CHAPTER THIRTY #2
“Kneel.” It was the Verath command voice, the one that didn’t wait for a response.
I knelt.
Not in obedience. More of an assessment of my current state; I was naked, wet, bound, without my magic.
Fighting would read as the demon’s strength asserting itself.
Resistance extended it. I’d learned this the way I’d learned everything here in this room, through repetition, through pain, through the clinical logging of what worked and what made it worse.
The first blow landed across my upper back. It was a line of fire, immediate and total, and the breath left me in a sharp exhale I couldn’t suppress.
“Strip from me what is unworthy.” The Drenath Litany came from his lips, spoken between blows in a voice that was steadying with each word. “Let the fire find the weakness.”
The second blow crossed the first. There was a third one, followed by a fourth.
His voice was steadier now. The rhythm of prayer and impact had taken on the quality of something liturgical, the words and pain alternating in a pattern that had its own internal logic, and with each cycle, I could hear the man on his knees receding.
The theology was rebuilding. Brick by brick, blow by blow, until by the tenth stroke, his voice had regained its full composure, and his hand was entirely steady.
He’d beaten himself back into belief.
He set the strap down.
Then he knelt beside me, close enough that I felt his body heat, the warmth from his exertion, and he recited the Solvaine closing prayer: “Water finds the truth of every landscape. What is false has been washed away.”
His voice was almost tender.
He placed one hand on the crown of my head. A benediction. “You may dress,” he said, in the tone of someone releasing a congregant after service. “And then you will clean the mess you forced upon me.”
I dressed with my back to him. The tunic touched my back, and the pain was a bright white thing that narrowed my vision for a moment. I breathed through it. I pulled the tunic straight. Then I cleaned his mess with a wadded-up piece of cloth he handed me.
And I hated him more than I’d ever hated him before. I hated him more than I’d ever hated Arthur, hated him more than I hated the words Lance had told me when he’d discounted everything we’d built together.
Behind me, I heard Galahad preparing for Illara’s nightfall prayer: the candles, the soft percussion of the prayer beads, the closed-eye sigil traced in the air above his face.
He prayed for my soul.
He prayed with what sounded like genuine grief, and he prayed to ease the corruption inside me that had forced him to act the way he had. He prayed that the boundary between the righteous and the fallen would increase in distance. He asked Illara to give him strength to continue his sacred charge.
Later, I lay with my face pressed into the thin pallet, and I made myself a promise: that when the reckoning came, I wouldn’t hold back. I’d destroy him quickly, and I wouldn’t hesitate.
From behind me, his voice finished the Illara Litany. “What passes through the veil does not return. Honor the boundary.”
I stared at the wall.
There are boundaries, I thought, that no prayer will undo.
-LANCE-
The first time I found myself standing before Arthur’s door, my hand was raised to knock, and it remained raised until my shoulder started to hurt, yet I didn’t knock.
Instead, I thought about Kay and, by extension, his suspicions against me regarding Guinevere’s maidenhood.
I told myself, just as I’d told Kay to his face: you have no proof.
I’d said the words firmly, assuredly. I’d said them the way I said things before a fight, always knowing the echo of my magic would show me what was coming next.
I lowered my hand.
The problem wasn’t Kay. The problem was the conversation I’d have to have in this room with the last man on earth I wanted to have it with.
I’d made the mistake of rehearsing said conversation in my mind, imagining myself standing here in the corridor, trying to find the best way to broach a subject that rankled me more than any other subject ever had.
I ran it through my head the way I ran through a fight sequence, anticipating my opponent’s moves and reading the space between them.
And, unfortunately, in this instance, my opponent was my oldest friend.
Arthur, there’s something I should have told you.
And then Arthur would look at me with that particular expression on his face.
Not immediately. First, he’d be still in the way he got still when he was deciding something.
Then there would be the way his attention narrowed, and then I’d have to explain why it happened, why I’d given in to the temptation in the first place.
I’d have to explain how I’d wanted someone I wasn’t supposed to want in a situation where I knew, and had always known, that he didn’t just desire her, but that he was obsessed with her.
I’d have to explain why I’d kept the truth to myself, the weeks of silence, why I’d pretended not to know anything about the man who had taken her virginity.
I’d have to outline the exact shape of my lies and why I’d chosen to protect those lies every morning since.
Every version of that conversation ended the same way: with Arthur’s face doing that thing it did when the king and the man inside him were fighting for the same ground.
I’d seen it happen a few times in the years I’d known him, and it wasn’t pretty.
I knew what this truth would cost him and wondered if it would perhaps cost him more than it would cost me.
What was more, I knew which side of him was always the victor when the stakes were high enough, and it wasn’t the human side of him.
I also knew just what the king did to those who betrayed him.
I dropped my hand and walked away.
The next time I found myself outside Arthur’s room, I didn’t lift my hand at all.
Instead, I remained in front of the door while a page appeared from around the corner holding piles of neatly folded linens.
He stopped when he noticed me just standing there and looked at me in confusion.
After he left, I kept standing there, kept not knocking.
I’d served Arthur since we were young men.
Since before Camelot was what it now was, before the dragon, before Excalibur, before a white-haired woman had bewitched us both.