CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE
-LANCE-
The practice post had demanded everything I had.
But I hit it again anyway.
Strike, parry, pivot, strike. The pattern Corvin had drilled into us over a decade ago, when he’d stood at the edge of this same yard in the blue pre-dawn cold and shouted corrections with that insufferable calm of his.
Your left shoulder drops. Again. Your weight is in your heels.
Again. The memory of his voice made my jaw tighten, and I swung harder as a chunk of wood the size of my fist spun off into the dirt.
This was the third post. The second had lasted four days.
I didn’t think about that. I didn’t think about anything. That was the point.
Strike. It ran up the shaft, from the hilt to my palms, to wrists that were already chafed under the cloth bindings.
Parry. It burned against my shoulders. Pivot.
The blade slipped across the hard-packed earth, throwing me.
I regained balance, moved forward, and the blade struck deep but didn’t come free.
To stop was to stand still. Standing still meant the silence rushed in. And in the silence, there was nothing to hold back the image of her face.
I’d tried. Gods Above, I’d fucking tried. But the image of her kept returning like a fucking nightmare that wouldn’t quit.
That wasn’t the only issue causing me unrest.
I’d completely lost the ability to fuck.
It was as if my body had gone on strike because I repeatedly found myself with a limp cock in my hand and the humiliation to show for it.
What was more, it didn’t matter what the woman looked like, whether she was fair-haired or not.
The blonde girl from the kitchens who smelled like bread and laughed too loud: a failed attempt.
The dark-haired one who served wine at the high table and had made it very plain she was available and willing: a useless venture.
Two others after that, whose faces I’d already blurred into a general shape of softness and willing warmth.
I’d pressed my mouth to skin that wasn’t hers and waited for my body to do what it had always done without thought, effort, or mercy, and instead...
Nothing. Not a fucking thing.
Not reluctance. Not distraction. Nothing. Just the flat, humiliating absence of any response whatsoever, while my mind produced, with perfect involuntary precision, the exact angle of violet eyes in torchlight.
I swung until my arms shook.
The yard was empty. Gray light was now coming up over the eastern wall, the color of dirty water, the kind of dawn that didn’t commit to anything.
My breath came hard, ragged, and the cold air burned going in.
There was frost on the practice dummies, frost on the ground, and the creak of the stable block settling somewhere behind me but nothing else, and for one moment...
One moment.
There was nothing but the weight of the sword in my ruined hands, the scream of my overtaxed shoulders and the beautiful, temporary obliteration of a body pushed past the point where thought was possible.
I closed my eyes.
“You’ll destroy your muscles training like that.”
I kept my eyes closed for exactly one more second. Then I opened them.
“But I suppose you know that already.”
Kay.
Leaning against the armory door with his arms folded and a cup of something steaming in one hand, his angular face was arranged into the expression that passed for neutral on him.
And that meant he was thinking hard about something and had been for a while.
His gray-streaked hair, which was thinning at the temples, was already neat.
He’d been awake long enough to be presentable, which told me he hadn’t slept well, which told me something was driving him.
Something was always fucking driving him.
The watching was what people always missed about Kay. They saw the sharp tongue and the administrative exactness and the slight frame, and they made their assessments and stopped looking. They didn’t notice his eyes, how they moved constantly, always cataloguing, storing.
He’d been standing there for a while.
I drove the practice sword into the dirt. “What do you want, Kay?”
“A word,” he said, detaching himself from the wall and striding towards me with the same deliberate pace of someone who had nothing better to do. It was all an act, all part of the equation.
I should have told him to go to hell. I knew that even then, standing in the frozen dirt with my hands bleeding through the wrappings and my body emptied out to the point of transparency. But I was tired in a way that had nothing to do with the training.
I followed him inside.
The armory smelled of linseed oil, old iron, and the damp cold that stone walls hold long after the rest of a building has warmed.
Blades were racked along both walls and armor stood on forms in the shadows like men who’d been emptied out but still left standing.
Kay closed the door and set his cup on the workbench, and when he turned back, the performance of leisure was simply gone, shed cleanly, the way a man sheds a cloak he no longer needs.
The person looking at me was sharper. Brighter in the eyes, in a way that had nothing warm in it.
“I know,” he said.
Just two words that were decorated with nothing else. There was no context, no preface, nothing that might hint to what he was talking about. But I knew. Of course, I fucking knew.
My blood ran cold.
“You know what?” I asked. Tonelessly. Reflexively. I decided to play the game as a soldier’s first reaction is to deny anything unless there’s too much proof.
But I could tell by his expression that Kay wasn’t interested in playing the game.
“I know it was you who fucked her, Lance.” He paused for a moment. “You who spoiled what the king was so obsessed about spoiling for himself.” Another pause. “You. Fucked. Her.”
The word ‘fuck’ was chosen on purpose. I recognized that immediately: the bluntness of it, the deliberate vulgarity, stripping the thing of any context that might soften it. Not ‘bedded’. Not ‘lay with’. He’d chosen the one word that made the act itself nothing but a transaction. Nothing but error.
I didn’t move. Instead, I kept my expression schooled, kept my breathing even, and felt the gate in me slam shut with the finality of something that had been waiting to close.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do.” He picked up his tankard again and drank without looking away from me.
“The witch. The spy. Merlin’s daughter, who walked into this court wearing a fake man’s face and name... and you, the First Knight, the king’s sword hand, the man who swore an oath of loyalty that is in fact quite specific about not compromising the crown through personal conduct...
yet you decided to fuck her. While she was disguised as a knight under your command. While she was feeding information to the enemy.”
The details.
That was what made it something other than an accusation.
The details were the threat: the timeline, the proximity, the specific facts laid out in sequence like stones across a river.
Kay hadn’t guessed; Kay had built something.
And what he’d built was accurate enough that denying it outright was going to require me to commit to a lie that wouldn’t be easy to maintain.
“Those are heavy offenses to lay at my doorstep, Kay.”
He nodded. “Indeed, they are.”
I needed to know how much he had before I could calculate how badly I was bleeding.
Kay set down the cup.
“You were careful,” he said. “I’ll give you that. Arthur couldn’t see it. Mordred, even with all his wards and his psychomantic nonsense, couldn’t see it. Not one of them.”
There was an almost approving note to his voice, the tone a man takes with a well-designed machine he doesn’t much like.
“But Lance, there is one thing you’ve forgotten. I’ve seen your face for thirty years now, and I know just how your expression appears when you want something. And in the days before her exposure...”
He cocked his head to one side. “There was something new to your expression. Something I hadn’t seen in it before.”
Silence filled the space between us, but something in my chest was pulling tight.
“I admit to nothing,” I answered, shaking my head.
“Because this is nothing more than another example of your scheming mind reaching for possibilities that are far from truths. What’s more, you have no proof. Thus, this would be nothing more than your word against mine.”
My voice came out level. I was proud of that.
Kay looked at me, and I looked back at him, at those deadpan eyes that could pick out vulnerability in everything.
“No,” he said slowly. “I don’t.”
He let that sit.
“But proof and knowledge aren’t the same thing, Lance. Proof is for the courts and accusation. Knowledge...”
He took another sip from his cup. “Knowledge is for discussions such as these. Private armories in the morning, when no one can overhear what’s being discussed and neither has cause to repeat it.”
There was still a bite of frost to the air in spite of the shut door. My fingers were numb. The blister on my right hand must have burst at some point while I was sparring because there was dampness from it soaking through.
I gave him a look and shook my head as I turned for the door. “Why don’t you find something better to do with your time than trying to invent stories that aren’t true?”
I didn’t wait to hear his response.
-KAY-
The corridor was filled with the smell of burning torches. Lance’s retreating steps had long since faded from hearing. I remained where he’d left me, pressed up against the cool stone wall.
He was right.
And it annoyed me that he was right. Proof. Yes, I needed proof. This realization weighed on me like a rock in my stomach. The bastard had stared into my eyes and told me straight out to prove it. And the damn thing was, I couldn’t.
Because I had nothing.
I’d seen the way he’d looked at her, stealing glances every chance he had.
I’d seen the way something had passed between them after the Hunt Trial.
I’d seen the flush at the back of her neck whenever his name was mentioned and the particular way she went rigid whenever he entered a room.
I’d seen a hundred small things, the kind of things that only added up to meaning when you knew what you were looking at.