CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO #4
“You wouldn’t have heard anything... recent about Corvin of Blackhollow?” I asked, keeping my voice even.
Something shifted in Tristan’s expression. It wasn’t pity, but something more careful than that.
“I admit I have not heard much,” he said. “Only that he’s still alive.”
The breath I’d been holding moved through me and then out. That was all I’d hoped to hear, that Corvin was still alive.
“Thank you,” I said quietly.
Tristan nodded once and then began to hum a tune I didn’t recognize, but I took comfort in the haunting sound. “Oh,” he said and then reached underneath his cloak, producing a bundle of muslin wrapped in twine. “I almost forgot.” Then he handed it to me.
“What is it?”
He shrugged. “Cheese and bread, I believe.” I accepted the bundle and unwrapped it to find exactly that, and in response, my stomach growled.
“Thank you,” I said as I looked up at him, shocked that he would have thought to bring me something to eat.
“Oh, don’t thank me: Sir Lancelot told me to bring it to you once he found out I was meant to watch you this morning.”
I didn’t know what to make of that at all. Lance had told him to bring me something to eat? It was beyond strange, and I decided it wasn’t something I was going to bother myself about. Instead, I happily ate the bread with the cheese and then just enjoyed the fact that I wasn’t stuck with Galahad.
Tristan and I sat there long enough that the sun actually found us, burning off the gray and warming the stone wall at our backs.
“Where are you from?” I asked him. “Originally.”
He smiled at the question, like it was one he’d been waiting for.
“A city called Varos in the province of Lyonesse.”
He leaned back against the wall. “Far east of here. Built on terraced hillsides above a harbor. The water there is so blue it looks painted, as if someone decided the sea should be beautiful and simply made it so.”
His voice softened with the memory. “The heat in summer is extraordinary. The salt of the ocean rides the air, and the sun-warmed stone is baked into everything: the bread, the cloth, even the people.”
I turned toward him slightly. “It seems like you miss it quite a lot.”
“I do,” he answered simply.
“And your power,” I continued. “Necromancy. How does that—”
“—come to me?”
I nodded as he considered the question seriously, which I appreciated. “It’s less like calling and more like listening, I suppose you could say. The dead are already speaking, but most people simply can’t hear them.” He paused. “I just listen.”
“But you can do far more than that, from what I’ve witnessed.”
He nodded. “Yes, I can summon ghosts. Revenants. Worse things, if the need is great enough. But I find the ghosts most instructive. They remember things the living have forgotten.”
“That doesn’t frighten you?”
“Most things that frighten people are simply things they haven’t sat with long enough.”
I thought about that. I thought about the dark, and Galahad’s footsteps in the corridor at night, and the sound of the scourge, and how I’d learned to breathe through the fear until it became something else. Something harder. Something I could use.
“You’d get along well with Merlin,” I said before I could stop myself.
Tristan looked at me with that measuring look again, and I wondered if I’d just gone too far. Yes, he was civil, but that didn’t mean he was a friend. I immediately prepared for the shutting down that should have followed, but he only said, “High praise or grave warning?”
“Probably both.”
I wasn’t sure how much time passed as we sat there, talking about nothing and I finished my cheese and bread.
It could have been an hour or maybe even two.
It was the first time in a long time that I could remember enjoying myself.
Not only was Tristan’s company like a breath of fresh air compared to Galahad’s, but the sunshine on my face was its own kind of bliss.
But soon that fleeting happiness began to darken when I heard the sound of footsteps.
I knew the particular rhythm of them; I didn’t have to look up to know who it was.
Galahad crossed the courtyard toward us, his white cloak billowing out behind him as the sun caught the gold of his hair. His spine was straight, his expression irritated.
Tristan rose unhurriedly as he reached out and palmed the muslin that had covered the bread and cheese, stealthily returning it to his cloak in a move that said he realized Galahad wouldn’t have been pleased to see it.
Then he looked down at me, and the smile lingered at the corners of his mouth.
I watched him walk away with a strange sinking sort of feeling.
That was the problem with small and fleeting lovely moments.
As soon as they’re gone, you miss them so much more.
So, I tried to diminish the last two hours into something much simpler: that I’d just been sitting in a garden, talking with someone who seemed interested in talking to me.
I didn’t let myself feel it too fully because good things in Camelot had a habit of being temporary.
But for a moment, I let it exist.
Then Galahad’s shadow fell across the bench, and I opened the book.