CHAPTER FIFTY #2
I thought about the serving woman, Edith, who had refused to bring the witch’s evening meal three nights running because Edith had touched the tray the witch had sent back and found it cold, not room-temperature cold, not the cold of untouched food, but ice cold,
cold that burned Edith’s fingers and left them numb for many seconds.
There were others, of course. Not many, but the ones who had followed my teachings and beliefs were the right kind.
They were not hot-blooded men who would act rashly and create complications, but quiet people with deep fears and the particular stubbornness of those who have decided that what they believe is more important than what they are permitted to say aloud.
I had been careful, of course, because I had to be careful.
I had said nothing direct and had only asked questions.
I had shared passages from the Boundless texts about spiritual contamination, about the responsibility of those who could see to act on behalf of those who could not, and I had let them come to their own conclusions,
which were the same as my conclusions because the evidence was the same evidence and it pointed in one direction.
The king was compromised; this much I now understood.
I did not enjoy this conclusion, for I had served Arthur with complete faith for many years.
I had believed in the Round Table, in the ideal it represented, in the possibility of a court that held itself to a standard higher than mere political survival.
I had believed that Arthur, for all his severity, was oriented toward justice.
But now I realized I was wrong in my beliefs because a just man did not protect a demon even if she had a pleasing face and body.
What was more, a just man did not humiliate his most faithful servant because another man’s desire had been inconvenienced.
A just man did not stand with his arms crossed while the evidence accumulated and chose, deliberately, not to see it.
Arthur was not protecting Camelot, though he did not realize as much. The truth was more along the lines that Arthur was protecting something that threatened it. And that meant the protection of Camelot, and the protection of the realm as a whole, had fallen to others.
I was at peace with this realization. That surprised me slightly when I allowed myself to examine it: the depth of the peace I was in.
I had expected, when I first understood what I was being asked to carry, some measure of fear or resistance within me.
After all, there is a natural human reluctance to act outside sanctioned channels, to become the instrument of justice when the justice system itself has failed.
But there was no fear or resistance within me.
I was at peace with this understanding. I had accepted it, and now there existed within me only clarity.
And it was a particular type of clarity that visited me now, one that came after long prayer, after the stripping away of everything that was not essential.
My seat at the Round Table was not essential, my standing in the court was not essential, and my physical safety was not essential.
What was essential was that the kingdom did not fall to what was inside her.
The candles burned straight now. Sixteen of them with small, steady flames in the dark chapel.
I knelt between them and felt the cold of the granite floor on my knees and understood that I was being prepared for something.
Something large and something from which there would be no returning.
This was a mission that would change me as much as it would change the kingdom.
She needed to die.
Not as punishment, because punishment implied wrongdoing, and she was beyond wrongdoing.
Yes, I was willing to allow that she might have been a victim of what had found her, that some part of what called itself ‘Guinevere’ might not have chosen this fate, but that understanding changed nothing,
for the vessel was still the vessel and the fire did not spare the building because the wood hadn’t asked to burn.
She needed to die, and the manner of her death needed to be precise, because what lived in her would not die easily, of that I was certain. I knew this because I had been reading and researching from the old books. And the old books had described a demon such as that which lived within the prisoner.
There were texts the Brotherhood considered sensitive.
They were not forbidden, as such, but they required preparation before study, required a certain state of mind and spiritual fortification.
I had never opened them because I had never had need to open them for I had never come across a demon of this fortitude and strength.
But that need was now upon me and so I had turned to the sensitive texts and I had studied them over the past two days, remaining awake all day and night in order to read them twice each.
When will you act? The thought occurred to me.
The answer was a simple one: I would act when the moment was correct.
I would not rush, nor would I act from anger or reactivity.
It did make things slightly more difficult that the witch had been moved out of my custody and into a room nearest the king’s.
But difficulties were merely that: difficult; they were not impossible.
Yes, I would await the correct moment, and when that moment came, I would recognize it.
In the meantime, I would spend my days in preparation, including, of course, prayer, fasting, and the prescribed readings.
I would speak to those who would listen, and I would say nothing that was not necessary and plan everything that was.
Even if it meant giving up my life, if it were impossible to make Arthur see the reason for what I did, that was acceptable to me.
Becoming a martyr was something I did not want, but I certainly was not afraid of it either.
The people who had shaped history were not the same ones who survived it.
They were the ones who understood the work mattered more than the worker.
I had been refined for this. The years of purging, of painful, deliberate self-emptying, of learning to want nothing that could be taken from me, all of it had been in preparation.
I understood that now. I had thought the path I walked was about my own purity, my own advancement toward something higher, but it had never been about me.
It had been about being ready when readiness was required. And I was now ready.
The chapel was very quiet. Outside, somewhere in the castle, a door closed.
The ordinary sounds of Camelot at night continued: footsteps on stone, distant voices, the muted clang of something metallic in the lower kitchens.
It was simply a world proceeding in its habitual ignorance of what was being decided in the small, dark room that the castle had forgotten about.
I bowed my head.
I will not look away.
The flames burned steadily. All sixteen of them, motionless now, throwing small yellow pools of light across the granite altar and the rough-hewn pews and the cold floor where I knelt.
I remained there until my knees grew numb. And then I stayed longer still.
There was no rush because the decision had been made, the way was known, and the knowledge gave me the peace of clear water that reflects perfectly and without blemish what lies before it.
I would be prepared. I already was.
-CORVIN-
Kay came at the end of the afternoon watch.
I heard him before I saw him, as I recognized that particular cadence of his walk, including the slight drag of his heel on the left, the way he never quite lifted his foot.
I’d noticed it perhaps three weeks ago. In truth, I’d noted everything about everyone who came down these stairs because it was the only work available to me, and I wasn’t built for idleness.
Kay carried nothing with him this time, no games meant to trap me into commentary I preferred not to have.
He sat on the low stool outside the bars and looked at me with an expression that was difficult to name.
Regardless, I knew enough of Kay to know he’d come with something prepared, and he was taking his time opening it.
“Good news,” he said finally.
The warmth in his voice was constructed, and I kept my expression where it was as I waited.
He gave me a broad smile as he related that Guinevere was no longer in Galahad’s custody.
She was now inside her own bedchamber bordering the king’s.
And in that bedchamber, there was a hearth and a fire, a bed with exquisite linens, and all the trappings of comfort.
Kay said she was, by all accounts, better than she had been.
I asked what that meant.
He took a small breath, one that was almost imperceptible, the breath of a man who had been waiting for exactly that question, and he told me.
Not all of it, I was sure, but enough of it.
He mentioned the bruises and wounds that had been uncovered in the training yard, how Lance had attacked Galahad in front of witnesses.
Kay relayed the information the way a man says something he knows will draw blood: carefully, watching the blade go in.
What was more, there were rumors, Kay called them, rumors that Galahad had done more than just bruise her.
There were rumors that he had raped her.
Or that he’d tried. Kay delivered this information in the measured tone of a physician relaying a prognosis, watching my face the whole time.
I gave him nothing, just as I was trained to do.
It was the hardest thing I’d ever done.
Because what Kay had just told me, beneath the clinical language and the careful pacing, was that a man had put his hands on Guin.
Not in combat. Not in the course of a fair fight between two people who had chosen to be there.
No, he had put his hands on a woman who was bound, who had been stripped of her power, who had nowhere to go and no one to call on. He’d done it and called it holy.
And I’d been forty feet below the ground, counting a guard’s footsteps.
Inside me was another situation altogether.
Inside me, there was a war brewing as emotions battled against one another for supremacy.
There was rage, first and foremost. And it was a rage that was so clean and absolute that it didn’t feel like emotion at all.
And if he had, in fact, attempted (whether he’d succeeded or not) to force himself on her…