CHAPTER FIVE #2
Her voice was level. “When everything happened at Eldenvale, I was simply a dairy maid whose magic was responsible for getting my parents, the only parents I’d ever known and loved, killed.”
A beat. “The captain of your guard ran my father through with his sword simply because my father couldn’t tell him where I was. Because he didn’t know. And when my mother came out to defend him, your men killed her just as quickly.”
She paused as if the words were hard for her to swallow.
“Your men killed my parents in cold blood. What would you have done?”
My hands loosened on the bars.
The question landed somewhere I hadn’t braced for. Because I knew the answer. Every soldier knows the answer. Every person who has ever stood between a blade and someone they loved knows the answer.
“I’d have done the same thing.” It was the truth, and I couldn’t hide it. Wouldn’t hide it.
The admission moved through me like cold water, and I hated it.
Hated the way it complicated the clean lines of my rage, the way it reached into the story I’d been telling myself for days and pulled at the threads.
But even if I could understand her own narrative, even if I didn’t fully blame her for what had happened that day at Eldenvale, it didn’t change the events.
It didn’t change the fact that we were still on opposite sides.
My men had trusted me, and she’d murdered them.
I stood there for a long moment, just breathing.
She waited with her white hair falling loose around her shoulders and those fucking eyes steady on mine. And that steadiness, that quiet refusal to beg for my forgiveness, made it worse somehow.
“Yes,” I finally said. The word scraped out of me. “I understand what it is to defend yourself. And to defend the people you love.” I released the bars and stepped back one pace. I had to. “I’ve done so before, and I would do it again.”
Something shifted in her expression, the faintest loosening around her eyes.
“But it doesn’t matter.”
The loosening stopped.
“None of it fucking matters.” My voice came out flat.
Final. It was the voice I used to close negotiations and end conversations that had no further use.
“The why of it. The how. The grief you carry. The grief I carry.”
I looked at her. “None of it changes what you are. None of it changes what you did. None of it changes the choices you made. None of it changes why you’re here. And none of it changes the fact that you lied to me repeatedly.”
She held very still.
“Might I remind you that when you found out what I was: a woman, you kept that information from your king just as I did.”
I felt heat begin to burn me at her response, at the fact that she dared to spell out a truth I’d already spelled out to myself a dozen times.
“Because I believed that to be the extent of your lies! I believed you when you told me you were here only to support Arthur with your magic. I had no idea about the rest of it!”
“I lied to you because I had to lie to you,” she continued in a soft voice that was bereft of apology. Her admission did something to me: it was suddenly like kerosene dumped on the fires of my own internal inferno. “If you’d known the truth, you would’ve killed me.”
“Yes,” I nodded immediately. “If I’d known you were Merlin’s agent, come to kill my king—”
“—I had more than one chance to murder Arthur.”
Yet she never had. I’d reminded myself of that particular point numerous times as well.
“That doesn’t matter. It’s everything else that does.”
Her jaw tightened, and I knew that was all she’d give me. She wouldn’t cry. She wouldn’t yell. She wouldn’t beg for me to understand her or beg for me to forgive her. All she’d give me was that small muscle working beneath her cheek.
“I stood at Edwyn Cole’s bedside,” I continued, mainly because I couldn’t stomach the encroaching silence between us.
“And I made him a promise.” It was a point I’d replayed in my mind countless times because it was the only point that allowed my decision to be bathed in black and white, right and wrong.
“I’ve kept every oath I’ve ever made. Every single one. This will be no different.”
I straightened and took another step back from the bars.
“Then you’re incapable of seeing what happened in Eldenvale from my perspective?”
“I’ve seen it from your perspective, as I mentioned earlier.”
I paused, seeing the weight of hope suddenly shining in her eyes.
“I understand why you did what you did. I understand that my men were wrong for putting your parents to death. But even though I can understand it, it still doesn’t change anything. You still... you... are dead to me.”
Something moved behind her eyes. Something fast and something hurt. But then it was gone before I could place it.
“Were I in Arthur’s place,” I continued, needing to seal the tomb so whatever love had lived between us would be sealed from the light of day forever.
I cleared my throat. “I would have already ended this. There would have been no deliberation, no offers to be made. There would have been no waiting.”
I held her gaze for what I intended to be the last time.
“I would have had you executed without further thought.”
She said nothing, but I would never forget the expression in her eyes. I turned from the bars because I couldn’t look at her any longer.
“Lance.”
My name in her mouth stopped me cold. I didn’t turn around.
“This is the last time I’ll speak to you of this,” I continued. “As far as I’m concerned, you’re nothing and no one. What’s more: I regret everything that passed between us.”
Then I started forward once more, having said everything I needed to say, everything I’d come to say. But her voice caught me again before I reached the door.
“I know,” she said quietly. “I know what I did to you.”
The torchlight threw my shadow long against the door before me. I said nothing; I couldn’t find the words, and it was just as well, for there was nothing left to say. I reached forward and lifted the latch.
“I’m sorry for it,” she added.
I walked through the door and away from her without another word, without turning back. I didn’t stop until I reached the stairs and reached the darkness that had the decency to feel like what it was.
-LANCE-
When I returned to my quarters, I stood in the dark and let my eyes adjust to the shadows as I looked at my hands.
They were steady enough when I held them flat, but the moment I let them hang loose at my sides, they started up again.
A fine tremor, something barely visible, the kind of shaking no one would ever see unless they were looking.
I was looking.
I crossed to the table beside my bed and poured myself a glass of wine. I drank it in one go, standing up. I poured another. This time, though, I sat down in the chair nearest the dead fire and stared at the ash.
She’d reached for the bars; it had seemed like she was trying to get as close to me as possible.
I hadn’t meant to notice that. Just as I hadn’t meant to notice the smallness of her wrists, or the way the grime of her cell had worked so deep into the creases of her knuckles that it looked like she’d been buried and dug back up again.
She’d reached for the bars, and I’d stepped back, like she was something that might burn me.
She killed your men.
Yes. She had.
I refilled the glass.
Her parents, who weren’t her true parents, were dead before my men had breathed their last.
I knew that. I’d known it the moment I’d read the garrison report all those months ago.
I remembered standing in Arthur’s solar with the parchment in my hand.
I’d read the thing twice while Arthur talked about the witch of Eldenvale and how she had to be put to death for her crimes against the crown.
Self-defense had been the charitable reading: the thought had even crossed my mind back then, before I’d ever known what it meant to love Merlin’s daughter.
I drank more. Finished this glass of wine before I realized it. I poured another.
Arthur hadn’t mentioned the fact that my men had killed her parents first; maybe he’d skipped over that part?
Or hadn’t considered it of importance? I hadn’t mentioned it either.
Instead, I’d stood there in my immaculate black armor with Arthur’s crest on my chest, and I’d said nothing.
I’d simply watched him fume about the men he’d lost, and I’d agreed that they would be avenged.
The wine was going down easier now.
She made a fool of you.
That was the part I was supposed to hold onto.
That was the part that was supposed to make the rest of this simple.
A woman had disguised herself as a man and entered the king’s trials, and she’d survived them.
A woman with revenge in her heart and fire in her eyes.
A woman who had completely turned my life upside down.
That was the embarrassing part, and the part that reflected on me. I was supposed to be angry about that.
I was angry about that.
I gripped the carafe and didn’t bother with the glass; it was a waste of my fucking time.
Arthur wouldn’t be kind to her. Yes, his offer that she be his reverse spy was real enough; Arthur didn’t make offers he didn’t intend to keep.
But the shape of the thing underneath it, the punishment built into the architecture of it, that was real too.
She’d made him look like a fool. Perhaps even more so than she’d made me look like a fool.
Because her mockery of Arthur had been public.
And as far as I knew, no one knew the truth about the two of us. And gods be that no one ever found out.
Regardless, Arthur wouldn’t forgive someone making a fool of him. He wouldn’t tolerate it. He’d collect it, then he’d file it away and let it compound interest until the moment he chose to collect.
She didn’t know that yet.