CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR #2
Behind Mordred’s binding, my magic screamed.
I felt it the way you feel a shout through a stone wall: the vibration without the sound.
The water in the basin was right there. I could sense it, sluggish and cold, but I couldn’t touch it, couldn’t move it, couldn’t do anything with it except stand in it, shake, and keep breathing.
He turned me to face him.
His eyes were glassy as he examined my stomach, my navel, the line of my hip bones, pressing his fingers into the bone as if testing my structure. He refused to look at my quim, and when his eyes dropped too low, he cleared his throat and immediately looked up at my face.
“Raise your arms.”
I raised them, and my breasts moved as I did. He tried not to notice them, keeping his eyes trained on mine. His voice stayed even when he spoke.
“The mark often manifests near the heart for corruption enters closest to the vital seat.”
His voice cracked on the word vital in a way he either didn’t notice or decided to ignore.
He knew the sexual side of him was reacting to me, much though he might fight that knowledge.
That was the thing I’d started to understand, and this second purification bath just further confirmed it.
He wasn’t oblivious to what was happening inside him.
He was just very committed to the framework that let him call it something else.
I lowered my arms without being told to.
“Your teacher,” I said quietly, remembering the few stories Galahad had told about the man. My voice was quiet. “Brother Eamon.” I watched his hands go still. “What would he say,” I continued, “if he could see you now?”
Three heartbeats. I counted them in the silence.
Something moved behind Galahad’s eyes. Not the zealot.
Not the knight with his perfect posture, his celestial gifts, and his absolute certainty about what the Boundless required of him.
This was something younger, something that sat at a teacher’s feet and was told that seeing falsehood didn’t always oblige you to expose it: that sometimes it obliged you to ask yourself why you needed the falsehood to be true.
He stood.
And then he left. It wasn’t his usual composed exit with the measured steps and the door drawn precisely shut.
And I noticed he didn’t call a guard to take his place.
He just simply left: pulled the door hard behind him and locked it, his footsteps uneven on the stone.
And then the sound of his retreat was swallowed by the corridor.
I stood alone in the cold water.
The shaking got worse for a moment before it got better. I let it. My body needed to do something, and this was what it had available, so I stood there, shaking, and just breathed until the worst of it passed.
Then I climbed out of the basin.
I wrapped my linen tunic around my shoulders and sat down on the stone floor with my back against the basin’s curved side. The cold came up through the floor, but this cold wasn’t the same as the ice of the water.
It was later that evening that I heard it.
The wet crack of leather on skin. I’d heard it before, of course, at the end of his evening prayer.
It was usually just a few measured strokes, penitential and controlled.
But this was neither measured nor controlled.
The scourge fell fast and hard, and it kept falling, frantic in a way that had nothing to do with ritual.
It was the sound of a man trying to beat something out of his own body before it took root.
I’d pressed on the wound of his conscience; that much was fairly clear. And now he was bleeding from it.
And tomorrow, I had a feeling his rage at me for making him bleed would be worse than anything that had come before. Because I’d reached him. Because I’d found the boy under the knight and called him by his teacher’s name, and he would need to punish me for knowing he was still there.
I tried to ignore the sounds, tried to sleep for however long he allowed me before he woke me for another prayer because I knew the next canonical hour was coming. It always came.
And when it came, his expression would be composed, his voice would be level, and there would be nothing in his eyes that admitted what the sound in the middle of the night had given away.
He’d recite the opening of the Drenath morning cycle, and he’d expect me to repeat it after him, and I would because survival wasn’t always about defiance.
Sometimes survival was being still while the storm demanded it.
So, I’d continue to kneel. I’d continue to recite words I didn’t believe. I’d eat the half a crust when it came because I’d refused it once and made my point, and what was more, I needed the sustenance, even what little the bread offered.
But I promised myself that I’d remember every detail of what went on in this room. I’d remember where his hands had gone, how long they’d stayed there, which touches were inspection for the witch’s mark, and which were something else.
Someday someone would ask what happened in this room, and I would have the answer. And when it came, it would be precise, complete, and devastating.
I wrapped my arms around myself and waited for him to wake me up.
-GUIN-
The sole window in the room opened to the east, and the light slanted in such a way that the stone floor appeared as if it were covered in a layer of liquid fire.
The slant of the sunlight always woke me up before the sound of the bells could. Well, the sunlight, or Galahad himself.
From his room, which was located high up in the tower (though not so high as the king’s rooms), the entire inner courtyard of Camelot appeared to be laid out as if it had been made ready for painting.
I could see the rose garden, the gravel walkways, and the stone fountain of a fish with water that perpetually poured from its open jaws.
I stood at the sill with my arms crossed over my chest, and I watched Arthur and Isolde weave through the serpentine paths of the rose garden.
Arthur walked slowly. That was the first thing I noticed because he never walked slowly.
Every time I’d seen him move through Camelot, he covered ground like a man who was outrunning something.
Or trying to. His shoulders were always forward, his eyes fixed on whatever came next.
But down there, in the pale morning light, with the roses still wet from the night’s dew, he moved like he had nowhere to be. And that was strange.
Isolde said something to him, and she reached up on her tiptoes to whisper it into his ear.
Of course, I couldn’t hear what it was she’d said, but whatever it was, it made the line of his jaw change. And the set of his mouth... he started to smile. Then he tilted his head toward her like he was actually listening, as though whatever she’d said mattered to him.
My thumbnail found the edge of the stone sill and pressed in, though I couldn’t say why it bothered me to watch the two of them.
It just came down to whatever strange magic existed between the two of us, I supposed.