CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT #3
He believed everything he said. There was no performance in him, no calculation beneath the piety, no layer of self-interest humming quietly underneath the doctrine the way it did in Agravaine, the way it did in me.
He believed the prisoner was improving; he believed the process was working. He believed, with the serene and immovable certainty of a man who has never had reason to doubt his own framework, that what he was doing to her was the correct and righteous thing.
I’d given her to him.
And that was your first mistake.
The fucking dragon was relentless.
After a bit more discussion on the Rebellion, I closed the council.
Chairs moved, men gathered their papers, and the room emptied.
Lance remained after everyone else had left (except Mordred) because he was the one who always wanted to say something privately.
Today I didn’t want to hear it. I didn’t want to hear about Galahad starving her.
I wanted to hear that she was broken and ready to be rebuilt, ready to switch sides and vow her loyalty to the crown and to me.
Anything short of that, I wasn’t interested in.
I shook my head at him to tell him as much, and he left with a small tension in his jaw that he controlled by the time he reached the door.
Then it was just Mordred.
He was still seated, his annotated vellum squared neatly in front of him, the triangle pendant at his throat catching a thin line of the morning light. I waited until the door had been closed long enough that no one was standing on the other side of it.
“The wards,” I said. “The perimeter junction degradation. Is it purely the missing materials, or is something else affecting the outer wards?”
Mordred was quiet, and in that silence, I read a man deciding how much of the answer to give.
“There is an anomaly,” he said at last. “In the bedrock readings beneath the northern junction.”
“What kind of anomaly?”
“I’m still characterizing it.”
I looked at him. “How long until you know more?”
“I should have a clearer picture within the fortnight.”
“Mordred.”
He met my eyes. His were, as always, difficult to read because they seemed to be reading two different things simultaneously.
“Know sooner,” I said.
He inclined his head, picked up his vellum, and he left.
I stayed at the table after he was gone.
The rebellion was running a clean campaign, clean enough that someone had planned it.
Clearly, this hadn’t been improvised, nor had it been stumbled into effectiveness.
No, it had been designed from the beginning to bleed me slowly.
The convoy routes had been chosen deliberately, the maintenance materials taken because someone understood what they sustained.
This was from someone who knew Camelot’s operational patterns.
My thoughts then turned to the bedrock anomaly beneath the northern junction that Mordred had just mentioned.
I had no idea what he even meant but hadn’t been in the mood to hear a long explanation that would probably still make little sense to me.
Outside, in the courtyard, I could hear the training yard beginning its morning noise. There was the slashing of steel against steel and boot leather on packed earth. Someone was calling a correction.
The ward-stones degraded in two months if the materials remained gone.
I needed to know what was in the bedrock before then.
-LANCE-
The cold air of the corridor hit me as I walked out.
I’d known, when I opened my mouth, what it would cost me.
I’d done a rapid and uncomfortable calculation in the seconds before I spoke and arrived at the same answer I always arrived at, which was that I was going to speak anyway, and the cost was going to come due regardless.
Every word I said in that room was another thread of the picture Kay was building, another line of color, another detail rendered more sharply.
She matters to you when she shouldn’t. Here is the proof again.
I knew this, but I’d said what I’d said anyway.
Outside, the sky was pale and cold, the kind of morning that felt like something overdue. My breath came out in a thin white cloud, and I watched it disperse.
There were very few things in my life I’d wanted that I hadn’t eventually taken.
The shape of this particular wanting was different, maybe because it was more inconvenient, more poorly timed, more thoroughly against my interests in every direction I turned it.
But the wanting itself was the same animal it had always been: impatient and uninterested in my arguments against it.
Kay would use what I’d said today in the council meeting against me. Of course he would. That was what Kay did with the things he found: he held them at the exact angle where they caught the light and became undeniable.
My hands were cold inside my gloves. I pulled them tighter and walked toward the training yard because there was nothing else to be done with the morning, and because standing still made the calculation feel worse.
I would speak up for her again, even though it probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do.
But how could I not when Galahad was absolutely starving her, and no one seemed to care?
Well, no one except Percival, Tristan, and Gareth.
They’d sided with me when I’d brought the subject up.
Perhaps the next time I did, there would be four voices on my side instead of three
.