CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN #3
“You knew she couldn’t fight back! You knew Mordred had bound her, and you—” I stopped.
I had to stop, because finishing the sentence was going to end with my sword through him and some small rational part of me understood that Arthur was close and that killing Galahad here, now, in the open yard, would cost Guinevere more than it would cost him.
But I wanted to do it anyway.
The wanting of it was something I’d have to carry for a long time.
He took the blows. That was what cut through to my mind eventually.
Not the screaming about demons, not the doctrine, but the fact that he wasn’t trying to stop me.
He could have. His divine magical power was strong, and yet why wasn’t he calling on it?
Instead, his arms came up, but they weren’t blocking me.
He was accepting the beating, as if his suffering was the point, as if the pain was something he wanted.
The rage in me lurched sideways into something colder, and I suddenly wanted to murder him, to wipe that expression out of his eyes and kill the light therein.
I then felt hands on my arms, multiple sets of them.
I recognized Percival’s grip by the placement: his healer’s hands.
Tristan was soon on my other side, all quiet pragmatic strength.
Someone else was behind me. There were three of them trying to restrain me, and it still took them longer than it should have.
Finally, I let them pull me back and stood upright between them with my hands at my sides, breathing steadily and looking down at Galahad, where he’d curled himself around his broken ribs on the gravel. His face was a ruin. There was blood everywhere, and the yard was completely silent.
I looked at my hands. Her bruises had been four fingers and a thumb. Mine on him would be worse. Much worse. I hoped he felt the difference.
“Lance!” Arthur finally reached me, and when I turned to face him, he wore an expression I hadn’t seen in a long time. It was something genuine, alarmed, and confused. His eyes moved from me to Galahad and then to her.
She was standing where I’d left her, one hand holding the torn tunic together at her shoulder.
She wasn’t looking at Galahad, and she wasn’t looking at me.
Instead, she was looking at something in the distance, at nothing in particular, in the careful way people look at nothing when they’re making sure their face doesn’t give anything away.
But I looked at her. I couldn’t stop looking at her.
And I made myself a promise, standing there with Galahad’s blood on my hands and Percival’s grip on my arm, that I would never again look away long enough for something like this to happen to her.
Never again. No man would ever lay a hand on her again.
Not while I still had breath in my body.
Arthur looked at me again.
I held his gaze and said nothing. I let him read whatever was on my face and trusted that he was capable of understanding what it meant.
Somewhere behind me, Galahad had stopped screaming and had reduced himself to a wet, labored breathing that told me the broken ribs hadn’t punctured anything. He’d live. He’d be in pain for a very long time, but he’d live.
For now.
“What the fuck were you thinking?!” Arthur demanded.
I felt my jaw tighten again as I faced him. “Ask him,” I said, “what he’s been doing to her.”
-ARTHUR-
The yard had gone quiet in the way yards only go quiet when something irreversible has happened.
WE MUST DESTROY HIM FOR DARING TO TOUCH HER!
I ignored the beast and instead focused on the fucking crisis unfolding in front of me.
Lance stood over Galahad with his chest heaving and his knuckles split open, and no one said a word. Numerous men were holding their breath. The only sound was Galahad’s wet, ragged breathing and the distant creak of the gate in the wind.
I took it all in: every face, every shifted weight, every averted eye.
Tristan separated himself from Lance and then stood closest to Guinevere, a half-step in front of her as if he’d placed himself there deliberately. Percival was on her other side, his hands loose at his sides, his eyes fixed on Galahad’s broken nose with an expression that appeared mostly blank.
I knew what I was supposed to see: one of my finest knights laid out in the dirt, bleeding and broken, felled by my First Knight. What I should have seen was a breach of discipline and a public humiliation. What I actually saw was a fracture line running straight through the center of my court.
Lance was on one side, and Galahad was on the other.
And Guinevere was in the middle. Every man in that yard was picking his footing without even knowing he was doing it, some gravitating towards Lance and others towards Galahad.
They would continue to do so, continue to take sides for and against, and that would lead to a separation within Camelot that I couldn’t allow.
I stepped forward, but not quickly. There was no need to rush because rushing would tell them I was rattled. The truth was that I was rattled, beyond fucking rattled actually, but I needed to maintain the appearance of calm.
“Get him up.”
Two of the King’s Guard moved immediately, and they got Galahad under their arms and hauled him upright.
He didn’t fight them. His head lolled forward, and blood ran freely from his nose, which was clearly broken, down over his lip, dripping off his chin into the dirt.
One eye was already swelling shut. Lance had done a fucking number on him.
I looked at Percival, our healer. But he made no motion to step forward and do what he’d gladly done for the other knights whenever they’d been seriously injured.
Instead, he watched Galahad the way a man watches a stranger, making no move toward him.
There was no instinct toward the healing that I’d watched him offer a dozen times before, for lesser wounds, to lesser men.
A broken finger. A split scalp. Once, memorably, a kitchen boy who’d caught a training sword across the ear.
Not today. Yes, sides were already being taken up, and I needed to do my best to avoid exactly that.
“Take him to the physician.” I kept my voice flat as I motioned towards the guards. “Tell him I want Galahad examined and a report by evening.”
The guards moved. Galahad went with them, or was taken; it was hard to tell which. The yard watched him go, and no one wished him well. That was the part that stayed with me the longest: the silence that followed him out.
I turned to face the yard. All the men were staring at me, some still gripping their practice weapons. Others had their hands at their sides, but all were careful and still, waiting to see what would come of this moment.
I met eyes where I could. “Return to your posts and your duties. If I hear that any of what happened here today became a conversation in my halls, the man doing the talking will answer to me directly. Am I understood?”
It wasn’t a question, and they knew that.
They moved; none of them scrambled to leave, none of them were that undisciplined, but they moved steadily and purposefully, the way men move when they’re grateful to be dismissed.
Tristan touched Guinevere’s shoulder before he left.
It was just a light thing, and it was quick, but I noticed she gave him a weak smile in response.
I felt my eyes narrow as I wondered what was going on between the two of them.
For now, though, I had this crisis to solve.
Lance hadn’t moved. He stood where he’d been standing since the beating ended, his breathing slowing now, and one hand curled at his side. He was staring at the ground where Galahad had been. Or perhaps he wasn’t seeing anything at all; it was hard to tell.
I waited until the yard was empty.
Then I said, “Walk with me.”
-ARTHUR-
The anteroom outside my solar had a window that faced the inner yard. I’d stood at it a hundred times, watching my knights train as well as the daily machinery of Camelot grinding forward. I stood there now because I couldn’t sit; sitting required a stillness I didn’t have.
Lance had followed me inside, and I noticed he hadn’t sat down either. Instead, he stood with his bloody and ruptured hands hanging at his sides, blood still crusted at the corner of his mouth from where Galahad’s elbow had caught him in the scuffle. His armor was half-on and hastily buckled.
I closed the door behind us, and neither of us spoke for a moment.
Another man protecting what is ours.
I shut the voice down. Hard.
“You beat a Knight of the Round Table mercilessly,” I said. “In front of numerous witnesses.”
“Yes.”
“In front of the other knights.”
“Yes.” Lance didn’t flinch. His jaw was set, his dark gray eyes flat and level. “And I’d do it again.”
That was the part that made my teeth ache. It wasn’t the doing so much as it was the admission and the ease of it.
“That isn’t the point,” I said.
“Then what is?”
I crossed to my desk and stood behind it, not because I needed the barrier but because without it I might have hit him myself. Did he not fucking realize the position he’d put me in? That he’d forced me into a corner?
We should have defended her. Not him.
“The point is the position you’ve put me in.”
“And what position is that?”
He wasn’t going to make this easy on me. “Lance, you attacked Galahad over the prisoner’s virtue,” I said, shaking my head. “That’s what the court will see, and it’s what the other knights will see: that you attacked your fellow Knight of the Round Table to defend our fucking enemy.”
“My reasons were clear.” His jaw was tight, but mine was even tighter.
“Your reasons are the problem, Lance.” I looked at him directly, but when he didn’t comment, I continued. “The point is that you care too much, and that has me concerned.”
“I don’t care too much. I acted...” He paused and took a deep breath. “I acted the same way I would have acted if Galahad had abused any other woman.”
I looked at him. “We both know that’s a lie.”
He cleared his throat but didn’t respond, so I continued.
“You’ve fallen under her spell just like every man has who gets too close. That’s the truth, and you know it.”
I took a breath. “It’s the same fucking thing that’s happened to Tristan, to Percival, and even to Galahad, in some form or another.”