CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE #2
Instead, I focused on the practical business in front of me: I was starving and had been from the moment I was given to Galahad’s custody, and there was food in this room. That was the only thing that mattered.
Arthur stood then and the hall, which had been watching me, shifted to watch him. The crown on his head caught the torchlight and glinted so sharply that I blinked against it.
“Guinevere.”
It was my name from his mouth. Not Lioran. Not the prisoner or the witch. My actual name, which he now used in a way that meant he understood that using someone’s name was also a way of possessing it, of possessing them.
He went on to announce, in words I barely registered, that I’d been granted the privilege of joining the court for the evening meal, that this was a demonstration of Camelot’s justice and mercy.
A prisoner, he said, is not an animal. Thus, I was being fed, housed, and treated according to my station.
And my station, he made abundantly clear, was no station at all.
I sat at the court’s pleasure. I ate at his sufferance.
And any knight who harmed me answered to him, just as any knight who aided me answered to him.
I wondered what he’d have to say about the harm I’d suffered at Galahad’s hands. Nothing, I imagined. Because if Arthur was nothing else, he was a hypocrite.
He sat.
His speech was beautifully done, both magnanimous and absolute simultaneously.
He fed his enemies: how civilized, how just.
Not only that, but he controlled everything touching those enemies: however complete, and however final.
I was a trophy at the same time that I was a warning, dressed in gray and displayed at his sufferance, and the court absorbed all of it in the moment before conversations resumed at half volume with all attention now angled toward me.
It was then that I noticed Isolde was looking at me.
Not with hostility. And not with the particular female appraisal I might have expected: those proprietary, assessing, and calculating gazes as if they were trying to determine a threat.
Instead, she looked at me with curiosity.
She appeared to be open, direct, and genuinely interested in what she was seeing, wearing the gaze of someone who’d just encountered a puzzle she wanted to understand rather than judge.
Her eyes moved over my gray gown, my hollow cheeks, and my unbound hair without flinching.
She was taking stock of me without cruelty, and I recognized in the quality of that attention something I hadn’t expected: competence.
It was the look of a woman who didn’t miss things and also didn’t pretend to.
It was at that moment that I realized Isolde of Corbenic wasn’t stupid. She also wasn’t decorative like all the other ladies of the court. As to what she was to Arthur? I didn’t know and tried to convince myself that I didn’t care.
Our eyes held for three seconds. Then she turned back to Arthur and said something I couldn’t hear, and Arthur nodded.
They put me at the far end of the lowest table.
Below the squires. Below the pages. Below the kitchen boys who ate at court only because they’d run out of room for them elsewhere.
I sat, and I did so by myself. In fact, vacancy spread around me like it was a disease, people shifting down the bench by degrees, finding reasons to relocate, until I sat on an island of bare wood in the middle of a full hall.
But I didn’t care. Instead, I watched the serving trays come out from the kitchen corridor, watched the steam rise off them.
I tracked one tray in particular: the one with the fowl, from the far end of the hall as it made its way toward me.
And I did so with the focused attention I should have been giving to threat assessment, political intelligence, and the dozen other things Merlin’s training said I should have been doing in a room full of my enemies.
But all I could think about was that platter of roasted bird.
Soon, it arrived, and when set in front of me, it was even more incredible.
Root vegetables swam in gravy, dark and fragrant with something herbed.
Bread came next, and this was real bread, not the dried hull that Galahad had been giving me.
This bread was still warm, with a crust that gave slightly under my fingers.
Next came a cup of watered ale that smelled faintly of honey at the rim.
My hands shook from the effort of not tearing into everything simultaneously and immediately.
I forced myself to take three breaths, well aware of the fact that eating too fast after fasting made you sick, and that being sick in the Great Hall of Camelot in front of every knight who now wanted me dead was a complication I couldn’t afford.
I lasted about four seconds. Then my body overruled me entirely.
I tore into the bread at the same time that I pulled the bird apart with my fingers because a knife would slow me down, and there was no one at this end of the table to observe my manners anyway, and I didn’t care if there were.
I stripped the meat from the bone. And I pressed the bread against the pooling gravy and put the whole soaked piece in my mouth at once.
I drank the ale in three long swallows and set the cup down as I picked up the plate’s edge and drank the gravy directly because the spoon was in my other hand and the plate was closer.
My hands were still shaking, my jaw hurt from chewing, and my eyes burned with something I refused to name.
Of course, I was aware of the stares. I could feel them without looking.
They were expressions of half disgust and half satisfaction, the court confirming its assumptions about Merlin’s daughter.
The witch ate like an animal. Of course, she did because that’s exactly what she was: an animal. It was all the evidence they needed.
Let them watch. I didn’t give a fuck.
A second plate arrived, which was a surprise. A servant set it down without meeting my eyes as I recognized it for what it was: an act of mercy so quiet I nearly missed it.
I didn’t look up. There was no reason to.
Servants moved through the hall like water finding the low places, following the lines of least resistance between tables, chairs, and extended arms.
My attention had narrowed to the radius of my own plate, my own cup, the particular problem of making my hands slow down before my stomach registered the consequences of not slowing down.
The servant set the plate down and withdrew.
And something snagged.
Not her face. I hadn’t looked at her face.
It was the plate itself: the specific placement of it, the edge aligned too precisely with mine, closer than a servant’s efficiency required.
The rim of her sleeve had caught something as she withdrew, a fold of cloth, and the withdrawal had been fractionally slower than the movement warranted.
No one else would have noticed because it was nothing.
Or, at least, it had looked like nothing.
I kept eating.
I didn’t look up. I didn’t change the rhythm of my jaw or the angle of my shoulders.
I reached for the bread with my right hand the way I’d been reaching for bread for the last ten minutes, with slightly too much urgency, and under the cover of that movement, my left hand found the edge of the new plate.
There. Tucked against the underside of the rim was a small fold of fabric, a piece of linen no larger than my thumbnail, tied twice at the center.
Two knots. I knew the language without having to think about it.
The thinking had been done years ago, drilled until it went somewhere below conscious access.
I palmed it without looking at it. Then I reached for the servant’s sleeve in my peripheral vision, wanting to put a face to the contact, wanting something to carry back to whatever was left of my operational mind.
But she was already gone. I scanned the hall the way I’d been taught: not by moving my eyes, but by moving my gaze behind eyes that appeared still.
Following the exits, the corridors, the shadows between the pillars.
But she was nowhere to be seen. Whoever she was, she’d known how to move through a room without becoming memorable.
She’d known how to make contact and then stop existing.
I ate the rest of the fowl. I stripped the second bone clean and set it on the edge of the plate with the others. Then I soaked the bread through the last of the gravy, and I ate that too, but I didn’t taste any of it.
The piece of linen was against the inside of my wrist, tucked beneath the cuff of the gray gown, held there by my own pulse.
It didn’t change my situation. I was still sitting at the lowest table in a hall full of people who would happily watch me burn. My magic was still bound, my hands still faintly trembling from weeks of insufficient food. None of that had changed.
But what my situation meant had changed. I wasn’t a dropped stone falling through darkness with nothing beneath me. Someone had their eyes on where I was going.
I scraped the plate clean. Then I picked up the last piece of bread and ate it in two bites.
I drank the remainder of the ale to the bottom of the cup.
Then I set the cup down with the particular care of someone who wasn’t going to let her hands shake in this room, not now, not in front of all of them.
Then I straightened, and I looked up.
Arthur was watching me and not with the open stare of the court, who were watching me the way you’d watch a dog that got into the food while you’re trying to decide whether to be offended or amused.
His gaze was level, still and wholly separate from the room around him, Isolde at his right hand, the torchlight working its angles across the crown, all of it.
He was watching me with an expression I couldn’t decode, and I’d spent months learning to decode his expressions.
I held his gaze for two seconds and in that two seconds I made sure my back was straight, and my chin was held up high. I looked away first, back at my empty plate, as I sat there, clutching the little piece of folded linen.
And once my stomach felt as if it had been pushed past the category of ‘full,’ I very carefully untied the little piece of fabric and found within it one single raven’s feather, as dark as night and as shiny as a blade.