CHAPTER FORTY #2
He’d come from somewhere with blue harbors and salt-warm stone, and he’d ended up here by the usual mix of skill, accident, and probably a decision made in youth that couldn’t be unmade.
He’d looked at me like a foreigner looks at things they haven’t learned to dismiss yet.
And he’d told me the truth about Arthur: that Arthur had noticed Tristan noticing me and that Arthur had told him to essentially spy on me. And of course Tristan had agreed because he’d had to agree. But he’d also told me the truth about their arrangement, and that was worth something.
Did that mean that Tristan could become an ally to me?
Or was that the whole point: that I’d drop my walls around him just as Arthur wanted me to?
Was this all part and parcel of the king’s plan?
I didn’t know. But I wanted to find out because my natural inclination was to want to trust Tristan, and I didn’t know why.
I didn’t know if it was just a weakness on my part because I so wanted a friend, or if it was something else.
The inconvenient truth was that I wanted him to be genuine in his attentions to me. I wanted to find a friend in him. That was the problem: that I wanted him to look at me the way he had in the yard, like I mattered.
And that was a problem because wanting things was how you lost them.
Across the room, the sound Galahad was making stopped. It was followed by a long silence. Then the careful pull of linen.
I kept my breathing even. Kept my eyes aimed at the ceiling.
In. Out. Like someone sound asleep, like someone dreaming and not aware that the religious zealot was stroking himself to a woman he considered a demon.
I didn’t decide anything where Tristan was concerned, but the question remained open in the dark like a wound that wasn’t ready to close.
Can I trust him?
I didn’t know. But I was already asking, and that alone was more than I’d given anyone in Camelot, aside from Lance. And I already knew how that had ended.
Which meant I needed to be very, very careful.
-GUIN-
The library smelled of old paper and rain. Water ran in long silver threads down the narrow windows, and the light that managed to get through was flat and colorless, the kind of light that made everything look like it was already in the past.
A guard had brought me here without explanation. I’d stood in the center of the room for several minutes before Arthur arrived, long enough to understand that I was meant to feel the waiting.
He came in without ceremony, as he always did. No announcement, no pause in the doorway. He simply entered the room as if it had been waiting for him specifically.
He didn’t look at me right away. Instead, he moved to the shelves along the far wall and ran one finger across the spines of several books, unhurried, as if he’d come here for the books and I was incidental.
I watched him do it and said nothing. I’d learned by now that Arthur’s silences were never empty, and if you could read them, you could learn something.
“Lance mentioned something at the last council,” he said finally, still facing the shelves. His voice was even, almost conversational. “He said you looked... emaciated.”
I said nothing, even though I was surprised to hear that Lance would have mentioned my physical appearance in a council meeting. Actually, I was surprised that Lance would mention me at all.
He turned then and looked at me properly for the first time. His gaze moved over me in brief assessment, not the way a man looks at a woman, or not only that. It was more the way a commander looks at something that belongs to him and wants to know its condition.
“Is Galahad not feeding you adequately?”
“I eat what I’m given.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
I held his gaze but said nothing further. He let the silence sit for a moment, then he moved away from the shelves and toward one of the chairs near the cold fireplace, but he didn’t sit. He stood with one hand resting on the back of it, watching me.
“It concerns me,” he started.
“Why would my state of physical being concern you?”
He gave me a look. “If you would have allowed me to finish, you would have learned that your physical state isn’t what concerns me. What does concern me is that a knight of my Round Table is directing his concern toward a prisoner’s welfare during a council meeting.”
He tilted his head slightly as I glared at him and fumed at myself for making such a stupid mistake.
Why would I have ever thought that Arthur would be concerned about me personally?
It was stupid. “It concerns me more that Lance felt it necessary to say it aloud.”
“Perhaps he simply noticed.”
“Lance notices a great many things.” His eyes hadn’t left my face. “I’m curious what it is about you specifically that keeps drawing his attention.”
“Him noticing my being thin doesn’t mean I keep drawing his attention,” I said, even as I wondered what Arthur was getting at. This was the first I’d heard that Lance noticed me at all.
“Yes,” Arthur agreed, and something in his tone said he found that answer perfectly reasonable and also completely insufficient.
He studied me for a long moment. I let him look.
I’d had practice by then at letting him look at me without flinching, at keeping my face the kind of blank that gave him nothing to work with.
What I couldn’t entirely control was what my body did under that scrutiny: the slight steadying of my breath, the conscious stillness I had to impose on my hands.
If he noticed, he didn’t say so.
“He watched you,” Arthur said at last. “In the yard. When you weren’t looking at him.” He paused. “I noticed it before you were taken to Galahad.”
I blinked once, slowly, the way I might have reacted to being told something mildly interesting about the weather. “Men watch women. I wouldn’t read much into it.”
Something moved across his face, something that lived beside amusement.
“No,” he said quietly. “I don’t suppose you would.” Then he cleared his throat like this conversation was over and now he was turning to the next one. He looked over at me and his eyebrows reached for the ceiling. “Why are you so cold this morning?”
I frowned, as I wasn’t aware I was being cold. “I’m a prisoner: would you expect me to be warm?”
“You were warmer with the guard who brought you here.”
I frowned deeper. “How would you know that when you weren’t even there when the guard escorted me?”
He shrugged. “Call it a guess.”
I frowned. “If I was warmer to the guard, it’s simply because I hate him less than I hate you.”
“Ah,” he said with a quick nod and started further into the room. “Are we still at the stage of hatred of one another then?”
“Call it whatever you want to call it.”
He leaned his shapely ass against the windowsill at the far end of the room and extended his long legs out in front of him, crossing them at the ankle. “I don’t hate you.”
“I wish I could say the same.”
His lips took on a slight smile. “I don’t understand why you would hate me,” he continued with a shrug. “I’ve allowed you to do what you enjoy most: training alongside my men. And you dine at my tables and have repeatedly.”
“You do me no favors, Arthur.”
He crossed the room, not quickly. Arthur never moved quickly unless he meant violence.
This was the other kind of movement, the controlled kind that was almost more threatening because it gave you time to decide how afraid you were going to be or how afraid you should be.
He stopped close enough that I had to tilt my chin up slightly to hold his gaze.
“That’s not what this is,” he said, and I strained my neck to keep looking up at him, but there was no way I was going to show submission by breaking his gaze first. “I know the difference between a prisoner’s resentment and whatever this is.”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You’re jealous.”
My jaw tightened. “In order to be jealous, I’d have to care about you, and I don’t.” I paused. “I harbor the opposite of care for you.”
Something moved across his face: amusement and something harder underneath it.
“Is that so?”
“Yes, that’s so.”
“Then you won’t care, and it won’t upset you to learn,” he started, “that I’m courting Lady Isolde.”
The words landed like a blade dropped flat. They didn’t cut, but just struck and did so thoroughly. I felt it in my chest and immediately organized my expression around not feeling it.
“You’re right: I don’t care.”
“No?”
“No.”
He moved closer, but I refused to step back. When he leaned in close enough, I felt his breath against my temple.
“Then you also won’t care to know that I kissed her.”
My heartbeat did something involuntary, and I hated it. “I don’t—”
“—and when I kissed her,” he interrupted, “a blush stole across her cheeks, making her even more lovely than she already is. Wouldn’t you agree she’s lovely?”
“If that makes you happy to hear it.”
“Yet, you are anything but happy to hear it.”
“I’m indifferent.”
“Your pulse would say otherwise.”
“Why are you telling me this?” I asked finally, not wanting to hear any other details about him and Isolde. My voice came out quieter than I meant it to.
He pulled back far enough so he could look at my face. “Because you’re lying to yourself as much as you’re lying to me.”
“About what?” I demanded, glaring at him.
“That you care.” He leaned in closer again. “Because you do care, precisely because you desire me. And you hate yourself for it.”
The honesty of his words was worse than cruelty would have been. At least with cruelty, I knew how to meet it.
“Believe whatever the hell you want to believe, but the truth remains unchanged.” I took a breath and wanted nothing more than to be free of him. “Now return me to Galahad.”
He didn’t move.
“Look me in the eyes.”
“I am looking you in the eyes.”
“Now tell me again that you don’t care.”
“I don’t—”
Before I could finish the sentence, his mouth was on mine, and his mouth was warm.
That was the first thing that reached me through the shock of it, before anger could organize itself into something useful.