CHAPTER TWENTY-SIX
-GUIN-
The candles had burned low by the time Galahad began reciting Drenath’s prayer.
“Drenath sees what the flesh conceals,” he began. “What hides in bone and blood and marrow.”
I sat on the stone floor beneath the window, my knees and head bent. I kept my eyes on my hands. Outside, the last light was going. The courtyard torches had just been lit, and I could hear the distant clang of the changing guard.
“The demon does not announce itself,” Galahad continued. “It does not wear horns or carry flame. It wears the face of the innocent. It wears beauty as its first deception.”
Then he stopped reciting and turned to face me.
“Look at me.”
In surprise, I looked up at him.
His unsettling eyes moved over my face with that careful, clinical attention that had started to feel worse than contempt. Contempt I understood; contempt was something I could handle. But this was something else.
“The demon will not emerge of its own volition,” he said. “It must be drawn out.”
That was new.
“Drawn out,” I repeated, frowning as I shook my head.
“Forced out, if necessary.” He stood up and squared to the corner. “I have been too patient with you. Mercy without rigor is indulgence, and indulgence serves no one, only the demon.”
“I don’t have a demon.”
“Yes.” He almost smiled. “That is precisely what the demon would say.”
The scourge was hanging on the wall beside his door.
Knotted leather, three tails, each one tipped with something small and dark I hadn’t let myself look at too closely.
I’d watched him take it down for himself twice now.
Watched him in the darkest hours of the night when he thought I was asleep. I’d heard the rhythm of it.
He crossed the room and took it off the wall.
My body moved before my mind caught up. I was on my feet and backing toward the far corner, my hands already up as if I could ward him away with them alone.
“No.”
“You will submit—”
“—You don’t have any right to do that to me.” It was easier to say than I thought it would be.
“Yes, I do.” He stepped toward me with the scourge in hand, and his face didn’t change even a little, which was the most frightening part about it.
“The king put you in my care to cleanse you of sin. But after all your praying, you have not been cleansed yet, nor are you even close to it. Your demon is stronger than I imagined. And it’s still there because your body is not inhospitable to it. Tonight, that will change.”
“Don’t touch me!”
He didn’t. Instead, he came for me.
I threw a punch. A real one, the way Corvin had taught me. There was weight behind it because I pivoted from the hip. My fist caught Galahad across the jaw hard enough that his head snapped sideways, and I felt the blow in my knuckles.
He stopped and touched his jaw, and when he did, there was real surprise in his gaze.
Then he just looked at me. When he moved this time, he was faster than he looked.
He caught my wrist before I could swing again, used my own momentum against me, and then I was facing the wall with my arm wrenched up behind my back and his weight pinning me there.
I screamed at the magic that was still inside me. Tore at it the way I had every day since Mordred had bound it. But the binding held. It always held. There was nothing there to be called: no current, no cold, no answer from the water in the air around me. Just silence where my power used to live.
“Stop.” Galahad’s voice was close to my ear. And his tone was quiet. Almost kind. “You will only hurt yourself.”
“Get off me—”
“—the demon dislikes pain as much as its host.” He stepped back but kept hold of my arm, walking me forward until I stumbled against his cot and had to grab it to stay upright. “That is the mercy in this. One flesh, one suffering. One purification.”
“There’s nothing to fucking purify—”
The first strike landed across my shoulders, and the sound it made was worse than the pain. The pain came a half-second later, bright and specific, and I bit down on whatever noise was trying to come out of my throat.
“By pain the corruption is named,” he said. The prayer had taken him again, as had that smoothed-out voice. “By suffering the unclean is made visible.”
He pulled at the back of my tunic. I felt the laces give.
“Don’t—”
The fabric fell. The cold air of the room hit my skin, my knuckles going white as I stared at the wall. I kept my breathing even because I wouldn’t give him the sound. I refused.
The second strike was lower than the first, and that was when I heard his breathing change.
It was also when I understood something I wished I didn’t.
He wasn’t doing this despite the fact that it disturbed him.
He was doing it purely because it disturbed him.
Whatever he’d purged from himself, whatever he’d flagellated, fasted, and prayed out of his own flesh, it was right here, close to the surface, alive and watching.
The scourge landed again.
I counted the candles reflected in the dark window glass. Three. The shadows they threw were long. Outside, someone in the courtyard laughed at something: a guard, ordinary and oblivious, not twenty feet below us.
I thought about Corvin in the dungeon. I thought about the water in the well at the center of the courtyard and how I could feel its shape now, even bound as I was, even silenced.
It felt like a dull, distant ache. I thought about Merlin’s voice telling me: survive first. Everything else comes after.
Galahad said something else from Drenath’s prayer, but I’d stopped hearing the words. Instead, I counted the candles, and I survived.
-KAY-
As soon as I walked into the solar and saw Arthur, I realized he was restless, or the beast within him was restless.
I’d sensed as much in the walls. Not literally, of course; I was no Percival who dealt in mysticism or some other such guff.
I simply had forty years’ worth of experience reading the frequency of this particular castle, sensing how sound traveled through its walls, and how the guards held themselves according to what they’d heard inside the rooms they were guarding.
Arthur sat behind his writing table. But he wasn’t writing. The candles were lit, but the documents in front of him were untouched. Arthur didn’t wear his crown here. That alone marked this room as different from every other room in Camelot. Here he was allowed to be other than what he was.
He looked up.
“Kay.”
“Arthur.”
I shut the door behind me softly.
He looked exhausted. Beyond exhaustion, really.
I settled into the chair across from him, even though he hadn’t invited me. But such was how it was between blood, between brothers. The fire in the hearth threw inadequate light. I didn’t comment on it.
“You have administrative gaps,” I said.
He waited.
“The part of your administration that’s exemplary is where it’s always been exemplary: in the kitchens, the armory, the treasury, the stables.” I paused. “What it’s lacking, however, is a systematic way of checking the private rooms of the senior knights.”
“Why would I want to check the private rooms of my knights?”
I shrugged. “Why should you not?”
He cocked his head to the side. “I suppose that’s a good enough point.”
I nodded, knowing he’d see the logic in it. Arthur was, by rule, paranoid and distrustful. “But there’s no office with that mandate.”
“And I suppose you would like to take on such a task?”
“I’m as good as any for the position.”
He nodded. “You’re asking for the Seneschalship.”
“No, not asking. Simply explaining why it’s necessary.”
His eyes moved to the fire. I watched his jaw work once, barely, before he controlled it again.
“If you’ve come to tell me something, spit it out.”
“I’ve not come to tell you anything. I’ve come to tell you what I intend to find out.”
You didn’t bring your suspicions to Arthur, for he wouldn’t act on them. What you had to bring was evidence. And such was exactly what I was after.
“What do you intend to find out?”
I didn’t answer right away, and the pause was by design. “Tell me, Arthur, does the question regarding who took Guinevere’s maidenhead still bother you?”
He studied me for a moment, as if trying to gauge my game. “Of course.”
“A subject you still haven’t resolved.”
His eyes narrowed. “How do you know I haven’t resolved it?”
“I make it my business,” I said, “to know all things that happen within this castle.”
The flat hands on the table shifted slightly. It was almost nothing, but my gift picked up on it anyway, especially the small seam of tension in his right hand, where his grip wanted to form, but he wasn’t letting it.
“It hasn’t been resolved, no.” Something crossed his face that might have been amusement in a different man in a different room. “She still won’t confess who it was.” A pause. I said nothing. “And I haven’t—” He stopped. Restarted more flatly. “I haven’t determined the answer by other means.”
“No,” I said. “You haven’t.”
He looked at me directly then. The firelight made his eyes difficult to read. “Do you have information on that subject, Kay?”
“Not yet.”
“Then what are you—”
“—I know how to get it.” I let a beat pass. “But that all depends on you.”
“Depends on me how?”
“With the appropriate title of Seneschal and its associated access, what I currently suspect becomes something considerably more useful to you.”
He was quiet for a moment. The fire popped once in its low, neglected way.
“It’s a substantial title,” he said.
“It’s a necessary one.”
Another silence. Not a hostile one. Arthur’s silences were their own form of conversation, and this one read as a man confirming a decision he’d largely already made; he would give me the title I requested because he wanted to get an answer to this question.
“You’ll have it by morning,” he said.
I didn’t thank him because thanking him would have made the title a gift. It wasn’t a gift; it was a tool I’d argued was necessary, and he’d agreed. Those were different transactions.