light went pale gold through the window. His prayer beads were wound around his left hand, as usual. They were the amber ones he used for the Drenath sequence.
Drenath was the god known for pain and purification through suffering, the burning away of weakness.
“The body is the crucible. Pain is the fire. What survives the burning is worthy of the Boundless,” Galahad whispered once he walked into the room and saw me.
Apparently, Drenath’s teachings were meant to instill the idea that life’s hardships refine character. He was also the god who believed in punishing oneself for one’s sins, hence the latticework of scars on Galahad’s back, all interweaving like some macabre vine.
When he walked into the room, he moved like a man who’d trained himself to take up no more space than was necessary. His golden hair caught the light and almost reflected like a halo. Galahad was, objectively, beautiful, and that seemed to make everything worse.
He looked at the untouched crust of bread that was still sitting in front of me.
Then he looked at me.
“You haven’t eaten.”
“No.”
A pause. “You eat when I tell you to eat.”
I felt my eyes narrow of their own accord. “Why am I here?”
His chin came up a fraction. “You’re a prisoner of—”
“—I know why I’m in Camelot.” My voice was steady.
I was surprised, actually, by how steady it was.
Hunger did something to steadiness; it stripped away the wobble of social consideration, leaving only the load-bearing structure.
“I’m Arthur’s political prisoner. That was the arrangement.”
I looked at him. “Nowhere in that arrangement, though, did it say I’d have to become a follower of your religion. What’s more, Arthur never mentioned anything about starving me. And never did he say I should be awakened seven times a night to recite prayers to gods I don’t worship.
So I’m asking you directly: why am I here? In your quarters. Under your authority specifically.”
The prayer beads went still in his hand.
“The King determined that my supervision would best serve—”
“—what are you afraid of?”
The question landed. I watched it land.
“I am not—”
“—I have no magic.” I held up my hands, palms out.
The binding was invisible, but I could still feel it.
“I have no weapons. I have no allies. I can’t reach anyone outside these walls. I’m at least ten pounds lighter than I was two weeks ago, and I’m so tired I’m having trouble tracking this conversation.”
I lowered my hands. “What exactly do you think I’m going to do? What threat do you need this much control to contain?”
Galahad was very still, but he said nothing. His jaw worked once as his hands closed at his sides. There was a long gap of silence between us when he finally opened his mouth again.
“You speak,” he said very quietly, “as though understanding my methods is your right.”
“I speak,” I argued, “as though I’m a person.”
He didn’t respond but just rubbed his prayer beads through his fingers as though they were giving him patience he could apply to the situation. And, for all I knew, maybe they were.
“I will not close my eyes against corruption,” he began the Kaelthar Litany, but then interrupted himself. “You will undergo the Solvaine purification bath this morning.”
Then his voice returned to its usual register, measured, certain, and calm, as he finished the prayer.
He gestured toward the center of the room, and I stood up, knowing there was no use in fighting this or him.
Galahad, I’d come to learn, had patience that didn’t expire.
If I didn’t do as he said, he simply waited until I did.
I knew what the purification bath was. He’d put me through it once already, and it wasn’t fun. I’d endured the bath the first time by going somewhere else in my head, and I hoped I could do the same this time.
“Undress.”
The water had been drawn from the deep well and left in the stone corridor overnight before he carried the metal tub inside.
I knew this because he’d told me in the same tone one might describe a poultice for a wound.
Cold water purifies what warm water merely cleans.
When I stepped toward the basin and put my hand in the water, the cold hit like a fist.
I undressed. I’d stopped being ashamed of this particular humiliation ever since Arthur had paraded me in front of the male court. Shame requires a kind of energy I no longer had to spend on it.
I stepped into the small basin.
“Sit.”
I did as I was told, and every muscle in my body contracted at once.
My lungs emptied as I gripped the basin’s edge and forced air back into them the way Merlin had taught me to breathe through pain.
Of course, he’d meant a different kind of pain altogether.
Regardless, the cold of the water was aggressive.
It pressed against every inch of me, but I stood in it and breathed until the worst of the seizing passed.
Galahad knelt beside the basin with the rough cloth, the same one he’d used the first time he’d subjected me to this. He began the Solvaine prayer. “Water finds the truth of every landscape. It cannot be deceived.”
His voice didn’t falter. Yet his hands, as they washed my body with the freezing cold water, moved more slowly than they had the first time.
I pushed that little kernel of information into the storage of my mind.
That’s what I did: turned my mind into a ledger where I wrote everything down.
It was how I’d held my cover as Lioran for weeks among men who would have killed me for what I was.
It was also how I’d survived the stripping before the court and the look in Lance’s eyes when he’d told me I was dead to him.
The ledger didn’t feel things. The ledger only recorded, and I loved it for that.
Galahad’s hands moved across my shoulders, my collarbones. He lifted each arm and examined beneath it, as though he was looking for something. Each time was the same: he was clinical and purposeful. When he reached my ribcage, his thumb grazed the side of my breast.
He paused.
One breath held. Two.
Then he moved on.
He told me to stand.
I stood but couldn’t stop my body from shaking with cold.
Galahad didn’t seem to notice, or if he did, he didn’t care.
Instead, he walked around me the way a merchant circles a horse at auction, assessing its weight, conformation, and soundness.
His lips moved in the Drenath penitential.
I recognized it by now; I’d had days of these texts recited at me.
“Strip from me what is unworthy.”
Soon, he began his prayer to Kaelthar. “Open my eyes to what is hidden. Let no falsehood pass unchallenged before my sight. I will not look away. I will not close my eyes against corruption. To witness is to serve. To see is to stand guard.”
His hand touched the small of my back. He was no longer sponging me down. In fact, I wasn’t sure where the rag had gone. His fingers moved down my spine slowly. He was counting vertebrae, it seemed.
“Wha-what are you doing?” I asked with a shiver.
“The Book of Abominations holds that the corruption mark manifests along the sacral line in magic-bearing women, in witches.”
This was the first time he’d checked me for the witch’s mark. Or, at least, the first time he’d mentioned it.
“I’m not a witch.”
“The witch’s mark will say otherwise.”
His voice was perfectly steady; his breathing wasn’t so steady.
I could hear it change. The inhalations became faster and the exhalations shallower. It was the specific rhythm of a man who was losing a war he’d decided to call by a different name.
His hand stopped just above the curve of my lower back. His breathing sped up.