CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE #4
He came to stand behind me, and I heard his breathing, heard how it was elevated. He gathered my hair to one side, clearing my back, and his fingers stilled for one second at the nape of my neck, where my hair was the thickest.
“For the appetite indulged,” he whispered. “For the will surrendered.”
He was standing closer than the inspection required, and his breath moved against the back of my neck. It was warm, slightly ragged, and the small hairs along my skin rose up in disgust.
“The body that indulged,” he said very quietly, “must be reminded of its purpose. The flesh exists to serve the spirit. When the flesh forgets, the spirit must reassert dominion.”
His hand landed on my hip, his fingers curving forward over the crease where my hip met my thigh.
He turned me to face him, and his eyes dropped.
I watched them do it, watched them move across my collarbone, my breasts, and down to my stomach.
The fasting had made me angular for weeks, until all that was left of me was concave planes and visible structure.
One meal had changed that. Gently, barely, the way a breath of wind changes the surface of water. But his eyes stopped there.
He stared at my belly the way another man would stare at a plate of roast hare in the Great Hall. It was that same quality of hunger wearing the costume of disgust. Appetite dressed up as condemnation because that was the only wardrobe his theology allowed.
“Your belly is full,” he said.
The words came out wrong, though. They were too thick.
“The flesh, fed. The beast, satisfied.”
His hand moved from my hip to my stomach. His fingers spread across the slight curve of it, pressing gently, and I kept my hands at my sides, my face neutral and my eyes on the far wall past his ear while every nerve I possessed screamed at me to step back.
His thumb traced a line below my navel, and his hand slid even lower.
I drove my nails into the center of my palm. The crescent bite of it was precise and clarifying. I thought about the location of his hand, the pressure of his fingers, the way his breathing had changed from controlled to ragged in the space of thirty seconds.
His fingers found the crease of my inner thigh and traveled inward.
There was nothing tentative about his touch.
No, this was purely deliberate. It was the path his imagination had worn smooth enough that his body followed it without hesitation.
When he pushed his finger further against my flesh, his breathing broke apart.
His entire body was shaking in a fine, continuous tremor like a man holding a heavy weight at the end of his reach. The binding in my blood roared.
I felt his fingers enter me, and my magic hit the cage of the binding, the reverberations traveling up through my vision in pulses of white. Somewhere very deep in my chest, something threw itself against the bars with enough force to blur my sight for one terrible second.
Flood the room with your magic and drown him!
The thought railed at me. But I knew better.
As much as I might want to draw on my powers to destroy him, I couldn’t.
I was bound. And if I tried to fight him, I’d lose.
No, the better move was to just wait until the thinking part of him took over, as it always did.
Almost as if reading my mind, Galahad pulled away.
The withdrawal was a full-body recoil, and he stumbled backward three steps, his raised hand out before him like it was a foreign object that had somehow become attached to him at the wrist. He stared at his own fingers, which had just been inside me.
The horror on his face was genuine.
That was the part that cost me something I hadn’t budgeted.
The horror was completely genuine: not performed, not calculated, not the strategic expression of a man managing a room.
He looked at his own hand with the expression of a man who’d just found a wolf wearing his skin, who’d only now understood the wolf had been there all along.
He couldn’t look at me. His eyes, instead, moved to the wall.
“The corruption—” He started but then fumbled his words and swallowed hard. He tried again. “You projected... the Book warns that the vessel breathes outward, that the contaminated... the purification is—”
I watched the mask of the pious and devout reassemble. It was like watching someone reconstruct a shattered plate: the pieces didn’t quite line up, and the cracks still showed.
“The purification is incomplete.” The liturgical register was quickly returning but still unsteady at the edges. “We will fast tomorrow. Both of us. Aethon to Illara. No food. No water. The flesh must be reminded of its proper station.”
There it was.
My meal, the one hour of relief after days, would be paid for with a full day of starvation.
His hand between my legs would be converted, through the alchemy of his theology, into an affliction that originated in my body and had spread outward through the corrupted air I exhaled.
An affliction that had landed in his innocent palm entirely against his will.
And therefore, my body would bear the consequence.
The logic was complete. In fact, it was airtight. And it was also the most obscene thing I’d heard in twenty-three years of living, and I’d grown up believing magic was an abomination.
He left for the chapel, and I was beyond relieved to see him go.