CHAPTER ONE #3
His throat moved as if he wanted to say something, but no words came; he didn’t look away.
There was something in that. Not comfort, but something.
Gawain stood at Gareth’s right hand, where he always stood. The Orkney brothers were close and always had been. Gawain’s face was stone, unreadable. His jaw was tight, and something moved behind his eyes, something brief and buried, and his gaze dropped to the floor.
The silence stretched through the room, and Arthur allowed it, reveled in it, I imagined.
This display of my weakness and his power over me was, no doubt, fueling him.
Then, from the far end of the knights’ row, there was a sound.
It was quiet, involuntary, almost nothing, just a quick inhaled breath. I looked up and found Galahad.
He stood apart from the others, the way he always stood.
And he wore that particular stillness of a man whose discipline was a physical practice.
His golden hair caught the candlelight like something consecrated, but it was his gray eyes that captured my attention.
They were on me, just as everyone’s were, but his were...
Wrong.
It wasn’t the crude appraisal of the courtiers, and not Kay’s calculating inventory or Agravaine’s cold assessment of utility in Galahad’s gaze.
Instead, strangely, it was the expression of hunger, raw and poorly hidden.
It was something that struck me because Galahad had built his entire existence around his lack of appetite, his purity.
Yet, the way he was looking at me now reminded me of the way a starving man eyes a meal he’s convinced himself he doesn’t want.
Once he realized I’d caught him staring, something locked shut behind his eyes, and he turned away.
Arthur approached me once again, and as he closed the distance between us, I felt it: that thing I’d always felt whenever he was near.
It was something that had continued since the first time I’d met him at the lake, when I’d been Guinevere and he’d been Arthur, and something had passed between us.
I didn’t know what to call it, but it felt like a vibration, or a hum beneath my sternum, low and insistent, like a string plucked.
It was something warm, something that thrummed within me and almost felt like... recognition of one soul to another.
Whatever it was, it got louder.
His jaw tightened. It was just a small movement, almost nothing really, but I was standing close enough to see it. He didn’t look away, as the hum moved through me like current through still water.
He felt it too.
“The daughter of Merlin will now be offered the chance to become my spy,” he continued, but the tone of his voice had changed. He was now uncomfortable. That low humming had upset him, just as it upset me. “Against her father.”
He let that statement land, watching the surprise ripple through the room in small movements: a shifted weight here, a drawn breath there, the twitch of Kay’s mouth.
“If she accepts this honor, she will feed Merlin every detail we give her. She will deal in the language of disinformation and misdirection. What is more, every defense of Annwyn, she will deliver to us. Every operation the Wardens run, every weakness in Caer Gwyll will be ours.”
He tilted his head just a small angle, just an inch, but the hum in my blood sharpened to something almost painful.
“She has a choice,” he continued. “Either accept my offer or die as the witch she is.”
Then he raised his hand and snapped his fingers once in a clean, imperious gesture that barely qualified as effort. One of the guards materialized from the edge of the room like a dog that had been waiting for precisely that sound.
“Return the prisoner to her cell.”
His voice was flat and final, and he was already turning away from me, as though I were a problem he’d now resolved and set aside.
He motioned downward with two fingers toward the cloak that was still crumpled and spread across the floor in a dark red pool of uselessness.
The guard stooped and retrieved it, holding it out to me with the blank expression of a man paid not to think.
I took it from him and then folded it very deliberately over my arm.
I stared at Arthur the whole time I did, and in response, he narrowed his eyes. I smiled.
I’d walk the remainder of this hall exactly as I was: stripped of disguise, stripped of armor, stripped down to nothing but my own skin because the alternative was to cover myself like a woman who was ashamed.
And I wasn’t ashamed.
Every eye in the room had already seen everything that was worth seeing.
Covering myself with the cloak now would only suggest that I wished they hadn’t.
But I wanted every man watching me to understand, with perfect clarity, that I wasn’t diminished by what had just happened here.
I wanted them to understand that Arthur could strip me, repurpose me, rename me, could stand before his court and announce my purpose as though I were a weapon he’d simply redirected, but I was the victor, not him.
“Anyone who touches her will be severely punished.”
Thank the gods for small mercies, I supposed.
-GUIN-
The prisoner’s clothing I was given was rough and stiff wool. It was the kind of fabric that scrapes skin raw, but I was grateful for it, all the same. Grateful not to be naked any longer against the constant chill of the prison walls and grateful not to be wearing the cloak of the fucking king.
The torch in the corridor just outside my cell threw a strip of light across the floor, but beyond that, there was only darkness.
It was the same as it had been for however long I’d been down here: nothing beyond the blackness of shadows.
They were the kind that press in from the corners and settle in the lungs, the type of dark that made you fear for what could be sitting inside it.
I put my back against the far wall and slid down until my knees met my chest. I could still feel the cold and the wet of the stone through the wool, yes, but it was still better than being naked, even if the prisoner’s rags smelled of the sweat of whoever had worn them before me.
I allowed myself one breath, and with it, a tear. In truth, I could already feel it streaming down my left cheek. Whatever had happened in the Great Hall, whatever performance I’d forced myself to play, it was hitting me now.
An image of Corvin’s face appeared behind my eyes, the way memories do when you’ve stopped fighting them.
I could remember the warmth of his hands when he’d pulled me into his arms after so many nightmares, his low voice steady and unhurried, talking me back down from wherever awful place the dreams had taken me.
“I’m sorry I failed you,” I whispered.
I allowed myself another breath as I blinked against the tears that now overflowed my eyes and streamed down my cheeks.
I thought of The Round Table, of the candlelight on the knights’ faces.
I thought of Gareth’s white knuckles and Percival’s locked jaw.
I thought of these men who had trained beside Lioran for months, men who’d shared bread, sweat, and stupid jokes. Gone. All of it...