CHAPTER FIFTY-THREE #3
The truth was that I did not need the book, and I had not needed it for a very long time.
But there was power in holding it, for people believed what they could see.
I opened it to the passage I had marked for this hour.
“Where darkness takes root in the seat of power, the faithful must not wait for the seat to speak. The seat has already spoken. Its silence is its testimony.”
I closed the book. “The king was told the truth about the demon, for I reported what I had witnessed: the demon’s magic breaking through Mordred’s binding. He experienced the terrible cold for himself. But when I told him of the demoness in our midst,
he removed the witch from my care and gave her a bed chamber of her own.”
The word landed flat and strange, the way a wrong note does.
“Now she eats the same food that feeds the other knights. She trains in his yard, and she breathes his air.”
Calogrenant made a small sound. Not a word, just air leaving him, but it was telling, all the same.
“Brother,” I said, and he looked up. His eyes were wet. “What you saw was real. What you felt in that corridor: that cold that went beneath the skin: that was your soul recognizing what your mind had not yet named. The Boundless gave you that instinct.”
“It was fear,” he said. His voice cracked halfway through it.
“Yes,” I said. “And faith is what you do with fear.”
I set the book down and folded my hands together.
“Tomorrow, I will invoke the Trial of Purity during the morning court.”
The silence that followed had weight.
Bonney spoke first. “The king will refuse it.”
“He may try,” I said as I shook my head.
“But the ancient right of trial cannot be refused without confession. It is written in the Burning Laws, which predate Arthur’s reign by three centuries. Even though he does not practice the Vow of the Boundless,
he cannot erase what is written in his own book of laws without erasing the legitimacy of every law that followed it.” I paused. “He knows this.”
“So he accepts the trial,” Lionel said slowly. He was working it through. Good. I needed men who were capable of advanced thought.
“He will accept the trial because he will have no other choice,” I said. “The witch will then be brought forward. Lord Mordred will be called to administer the testing that will decide what she harbors within her.” I looked at each of them again. “But we do not require such a test, do we?”
They all shook their heads, but their expressions revealed their confusion, so I continued. “No, we do not require it, for we know what she harbors within herself.” They began to nod. “She will not live to receive that test from Lord Mordred.”
Another silence. Longer this time.
“You mean to kill her,” Bonney said, though the tone of his voice wasn’t one of accusation but more a man squaring himself to a fact, trying to understand it.
“I mean to end the demon,” I answered. “Cleanly and fully, before the king can intervene and before Mordred can wrap his tests in procedure and delay. The witch will be brought forward in open court, in the sight of every lord, knight, and servant in that hall,
and I will perform the Rite of Severance. It will be witnessed. It will be lawful. It will be done, and the kingdom will be saved.”
“He’ll hang us all,” Calogrenant said, shaking his head.
“He will try,” I said again. I let the repetition do its work.
“And every man in that hall will have watched a confirmed witch destroyed before their eyes by men invoking ancient holy law. Arthur is a king who has survived because he understands optics,
and that means he understands that he cannot execute four knights of the Boundless for performing a sanctioned rite. Not now. Not when our own numbers are growing by the day.”
I had thought about this for a long time. I did not speak of things I had not considered from every angle.
Lionel uncrossed his arms slowly, like a man setting down something heavy.
“Where do you need us?” he asked.
I told them, and I was specific. I gave them positions, timing, the exact moment when we would need to act: not before she was brought forward to the center of the hall, not after I had spoken the first line of the rite, but the moment between, the threshold moment,
when the law had been invoked and the court had no choice but to witness what happened next.
Bonney asked three questions, and they were good questions. I answered each of them with patience.
Calogrenant said nothing more. But when I finished, he pressed his forehead to the floor in the full prostration of the Boundless, the gesture of a man who had stopped arguing with himself.
We prayed together for a long time after that, and I led them through the Canticle of Right Action, then the Litany of Witnessed Truth, then the short prayer that had no name in the texts but that every monk at the monastery had known by heart: “Let my hand be the hand of the Boundless.
Let my eye be the eye of judgment. Let what I do in this hour be counted, not against me, but among the works of the faithful.”
Their voices joined mine, the sound rose into the vaulted ceiling and dispersed there, the candles burned without flickering, and I felt, as I always felt in moments of true alignment, a perfect and absolute stillness.
This wasn’t the feeling of peace, for I had given up the word “peace” as imprecise.
This was something more exact. It was certainty.
When it was done, they left one at a time, at intervals, the way I had instructed them to do.
No one saw the three King’s Guard leaving the old chapel together in the dark hours of the morning.
Instead, if they were looking, they saw individuals, each going separately about their own private devotions.
Camelot was full of men with private devotions.
I remained, and I knelt again at the altar. I did not pray further, for prayer had already served its purpose. What remained was the quiet, and the candle smoke, and the carved marble eyes looking down at me from above.
My hands rested on my thighs. They were still, and I was still.
I examined my hands as I sat there, looking at my knuckles and the calluses along my fingers from years of sword work, the pale half-moons at the base of each nail. They did not shake, and I was happy for it.
I had wondered, in some distant and theoretical part of myself, whether my hands would shake once this decision had been made.
I had read accounts of men who had performed necessary acts: soldiers, inquisitors, the great purgers of the Third Age whose names were recorded in the texts, and some of them had written of trembling, of the body’s resistance to the mind’s clarity.
Mine were still.
I understood what that meant. It meant I had been made for this, not chosen in some vague, flattering sense, but made, designed, purged, shaped, and refined across years of deliberate denial until what remained was only what the Boundless required.
Perhaps I did not shake because the facts were what they were.
The witch had broken through the binding, and only strong magic could break through binding.
The scholars said it was impossible. The magic would turn inward, they said.
It would destroy the host before it escaped, they said.
That was the function of the binding: that it was a container as much as a suppressant.
At least, that is what they said, but hers had broken through.
I had told Arthur that. And I had told him what that meant: that the demon within her was more powerful than any demon I had ever come across.
And he had looked at me with those cold blue eyes that had once held something resembling a soul, and in response, he had gifted her with her own bedchamber right beside his.
He was lost. I had accepted that, and I did not grieve it, for grief was a luxury I had purged years ago.
But I remembered the theoretical shape of grief, and I applied it briefly to Arthur, or to the man he had been as well as the king he might have been.
Then I released it because grief was also a distraction, and tomorrow required everything.
I stayed until the last candle guttered. Then I rose, straightened my robes, and walked out of the old chapel into the corridor.
Dawn was beginning. That pale, indeterminate light that was neither night nor morning, that belonged to neither state. The sky above the courtyard was the color of old iron as I walked across the stones toward the east wing.
Behind me, the chapel windows caught the first true light of the sun as it crested the valley walls: caught the deep reds and ambers of the stained glass, the figures of the faithful rendered in a thousand fragments of color.
The light moved through them slowly, and from a distance, the glass looked like it was bleeding.