CHAPTER FIFTY
-GALAHAD-
The blood dripping from my lips had started up again long before I made it to the chapel.
It hadn’t healed in the days since Lance had beaten me. Regardless, I hadn’t wiped the blood away, for there was no reason for me to wipe it clean. After all, blood shed in service to the divine was not a wound; it was a signature. It was the body’s way of recording what the soul already knew.
The oratory was empty at this hour, which was how I preferred it.
It was just me and three rows of narrow pews that had been carved from pale ash wood; an altar of unpolished granite that was rough the way truth was rough; and two iron stands holding eight candles each.
The candles burned low and gold in the stillness as I knelt.
The cold of the stone reached through my robes, and I felt it as if I had just waded into ice water. I had no cushion for my prayers and had never owned one. Cushions were for men who prayed for comfort rather than clarity.
My ribs ached where Lancelot’s boot had found them; they had broken upon impact, but my own divine power had healed them.
Even so, they were still sore. Not only that, but my jaw was still swollen on the left side, which made the simple act of breathing feel like a question I had to answer over and over again.
I tried not to notice it because pain was information, and I received it without complaint.
To witness is to serve. To endure is to be refined.
I pressed my palms flat against my thighs, looked at the altar, and allowed the silence to settle over me.
I asked nothing of it in return. Almost immediately, an image came to me: that of Lancelot’s expression when his anger had overcome him and he had chosen to take it out on my physical body.
His face had been contorted, ugly with his anger.
And, let it be known, this was not righteous anger, nor was it even principled fury.
It was just want: the naked, animal want of a man who had stopped pretending he was anything more than what he was.
He had attacked me in front of many witnesses, including the King’s Guard, many of the knights, two pages, a groom who happened to be crossing the yard, and, of course, the king.
Lancelot had hit me in a rather interesting way; he had been territorial, possessive.
His anger had been that of a lover, not a soldier.
Thus, it was not a surprise that he had attacked me not for the king, nor for the kingdom.
He had attacked me for her. For the witch. For the woman who harbored the demon.
And Arthur had stood there and watched it happen.
Yes, eventually he had intervened, but long seconds had passed before he did.
I did not imagine that his inaction was owing to the fact that he wanted to watch me beaten.
No, the king was very protective of his men.
I believed it was more the shock of watching his First Knight attack another knight of the realm over a prisoner.
I turned this over in my mind carefully, the way I turned every piece of evidence until it began to paint a picture of truth.
Arthur had stood there with his arms crossed and his face arranged into the expression he used when he was deciding something.
He had watched Lancelot drag me up by my collar and repeatedly put his fist into my face, and then later, the king had reprimanded me in front of the other knights.
What no one seemed to understand was that I had been trying to purge the witch of the foul demon within her.
They seemed not to understand that a demon did not respect words but only action, nor that a demon would not be wooed from the flesh by pretty words, but by pain; hence the bruises and welts that had appeared on the witch’s body.
What was more, I had been given custody of the witch to do with as I saw fit.
Truly, I believed she was even more than a witch.
She was a woman with ice in her veins and violet eyes that changed color with her mood, which was itself an aberration: the body making visible what the soul harbored.
I had fulfilled my charge: I had tested her, I had looked for the mark of the unclean and impure, I had applied the purifications prescribed by the Brotherhood of the Boundless for three generations,
the same purifications that had cleared a man in Dunmore of a water-spirit infestation and saved a village in the western hills from a possession that would have taken them all.
I had done my duty. Or, I had attempted to do it.
And by sacrificing my own sanctity, my own purity, in order to sheath myself inside her and force the demon to the surface so I could vanquish it…
such was yet another example of the ultimate self-sacrifice.
And yet... yet, it hadn’t been regarded in such a way, which was rather perplexing.
Instead, Lancelot had put his fist in my face and his boot into my ribs, and Arthur had publicly humiliated me, and the witch still breathed.
The witch still breathed.
The candle nearest me shivered as if it were just as offended by the thought as I was.
I watched as the flame stretched sideways, toward the far wall, and held there.
Then the other candles followed, not in sequence, not in a draft’s natural progression from one end of the room to the other, but all at once as if something invisible were commanding them.
All sixteen flames bent outward simultaneously, pointing away from the center of the room like fingers indicating something, and holding there for one breath, two, three.
The air did not move, for there was no open window that could move it; the door behind me was shut and had been. I remained still.
I will not look away. I will not close my eyes against what is shown to me.
The flames returned to vertical once more, and they were now steady and calm.
I remained kneeling and simply allowed what I’d just witnessed to be what it was: not coincidence.
I did not believe in coincidence any more than I believed in luck, for the gods did not operate through accident.
They operated through pattern, through repetition, through the physical world made briefly legible by divine intent.
No, what had just occurred had not been coincidence. Instead, something had pressed up through the floor of this chapel and moved those flames, and it had done so merely to attract my attention. And that could mean only one thing: it had been a message, an instruction.
And what had been the thought I was formulating at the moment the message reached me? The witch still breathed.
The evidence had been accumulating for days, which was how evidence worked: quietly, persistently, building its case without announcement.
I could bring that evidence to mind quite easily: the ice in her cell on the first night, sheeted across the floor in forms that were too deliberate to be random.
Then there was the cold that came off her skin during the purification baths, cold that did not respond to temperature but to her own will.
And what of the magic that had exploded through Mordred’s binding like a boot through a rotted door, filling the bedchamber and corridor with frost?
Mordred’s binding... as though any working of Mordred’s could hold what I was now certain lived inside her.
This was not a woman with unusual magic.
I had known women with unusual magic; they could be tested, assessed, treated, or condemned on the evidence.
What lived in the witch’s skin was categorically different because it moved with intention and recognized threats.
It had chosen her, or she had invited it, one or the other.
Either way, the result was the same: she was simply a vessel that appeared to be a young and beautiful woman.
Yes, she walked like one and spoke with some reasonable approximation of human concern, but she carried within her something that had no interest in the well-being of anyone within these walls.
She carried within her a demon that had complete control over its host, and now that demon was, no doubt, mocking me for my failed attempts.
It was a demon that the king was feeding, housing, and protecting. It was a demon that was so clever it had fooled the king and his First Knight. But it did not and never would fool me.
This was what I could not make Lancelot understand at the moment his own anger overcame him.
Truly, I could not make any of them understand the truth because they could not get beyond looking upon the loveliness of her face and body.
They could not look beyond the flesh as I did, into the pattern.
They just saw a beautiful girl with heavy breasts, a small waist, and lengthy legs.
I saw the accumulation of evidence, the ice on the floor, the broken binding, and the magic that had answered my attempt to defeat the demon with a force that shattered walls.
I understood that what we were dealing with was not a prisoner who needed management but a problem that needed a permanent solution.
I had reached this conclusion the way I reached all conclusions: slowly, reluctantly, and then with absolute certainty.
The question had now become a very pertinent one.
And it was not a question of whether. It was now a question of how and when.
It had become a question of if I would need to act alone or if the men who had been moving quietly toward me over the past weeks would prove sufficient to the task.
I thought about Brother Rouert, who kept the chapel stores and had come to me twelve days ago with his hands clasped and his eyes lowered, asking if I had seen the frost that formed on the eastern corridor wall when she was led past.
I had seen it because, of course, I had seen it.
I saw everything that had anything to do with the demon in my keeping.
Brother Rouert and I had prayed together for an hour.
He had come back the next day and the day after that.
I thought about Guardsman Fennick, who wore Arthur’s gold and red and had served the King’s Guard for six years.
Fennick had told me in the corridor outside the Great Hall, his voice barely above a whisper, that he had watched her eyes change color when she was angry and that it was not natural and that something needed to be done about the demon in our midst.