CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE #4
I pushed between them, and the movement pulled everything that was wrong with me into sharp, screaming focus.
My ribs ground against each other in a way that made my vision go white.
Arthur had cracked at least two of them, maybe more, and I felt all of them now, felt the exact location of every break as my body registered what I’d just asked it to do.
My left knee nearly buckled on the first step, and I locked it through sheer stubbornness, blood still running freely from my mouth where something had split inside it.
I stood between them because I wouldn’t allow him to take out his anger on her. She didn’t deserve it. My love for her wasn’t her fucking fault. It was mine.
It was, objectively, the worst I’d felt standing upright in recent memory.
My body was cataloging the damage in real time: the ribs, the knee, the deep ache in my side that suggested something beyond bruising, and underneath all of that physical accounting was the other thing, the thing that had no clean name,
the thing I’d laid open in the yard not twenty minutes ago and hadn’t had time to put back.
I was still bleeding from that, too. Just somewhere Arthur couldn’t see.
But I was standing. I made sure of that. I was standing as tall as I could get, which wasn’t as tall as I wanted to be, because my ribs had opinions about full extension. I put my hand on Arthur’s forearm: not a grab, not a restraint, just placement, just contact; and I looked at him.
“Enough.”
The word came out wrecked. My mouth wasn’t working properly, and I could taste copper, and I was aware, acutely, painfully aware, that there was nothing left in me that was whole, clean, or capable of making this look easy.
I had nothing left to perform with. Whatever he saw when he looked at me right now, it was the actual truth of me, stripped down to the bone.
Behind me, I could feel Guinevere going still. She hadn’t moved away. She was still close enough that I could sense the warmth of her at my back, and some part of me that was past the point of wisdom was glad she was there. Was glad to be between her and his rage.
Even now. Even now.
Arthur’s attention dropped to my hand that was still on his forearm. He looked at it for a long moment: at the blood on my knuckles, at the way my grip wasn’t entirely steady, at the evidence of everything I’d already spent to get to this moment.
When he looked back up at me, something in him stopped being a man and started being the other thing.
The heat came first, a wave of it, dry and absolute, the way desert stones feel in midsummer.
When he breathed, there was smoke on his breath.
Soon, scales flickered under his skin along his forearm, just briefly, just enough to see them.
His eyes eclipsed, once glowing red and now the black of a reptile.
When he hit me this time, I hit the ground with all of me.
I heard shouting then. Multiple voices, Percival’s was loudest among them, something which surprised me.
Then there was the sound of boots in the mud, several pairs of them: the sounds of organized scrambling of men trying to get between me and something they were afraid of.
Someone pulled Arthur back, and I heard the effort it cost them.
Regardless, the scorching heat from him began to recede slowly, like watching a tide go out. I couldn’t move. I just lay there on my back and looked at the clouded sky through my good eye and breathed carefully around my ribs as I listened to the yard reorganize itself around what had just happened.
After a moment, I turned my head.
Guinevere stood where I’d left her. Her cheek was already reddening from the moment he’d hit her, but she didn’t seem to notice it.
Instead, she watched me with an expression I couldn’t read.
It definitely wasn’t gratitude, but maybe it was surprise?
I wasn’t sure what it was. All I knew was that I couldn’t allow him to hurt her again.
“Go,” I managed.
She shook her head, and almost at the same time, Tristan was at her side. He’d appeared from somewhere during the chaos, which was the kind of thing Tristan did. His hand was at the small of her back in a protective sort of way. Usually, it would have bothered me, but at the moment I felt nothing.
Until I noticed how she allowed his hand to remain there.
I turned my face back to the sky as something moved through me that felt like jealousy but much more complicated.
Whatever it was, it was something worse, something that had everything to do with the fact that she was standing there and Tristan knew exactly where to put his hand.
While I was lying in the mud bleeding from...
well, from everywhere, and none of that was anyone’s fault but mine.
I’d confessed because I was tired of the lie.
And I’d stepped in front of her because I couldn’t not step in front of her.
Both of those things were true simultaneously, but neither of them made any fucking sense.
And the fact that I still couldn’t stop looking at her was something I was going to have to carry for a very long time.
I sat up, or I attempted to. Nobody helped me.
That was also right.