CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
-LANCE-
The candle was on the table. I hadn’t lit it.
I sat on the edge of the bed in the dark and told myself it was because I was tired.
I’d trained hard earlier in the day, and my shoulders ached from the weight of the poleaxe.
Not only that, but my knuckles had split during the last bout, and dried blood had cracked into the creases of my fingers.
In truth, I was only now noticing it, in the shred of moonlight that was flitting through the window.
My hands were shaking again. I wasn’t sure when they’d started up. Perhaps the moment I’d seen her in the training yard with Arthur, when Agravaine had said what he had?
I pressed them flat against my thighs and felt them tremble there against the cloth, but I didn’t look down at them. Looking at them would only draw more attention to the fact that I was losing control of myself. And I couldn’t afford to lose control.
It had been days, maybe even weeks of the same: discipline in everything that mattered, including my morning drills, weapon rotations, and the slow systematic dismantling of anything that complicated my loyalty to the crown.
I’d been rigorous, and I’d been thorough.
I’d taken the image of her face in the dungeon, her voice, and the set of her jaw when she looked at me without flinching after I’d told her she was dead to me, and I’d placed it behind a wall the same way I placed pain behind a wall during battle.
It was something acknowledged, then something sealed away.
And the reasons were never far from my conviction: she was a spy, and she was a traitor.
Not only that, but she’d lied about everything from the beginning to the end, and the end was Eldenvale burning and twelve of my men in the ground.
How many times had I told myself the same? So many, I’d now lost count. Either way, she was dead to me. Just as I’d told her. I’d looked at her through the bars of her cell, and I’d spoken the words clearly, and I’d meant them.
Fucking dammit, I’d meant them!
But the wall didn’t account for the hollows in her cheeks.
I hadn’t realized she was going to join us in the Great Hall for supper.
Perhaps that wasn’t surprising because Arthur hadn’t been asking for my counsel lately.
In fact, he was spending more time with Kay than he’d ever spent before, something that obviously bothered me.
But not as much as what I saw when she entered the room.
Some animal mechanism in my body, some thing below human logic and reason, had swung my attention toward the door before my mind had issued the instruction to look. And then I’d looked and immediately wished I hadn’t.
White hair tangled. An amorphous gray linen smock hung off a frame that was thinner than I’d ever seen it.
She wasn’t thinner in the way a woman thins from illness from which she usually bounces back.
This was more like she was... diminished.
Reduced in the specific way I’d seen men reduced after sieges, after extended desert marches, after months in enemy custody where food was a negotiation and sleep was a punishment.
Her cheekbones cut hard, her wrists looked like things that would snap, and her breasts weren’t as prominent as they had been.
Not only that, but the gown gaped at the neckline where a week ago it would have fit against her body.
Beneath that gap, her collarbones jutted out like the keels of two small boats.
I couldn’t look away because I’d kissed all along those collarbones, and now they looked like something that might bruise simply from being touched.
I watched her eat. I sat at the high table with Arthur on my left and my plate untouched, and I watched her eat. “Eat” wasn’t even the proper word for it. I watched her scarf the food down before her as if she were some wild, feral thing someone had found in the woods and taken pity on.
The entire hall was performing the appropriate responses: disgust from the noblewomen, satisfaction from the more pious knights, the careful indifference of the servants who’d learned to want whatever the room wanted.
But I couldn’t share in their reactions.
Instead, I watched a woman fall on food like she hadn’t seen it in days, and I understood, with the cold lucid knowledge that comes from too many campaigns, that she probably hadn’t.
He was fucking starving her.
I knew what that looked like. I’d seen it at Dunmore when we broke the western siege, the defenders who’d been locked inside for four months coming out blinking, wrecked, and falling on the rations we tossed them with a kind of desperate focus that had no room for dignity.
I’d also seen it at the Valern prisoner exchange, men we got back from the northern warlords, hollow-eyed and trembling, tearing into hard bread with both hands and making sounds I’d tried to forget.
I knew what sustained hunger did to the body, to the mind, and to the particular layer of self-possession that makes a person seem human to other people.
Guinevere ate without pausing to breathe. Her hands shook around the bread. When the first bite went down, her eyes closed as if it were the single best moment of her entire life.
And not one bit of it was performance. This wasn’t the calculated display of a spy making herself sympathetic to the room around her.
No, there was no audience in that expression.
It was the face of a person for whom the simple act of eating had become its own kind of grace, stripped down to animal relief, no performance left to give.
Something cracked in my chest, and I couldn’t locate the seam to press it back together again. The thing that cracked started to blossom with intense anger as I thought of the culprit, of the reason Guinevere had appeared the way she had.
Galahad.
I thought about the way he prayed seven times a day on his knees, the dusk prayers that lasted two hours.
The way he looked at anything he judged unclean in that steady, dispassionate way of his.
It was the look of a man managing his disgust so that it might serve a higher purpose.
Arthur had given her to Galahad because Galahad was incorruptible.
I’d seen the value there. I’d accepted it as the best plan because none of us could have been trusted with a woman of her beauty.
It had seemed the best course of action because a man of faith couldn’t be seduced by a witch.
A man who had purged himself of appetite couldn’t be manipulated by a woman’s body.
But then I remembered Guinevere’s birdlike wrists and I thought about what incorruptibility could be costing her while in Galahad’s care. Perhaps he hadn’t been tempted by her, but whatever he was doing to her was its own form of torture.
And then I remembered the dream visions Morgan had shown me. No, I still wasn’t convinced they were real. But I was having a harder time trying to shut them out. And now with what I’d seen of her tonight...
There hadn’t been any bruises on her. I hadn’t seen any wounds, nor any old scabs that might have verified my dream in some way. But that didn’t mean she wasn’t being harmed in a different way.
It doesn’t matter, I tried to argue with myself. She’s a spy. She’s your enemy. She’s the king’s enemy.
It does matter, I argued back. Because she’s still a person.
Her posture had been all wrong. I’d noticed it somewhere between the way she inhaled her bread and the second helping she reached for with both hands.
I’d watched the way she was sitting: the angle of her shoulders, the way she kept her elbows in, the constant low-level attention she paid to the space directly around her.
I’d seen that posture before. Not in soldiers; soldiers who’d been through hard things carried themselves differently.
They were braced, ready, body pitched forward, ready to take action at the slightest provocation.
Guinevere’s posture spoke of something else, something I’d seen in the camp followers who moved with the army along the southern marches.
More specifically, it was something I’d seen in the women who’d learned that their bodies weren’t entirely their own and that men with size and authority used both freely.
I remembered the women who had learned how to be small, those who’d learned it the only way that lesson ever gets taught.
My plate was cold.
She is a traitor, I told myself. She killed twelve of your fucking men.
She did so in self-defense, after the murder of her parents.
She lied to you from the first words out of her mouth, dressed as a boy.
She trained at your side, earned your trust, and used it against you.
And the night you gave her something you don’t give easily, she’d already been lying to you for months.
The intimacy was the lie. The trust was the weapon.
You said she was dead to you, and you said it because the alternative was to admit that she’d made you into something you hate. Weak.
All of it might have been true, but it didn’t change the fact that she was a subject of the crown, and as such, she shouldn’t have been made to starve. And I wouldn’t back down from that way of thinking.
But the problem was what to do about it?
I thought to myself that I could go to Arthur to ascertain if he’d noticed how thin she was, how malnourished.
I had to be careful there because Galahad was one of us: a Knight of the Round Table and one of our accomplished elite.
He wasn’t just a knight. He had influence and power.
But maybe that didn’t matter. I was sure Arthur had noticed her emaciated condition; how could he not have? Of course, Arthur would see things the way I had, and no doubt, he’d remove her from Galahad’s custody quickly.
She is dead to you! Whatever happens to her isn’t your concern!
I thought about the bread and the way she’d closed her eyes when she bit into it. Then I thought about the hollows underneath her eyes.
I put the heels of my hands against my eyes until light burst behind them, small, bright, and meaningless.
I’d sat at the high table with a full plate of food, and I’d done nothing.
She’d eaten thirty feet away from me with shaking hands, hollow cheeks, and I’d just sat there and watched her.
Then when it was over, I’d gone back to my room, and still, I’d done nothing.
Because doing something would have meant she was alive to me.