CHAPTER TWENTY-THREE #3
And now I was watching Guinevere stand at the edge of annihilation with her arm extended toward a hand I couldn’t see, and I was considering whether my policy of strategic silence had perhaps run its course.
The problem was who to tell?
Arthur would either reject the visions as nothing to worry about or, worse, he’d weaponize them.
Whatever the visions meant, whatever they were pointing toward, Arthur’s first question would be how to use the information to consolidate his position, and the delicacy required to handle something this large would be entirely beyond his current emotional state.
There was just something... off about him. I couldn’t put my finger on just what.
And Lance would be useless because he was already fighting demons of his own. He’d been fighting a war inside himself that he hadn’t even acknowledged yet, and men in that particular battle were worse than useless; they were actively dangerous to anyone who came too close.
I rubbed the back of my neck and watched the sky lighten by increments.
Galahad would pray over it and conclude that the Boundless had a plan, which may have been true but wasn’t actionable.
Kay would want facts and logistics, and he’d look at me with that expression he used on junior knights who’d just reported something he considered strategically irrelevant to the matter at hand.
Yes, there was no one I could tell. Not yet, anyway.
I thought of Lioran. Of the particular way she’d laughed when she’d played the part of a man.
She’d seemed too surprised, like laughter caught her off guard and she hadn’t decided yet whether to allow it.
I also thought of the way she’d held herself during sparring practice, that economy of movement I’d thought was training but now understood was something else entirely.
I thought of the morning she’d sat beside me at the long table and eaten an entire bowl of porridge while reading a treatise on siege fortifications upside down because she clearly wasn’t paying any attention to it.
At the time, I’d thought it merely strange, but now I understood: her mind had been anywhere but on siege fortifications.
She’d lied about her name, about her mission, about who her father was, which was, objectively, a significant omission.
But she hadn’t lied about the laughter, or the discomfort at the feasts, or the way she’d talked about the hills of Logres, how there had been a slight softening in her voice, the kind that happened involuntarily when someone was speaking about a place they’d loved and lost.
My ability didn’t work at a distance. I couldn’t reach across a castle and read someone’s emotional truth like a letter.
But I’d spent weeks beside her, close enough to register the thousand small signals the body sends when it’s remembering.
Close enough to know the difference between a performed self and a real one.
She’d performed being a knight. She hadn’t performed being the person she truly was.
Since finding out she was actually a woman, not a knight, I’d asked myself if I’d ever been attracted to Lioran the way I was certain some of the knights had been, without even realizing why.
But I’d reached the conclusion that I hadn’t been.
I’d only ever regarded Lioran as a good friend to me, nothing more.
And now that I’d seen Lioran unmasked? Seen the beautiful woman who was her true face?
Even seen her naked when Arthur had attempted to humiliate her in front of all of us?
Even then, I couldn’t say I felt anything...
sexual towards her. Perhaps that was a relief.
Truth be told, I hadn’t felt such feelings towards anyone, whether male or female, and I’d accepted the fact that perhaps I was just built differently.
Perhaps I wasn’t meant to feel the yearnings other people did.
The sky outside had gone from gray to the pale gold that precedes sunrise. Somewhere below me, the stable boys would begin their morning rounds. The castle was waking up around me, the way it always did, indifferent to the fact that I’d just watched the world end twice before dawn.
I needed to do something with these visions.
The problem was that doing something meant talking to someone, and talking to someone meant explaining how long I’d been sitting on this information, and explaining that meant an uncomfortable conversation about why a knight of the Round Table had watched three weeks’ worth of apparent prophecy
unspool behind his eyes and decided the appropriate response was to say absolutely nothing.
The answer was that the visions had started the same week Lioran became Guinevere, and everything I’d thought was solid revealed itself to be a stage set. And I’d been raw enough from that particular revelation that I hadn’t trusted my own interpretation of anything.
That was the truth of it.
I sat back down on the edge of the bed. The stone floor was still cold.
She hadn’t lied about who she was. That was what I kept returning to.
Strip away the name, the disguise, the mission that had brought her here, and what remained was someone who’d been exactly what they appeared to be in every way that mattered between two people in a room.
Curious. Wary. Occasionally funny in ways she didn’t intend.
Carrying something heavy without any intention of putting it down.
That was Guinevere. It had always been Guinevere, whether she called herself Lioran or she didn’t.
The hand from the darkness. The trust she’d carried toward it like a lamp.
I pressed my knuckles against my mouth and sat with the weight of that image and wondered if it was already too late to matter, or if visions were warnings specifically because they still described a future that hadn’t happened yet.