CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO #2
I felt it before I understood it. It was almost like a kind of loosening of the pain, the kind that happens when you’ve been clenching a muscle for so long you’ve forgotten you were clenching it, and then suddenly it releases, and you realize the whole shape of your body has changed.
The grinding pressure in my side began to ease degree by degree.
The pain wasn’t quite gone, but it was retreating.
Then I saw Percival’s face. The change was subtle; he didn’t gasp or flinch, but something moved behind his eyes, something swift and involuntary, the way a man’s expression shifts in the half-second before he gains control of it.
His jaw tightened, and his breath came out slowly through his nose, and that was when I realized my pain was becoming his.
“Stop.” I put my hand over his.
He looked at me. “I’m not finished.”
“The ribs are enough.”
“Lance—”
“—my lip’s fine, or it will be, and the same goes for my eye.” I pulled his hand away from my side. He let me, but he didn’t look happy about it. “I mean it. Stop there; it’s more than enough.”
He sat back on his heels, and I watched him breathe through whatever I’d just handed him.
Three broken ribs, maybe four. I’d felt them go when I’d hit the ground, and the sound had been bad enough that I’d been grateful for the roaring in my ears that had followed.
Now that same damage lived somewhere in Percival’s body, invisible, a phantom, but real enough that his color had gone slightly gray.
“Thank you,” I managed.
I sat up slowly because my ribs were still tender, but that was nothing compared to the pain they’d been in.
Now that pain had been reduced to a dull ache that sat at the corners of my awareness rather than at the center of it.
Breathing was a different thing entirely now.
I pulled in a full lungful of air for the first time in hours and let it out again.
Percival nodded once. He was still pale, and he’d tucked his hands into his lap. I could see the faint tremor in his fingers that he was pretending wasn’t there.
“You can tell Arthur you healed me all the way,” I offered.
“Oh,” Percival started, breathing in deeply. “The king doesn’t know I’m here.”
And that meant Arthur hadn’t sent him, which meant Arthur hadn’t wanted me healed, which meant Arthur’s anger was a real and lasting thing. I’d immediately assumed, as soon as I’d seen Percival, that Arthur didn’t want me rotting away in pain down here, but apparently, he did.
I looked at Percival and nodded, and by his sorrowful expression, I was fairly certain he knew exactly what I’d been thinking. “You shouldn’t remain down here much longer. I don’t want you to get punished for tending to me.”
Percival nodded at that. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think he will keep you here for much longer.”
Clearly, he didn’t know Arthur like I did. “I’m most likely a dead man,” I said with an apologetic smile, because by the flinch on Percival’s face, he hadn’t liked that statement. “A king doesn’t forget something like… what I’ve done.”
Percival didn’t answer immediately. He had the honesty not to argue the point, but soon he stood up, and then he was moving out of my cell and away from me and up the corridor, and then it was the sound of the door opening that met my ears. After he’d left, I just sat there in the dark and breathed.
Corvin hadn’t said another word, which was just as well because I wasn’t in the mood to explain myself.
The candle burned lower. Even though my ribs no longer ached like they had, my face felt like something that had been pummeled then glued back together again.
As I lay in the cell that was reserved for traitors and enemies of the crown, I tried to remember when I’d stopped being certain which of those I was.
-ARTHUR-
The blood wouldn’t come out from under my thumbnail.
I’d scrubbed my hands twice with the basin water and a rough cloth, and still it sat there, dark and dried into the crescent.
Lance’s blood. I pressed my thumb against my forefinger and felt the dried flake of it and thought about nothing for a long moment.
Satisfied, the dragon murmured, somewhere beneath my ribs. It wasn’t a word exactly, but more like the feeling of satisfaction that had taken shape inside me like a coiled warmth.
I hated it.
I turned away from the fire and looked at my hands in the dim light.
The knuckles on my right hand were still swollen, and I was sure a few of them had broken before the dragon had healed them.
I hadn’t even been aware that the dragon was able to do such a thing, but there it was.
My breaks were healing, but Lance’s weren’t.
I thought about how I’d hit him too many times, especially when he hadn’t fought back.
I knew that now, and I’d known it then. Even through the red of it, I’d known, but I hadn’t stopped.
Kay knocked on my door twice. I knew it was him because I recognized the impatience in the sound.
When I didn’t make any move to let him in, he let himself in, which was his habit and one I’d long since stopped objecting to.
He carried a folded stack of correspondence, and his expression was the one he wore when he was working: neutral in the way a blade is neutral, something shaped for a purpose.
He looked at my hands.
“Court is unsettled,” he said.
“I gathered.”
He set the correspondence on the table and began sorting it by some internal system I’d never bothered to learn. “Lord Mervaine and his son departed before midday. They gave no formal farewell, and their steward cited a family matter, but the timing—”
“—I understand the timing.” I took a breath. “It’s not customary for a king to attack his First Knight.”
Kay nodded. “No, it is not.” He paused. “The Corbenic delegation has requested an audience.”
I said nothing because the idea of facing Isolde right now... well, it was too much. In fact, I hadn’t left this room purely because I didn’t want to risk the chance of running into her.
“I will... deal with that later,” I said.
He nodded. “And what would you like me to say to those who keep asking what is being done with Lancelot?”
I looked at the fire.
Lance was confined to the dungeon because I wanted him in the worst possible place in this castle, next to the only other man who had backstabbed me.
But the point was that Lance was still alive.
That and he wasn’t as seriously hurt as he could have been or should have been.
Still, I didn’t know what to do with him.
I’d been asking myself that same question since I’d left the training yard with his blood drying on my knuckles, and I still had nothing that resembled an answer.
“Tell them,” I said, “that the matter is being reviewed.”
Kay wrote the words down even though we both knew he didn’t need to.
Then he handed me Mordred’s report. It was longer than last week’s, which had been longer than the week before.
The handwriting was precise as always, the language careful, the conclusions buried inside three layers of qualification.
I read it twice. The containment seals on the lower wards were degrading faster than the replacement rate.
Three had failed entirely and been redrawn.