CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX
-GALAHAD-
She stepped through the door alone, which meant Lancelot had walked her to the threshold and left her there like a package he’d grown tired of carrying.
I set down my psalter and watched her cross the room. She moved differently than she had a week ago. Something had loosened in her spine. I’d worked hard to put proper humility there, and Lancelot du Lac had undone it in a single evening.
I didn’t believe him, of course: didn’t believe it when he’d made his announcement that the king meant to question the prisoner in his solar. Yes, I’d said nothing, but that was simply because there was nothing to say. Lancelot outranked me, so I’d swallowed down my disbelief.
But I’d thought about it since. In fact, I’d thought about little else.
The demon inside her was more sophisticated than I’d credited it previously.
That was the only explanation that made sense.
Lancelot du Lac had never lacked for women.
He was the kind of man women ruined themselves over freely and without coercion.
For him to show up outside my door at the height of the dark night, there had to be something working on him that wasn’t natural.
I was convinced the demon had reached through her and found the weakness already living in him: his emptiness and his hunger. The demon had simply fed it.
Which meant the demon was stronger than I’d previously assessed. Which meant I’d been too gentle with her.
She stopped in the center of the room and waited. She’d learned that much, at least. Don’t speak until spoken to. Don’t move until directed.
“Close the door,” I said.
She did as she was told.
I stood and came around the table. The moonlight entered through the narrow window at an angle, catching the silver in her hair. I looked at the wall instead.
“Strip.”
A pause. Just a breath’s worth. Then her hands went to the laces of her tunic.
I turned my back while she undressed, not out of modesty, but because I needed a moment to compose the prayer.
Let my eyes be instruments of discernment. Let what I see be only what Drenath requires me to see. No more. Let my hands be Drenath’s hands.
When I turned back, she was standing with her arms at her sides, her chin up, and her eyes fixed on something in the distance in that way she’d developed. It was always as though she was looking at something I couldn’t see. It irritated me.
I began at her hairline, as I always did. And I was systematic as I always was. The Blessed Texts were explicit: the witch’s mark could appear anywhere, and the examiner who rushed was the examiner who failed. I parted her hair in sections. Checked behind her ears. The back of her neck.
She is dirty.
The thought arrived fully formed. Not my voice exactly, but more the voice of discernment, which the Boundless granted to those who sought truth earnestly.
She is filthy with her own depravity. Can’t you smell it on her?
I couldn’t smell anything except the lye I’d given her when she bathed and, beneath that, something faintly like cold water.
I moved to her shoulders, where I could see the fading marks from the scourge.
They’d healed cleanly, which I noted without feeling.
The body’s repair of itself was a constant.
Spread her legs.
That voice was different. It was lower, and it came from somewhere in the dark parts of my mind and moved downward when I didn’t silence it quickly enough.
This time, I silenced it.
“Hold still,” I said, because she’d shifted her weight.
Her jaw tightened, but she held still.
I worked down her arms until I reached her hands.
Then I inspected each of her fingers, as well as the webbing between them.
A witch’s secondary marks were often small, as simple as a discoloration, an extra fold of skin, a spot that didn’t bleed when pricked.
I carried a pin for this purpose in my breast pocket.
I hadn’t used it yet. I was saving it for the moment that I found something worth testing.
Touch her.
I was touching her. That was the point. This was examination.
That’s not what I mean, and you know it.
I moved to her torso. I kept my gaze clinical, telling myself her body was architecture and nothing more. Just walls and beams. Nothing more than that.
She’s beautiful. Look at her. All men desire her. You desire her as well.
The anger came fast and clean, which was a mercy because anger was clarifying. I used it to push the other voice down into whatever lightless place it came from, and I held it there.
“Turn,” I said.
She turned. I checked her back, her shoulder blades, her spine, the dimples above her hips. I saw nothing. No mark. Not yet, anyway.
You won’t find it there. You know where it will be.
“Kneel,” I said.
She turned her head slightly, though not in refusal. She’d learned the lesson early on that to refuse me was to suffer punishment.
“For prayer,” I said. “Kneel.”
She knelt. And I made myself look at the wall again while I recited the Litany of Examination under my breath.
“Open my eyes to what is hidden. Let no falsehood pass unchallenged before my sight. I will not look away...”
But I looked. I didn’t mean to. My eyes dropped before I’d given them permission, and the shape of her was... exquisite.
I looked at the ceiling. The ceiling was made of stone, and that stone was cold, indifferent. I focused on a crack in the mortar above the window and breathed through my nose until the image behind my eyes faded.
She knows exactly what she’s doing.
She was staring at the floor. She wasn’t doing anything.
That’s how the demon works.
“Bend further,” I said. My voice came out rougher than I intended.
She looked up at me and swallowed hard, but did as she was told. I caught a glimpse of the flesh between her legs, and it nearly undid me. I had to grip the stone of the wall to keep standing.
“Dress and sleep. We’re done for the evening.”
Something moved across her face, something like calculation.
She was always calculating. I hated that about her.
There was nothing restful in her face, even in her most cooperative moments.
Something behind her eyes was always watching, always filing things away.
It was the demon. It was always the demon.
She dressed, then lay down on her pallet and faced the wall.
I knelt at the altar and began the evening prayers.
I prayed for two hours, but it wasn’t enough.
The candles had burned down to their stubs. I replaced them without breaking the litany, then pressed my forehead to the cold stone of the altar floor and asked the Boundless to take the heat from me, to render me clean and purposeful, to be an instrument and nothing more.
The scourge hung on the wall beside the altar. Seven cords, knotted at the ends with blades. I’d made it myself at sixteen, in the monastery, under Brother Eamon’s instruction. The making of it was itself a form of prayer.
I took it down.
The first stroke was always the hardest.
After that, the body’s own shock made the rest easier.
I kept my breathing even. I counted. The Texts prescribed seven, but seven had stopped being sufficient three weeks ago.
I did twelve. The welts overlaid each other in ways I recognized; I knew my own back the way a cartographer knows a map he’s drawn himself.
The fourteenth stroke drew blood. I knew by the heat of it.
I felt cleaner, felt the hot, clarifying burn of genuine penitence. This was real. This was what it meant to be serious about the work. Any man could profess purity. It cost nothing. The test was what you did when purity was inconvenient.
I replaced the scourge on its hook and sat back on my heels.
Behind me, she breathed slowly and evenly. She’d been asleep for an hour. I hadn’t checked since I began the prayers, but I could hear her now. It was the particular rhythm of genuine sleep, not performed stillness.
Do you suppose Lancelot fucked her?
I didn’t turn around.
You don’t even know if she’s a maiden. Wouldn’t that be answer enough if she is not?
I don’t know what happened between her and Lancelot, I argued back. That voice had grown more and more persistent over the last few days. Arguing and demanding.
She’s right there. You could put your finger inside her and see if she is still pure.
No.
She wouldn’t even have to wake. You could...
I was on my feet before I’d decided to stand. I told myself I was going to add another taper to the altar. I told myself that very clearly, but my feet didn’t go toward the altar.
Instead, I stood at the edge of her pallet and looked at her back. The tunic had twisted slightly in her sleep, exposing the back of one of her knees. The candlelight was doing things to the shadows in the hollow of it.
My hands were shaking. I pressed them together. A reflex. The prayer position. Boundless, I am being tested, and I need...
But the prayer dissolved. The words lost their shape.
I was looking at the back of her knee and the arch of her bare foot, and I was thinking about Lancelot’s announcement this evening and the fact that they’d been gone for long enough that he could have inserted himself inside her.
He could have succumbed to the call of the demon.
Had he?
The question had been in me since the moment they left, and now it was all I could hear.
If he had joined with her, if the demon had managed to move through her into Lancelot, then I’d failed.
I’d had her in my custody for long enough, and yet I hadn’t found the mark.
I also hadn’t confirmed her status as maid or whore, and the demon had simply gone around me. Found another victim.
This was information I needed: to know whether she was truly a whore. This was why the examination was required.
I crouched beside her pallet.
She was on her side, knees drawn up slightly.
I reached for the hem of her tunic with two fingers.
Carefully. The examination required access.
The Texts were clear about the relationship between bodily corruption and spiritual corruption.
A maiden’s body was protected by innocence.
If she was no longer a maiden, the corruption was demonstrable.
Provable. I would finally have what I needed.
I shifted her.
Her eyes opened and she turned to face me.