CHAPTER FORTY
-GUIN-
The training yard had left me with a split lip, a bruised hip, and the particular exhaustion that comes from being watched by too many people at once.
Arthur had pulled his punches. Not obviously; he was too skilled for that, but I’d felt it in the pauses and in the half-second of restraint before each contact.
Galahad had walked me back to his chamber after the training session was over. I was exhausted, covered in sweat and dirt, and every part of my body ached.
He didn’t speak the entire way; that was the thing that caught my attention first: his oppressive silence.
Most evenings, he filled the corridor with scripture or with careful, precise observations about my failures of character.
Tonight, he said nothing, just clasped his hands behind his back.
His jaw was set, and his eyes moved straight ahead, focusing on something that wasn’t the corridor walls.
The room was cold when we entered it because he’d left the window open, and the evening air had done its work. I went to close it, and Galahad didn’t stop me. Then I turned around, sat on my pallet, and waited for whatever punishment was in store for me.
He stood at the center of the room with his back to me for a long moment. When he eventually turned around, his expression had the careful blankness of something prepared.
“What designs do you have on Sir Tristan?”
I blinked in surprise at him. “None.”
“You spoke with him at length.”
“He spoke with me; I just responded.”
The line of his shoulders tightened. “You encouraged his conversation.”
“I answered his questions.”
“With considerable warmth.”
I kept my expression neutral as, outside, something called from the treeline: a nightjar or something that sounded like one. I counted three beats before I answered.
“I wouldn’t say there was warmth in anything I said.”
“I watched you smile and laugh at him.” He swallowed down his obvious disappointment. “I wish to know what you discussed.”
“He asked me about my sparring technique and offered his advice on how I can better use my small weight,” I lied. “That was the whole of it.”
Galahad moved to the window I’d just closed and stood looking out at the dark. His reflection floated in the glass: pale, perfect, and utterly unreadable.
“Keep your distance from him,” he said. “I don’t know what he’s after.”
Not a request.
I said, “Fine.”
He turned and looked at me. Then he moved to his side of the room, and I looked down at my hands in my lap as something occurred to me that didn’t make any sense. But I thought it, all the same: he’s jealous.
The words sat in my head all evening because this was a surprise, even though I was fairly sure it was true.
I’d just never seen this side of Galahad before.
Usually, it was him being righteous. Or angry.
Or disappointed. Or stewing about some other thing I’d done.
But jealous? Never. Yet, I’d seen the way he’d looked at Tristan when the latter was laughing beside me in the yard.
Something in Galahad’s expression had reacted before he could discipline it away.
I thought about that while I ate the bread he allowed me and while I washed my face and while I changed into my tunic and lay down on the narrow pallet.
I thought about what it meant that a man who had whipped me, starved me, and touched me without permission was capable of jealousy.
And I thought about what that said about the shape of his interest in me.
None of it was good.
Sleep came fast, the way it did when my body had been pushed past argument. And the dream came even faster.
The Hall of Lineages had changed. Or I’d changed. One of the two.
The last time I’d walked it, the hall had been vast, still, and cold, the dead kings watching from their stone seats with eyes like carved marble. They’d been patient. Distant. The kind of presence you feel in old churches, enormous and indifferent.
Tonight they leaned forward.
The torches burned blue, and the smoke moved against the draft, curling inward instead of up.
The banners on the walls, red and gold, crowned dragons, swords crossed over shields, stirred without wind, and the stitching on them seemed to shift, the figures rearranging themselves in ways I couldn’t track directly.
I walked the same path, the same stone beneath my feet, the same echo of footsteps that sounded like two people walking instead of one.
But the kings were closer now.
Their faces weren’t sheer bone any longer. They had the gray-green pallor of something that had been dead for a long time and was remembering what being alive felt like. Their mouths moved yet no sound came out, but I could read the shapes of the words.
I kept walking.
At the end of the hall stood the stone where Excalibur waited.
The sword was different tonight, too. The blade caught the blue torchlight and held it, and the light ran along the steel like something alive. Tonight there was something wound around the grip. It was dark and wet.
Arthur was nowhere to be seen.
The closest king rose from his seat. I stopped to watch him. As he moved towards me, the flesh began to grow around him, coming to life against the pale of his bones. And when he stood just before me, he was alive once more. And he was beautiful.
His skin was olive, his eyes the same darkness as the curls that tucked in behind his ears. And he was enormous: you could see it in the breadth of his shoulders, the size of his hands. He looked at me with the particular attention of a man identifying someone he’d been waiting for.
And this time, I opened my legs for him, invited him to shove inside me.
He looked down at my quim and freed his cock, plunging inside me as I wrapped my arms around him and urged him even deeper.
As he drove into me, he met my eyes and smiled, spilling his seed deep inside me as I clung to him and erupted in my own bliss.
Then he leaned down, and his mouth moved beside my ear, and this time I understood his words.
Not yet, my queen.
And then the walls cracked as the air itself and the fabric of the place ripped open at the seam like cloth being cut with scissors.
Through the gap, I saw nothing but a black void.
Not darkness exactly, but more like a blankness that had no depth.
From that darkness came a cold I’d never felt before. It was a cold that was beyond cold.
The kings recoiled from it. All of them, all at once, and the beautiful one who had spoken turned his face away from the gap like a man shielding his eyes from the sun.
I didn’t look away, though, and the cold moved through me. As it did, something in me recognized it: not my mind, and not my thoughts. Something older within me. Something that shared my blood and yet was not me at all.
The Veil, I thought, without knowing where the words came from.
Then the gap sealed itself shut, and the hall was just a hall again, and the kings were returned to stone, and I was alone.
I came awake slowly.
The room was dark. Through the closed window, the sky had the deep charcoal color of the small hours of the morning, not quite black, but not yet blue. Somewhere in between.
I was warm. Too warm. My tunic had ridden up around my waist while I slept, and I reached to pull it down, but then stopped.
That sound.
Across the room, from Galahad’s pallet on the floor, the rhythm of it was unmistakable because I’d heard it a few times before. It was controlled, but definitely there: the careful effort of a man trying not to be heard.
I pulled my hand back from my tunic and lay still, hoping he hadn’t noticed that I was awake. My eyes were almost adjusted to the dark, and in it, I could see the shape of him on his side and his shoulders moving, as was one arm.
I stared at the ceiling and breathed like someone asleep.
My heart was going too fast, echoing the fury that was building within me.
I let it sit there and burn slow and quiet, but I didn’t move or speak.
What was more, I didn’t know why I was furious, but I was, completely and unmistakably.
I had to wonder if it was simply all the days and nights of Galahad’s prison that were finally taking their toll on me, or maybe it was the simple fact that he was jealous of Tristan when he had no right to be.
I thought about Tristan, not in any particular way, just his face, because it was available to me, because it was the least complicated thing in my immediate geography.
He’d looked at me in the training yard like I was a person he had a genuine interest in, and now I realized how grateful I was to him for that small courtesy.
Then I thought of Corvin and hoped he was still alive in his cell below and that he was planning, just as I was planning. Was I planning? I wasn’t even certain I was. Maybe I was more just hoping that some opportunity would present itself and I could leave this place with Corvin.
But lying here now, in the dark, listening to Galahad’s controlled and joyless gratification, I kept turning Tristan’s face over in my mind: his gentle smile, the way his dark eyes seemed to hide some sort of loneliness.
I thought about the fact that I hadn’t asked him much about his own background, and now I deeply regretted it.
I’d just been so suspicious of his motives in talking to me that I hadn’t focused on learning more about him.
Hopefully, that would be a mistake I could rectify in the future.
Then I thought about the dream and the beautiful king with the olive skin, dark eyes, and curly dark hair.
Even though my sleeping mind hadn’t recognized him as Tristan in the dream, clearly, that’s who it was.
And I thought about how, for the first time ever, I’d actually invited one of the kings to fuck me.
Did that mean I wanted Tristan? I didn’t even know. I was simply existing and had been since I’d found myself imprisoned in Arthur’s dungeon. There had been little else in my mind than pure survival.
So why was I having sexual dreams about Tristan?
His name sat in my chest more steadily as I sounded it out in my mind.
He had no investment in Camelot’s outcome, by his own admission.