CHAPTER FORTY #3
His kiss was warm and certain, the way Arthur did everything: without asking, without hesitating, as if the world had always arranged itself to accommodate whatever he wanted from it.
I didn’t move. For a single, damning second, I didn’t move.
His hand came up and cupped the side of my jaw, and the warmth of his palm against my cold skin was so immediate, so specific, that something in me went very quiet in a way I hadn’t sanctioned. His thumb grazed my cheekbone, and his mouth moved against mine with an unhurried deliberateness.
Then his tongue touched mine. And my knees did something I would never forgive them for.
The stone in my chest where my magic used to live went briefly, treacherously warm as my fingers found the fabric of his doublet.
And somewhere in the confusion of it, that fabric bunched in my fist without my having decided to grab it.
I could smell him: cold air, leather, something faintly woodsmoke.
My body went quiet in his hands, but underneath that quiet, something else was building.
Something that wanted more. And it was that wanting that saved me.
The moment I recognized what it was, I knew it for what it was: a trap.
Not one he’d set deliberately, maybe not one either of us had set deliberately, but it was a trap all the same.
A thing that would cost me something I wasn’t willing to pay.
So, I pulled back. I took one sharp step, putting distance between us, and his hand fell away from my face, and I felt the cold of the room rush back in where he’d been.
My pulse was loud in my ears as his eyes landed on me, waiting to see what I’d do with what had just happened.
I breathed. Once.
“See,” I said. My voice came out steadier than I deserved as I wiped the taste of him away on my forearm. “I want nothing to do with you.” I took another breath. “Not your lips, not your cock. I want no part of you.”
Something flickered in his expression, but he said nothing, so I continued.
“I hate you,” I said. “I’ve hated you since before I knew you, and every day I’ve spent inside these walls has given me more reasons, not fewer.”
His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.
“And no matter what you tell yourself,” I continued, holding his gaze even as my fingers were still trembling slightly at my sides.
“No matter how many times you convince yourself that what just happened means something different than what it was.”
I exhaled slowly. “It won’t change the truth in my feelings toward you.”
Silence.
The flash of lightning through the window caught the edge of his cheekbone. He looked like something carved out of stone that was pretending to be a man.
“Now,” I said. “Return me to Galahad.”
He didn’t move immediately. Instead, he looked at me for a long moment, the way he looked at things he intended to understand eventually: with patience and certainty, like a problem he hadn’t solved yet but had every confidence he would.
That was the part that frightened me most. Not his anger. Not his power. Not the dungeon or the binding or Galahad’s cold hands checking my skin for the mark of the witch.
Just that quiet certainty. The way he looked at me like time was on his side.
He stepped back and moved to the door, then he pulled it open and called for the guard without turning around to look at me again.
I stood very still and kept my face neutral and my hands flat against my thighs.
My lips were still warm, and I could still taste him on them. I hated him for that most of all.
-GUIN-
The floor was cold through the thin blanket. That was the first thing I noticed every morning: the cold working up through the stone and through my thin wool blanket and into my hip bones like a slow accusation.
I lay still and listened to Galahad breathe. Even in sleep he was controlled. No restless turning, no mumbling. Just that measured rhythm, like even his unconscious self had taken a vow.
I waited until I was sure, then reached.
Not with my hands, but with the part of me Mordred had wrapped in iron and silence the night he’d pressed his palm flat against my chest and bound the magic within me.
Even though it was useless, I reached anyway because it was now just habit. And yet... when I reached this time... I was fairly sure that something was different.
It was so small as to be almost imperceptible, just a hairline fracture in the binding where last week I’d reached a solid wall.
I pushed against the binding harder and felt a thread of give, barely wider than a thought.
Like a door that had swollen shut in summer and was now, just fractionally, beginning to dry.
I pulled my hand back and then I lay perfectly still, keeping my breathing even.
I wasn’t sure why but I thought about the skull moths.
And when I thought about them, I remembered how Galahad had looked at them before looking at me.
I remembered how he’d blamed me for them being here in this room.
I hadn’t seen them since and for some strange reason, that fact depressed me.
Galahad shifted.
I watched the ceiling but I didn’t move.
When his breathing settled back into its rhythm, I let myself think about it. Carefully. Quietly. The way you think about something dangerous in the presence of someone who is also dangerous.
The binding hadn’t broken. Not even close.
But it had loosened, even if only a fraction, barely a degree.
I shouldn’t even have been able to feel it, but I’d spent the last three weeks cataloging every sensation behind my sternum the way a prisoner counts stones in a wall.
I knew the feel of the binding, the way I knew the exact pitch of the hinges on Galahad’s door, and the third flagstone that clicked when you stepped on it wrong.
I didn’t know why, but I remembered something I’d overheard two days ago, in the training yard, when I’d been waiting for Arthur.