CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR #3
A magic that could allow two people to hate one another fully and completely and yet desire each other just as much.
Isolde moved through the garden with her hands loosely clasped at her waist, and her fingers relaxed, unguarded.
Her gown was a deep emerald that held the morning light differently than the roses around her, as if she were the prize and they paled in comparison.
The hem dragged soft, unhurried lines through the damp gravel as she walked, as though the garden itself was in no rush to let her pass.
Her hair was a very dark auburn, and where the pale morning caught it, threads of copper and deep red ran through the dark mass of it like something lit from within.
She tilted her face toward Arthur when she spoke, easy and open, with the natural grace of a woman who had never been asked to be anything other than exactly what she was.
There was no performance in her. No armor.
Just a stunning woman in a stunning green dress walking through a garden in the early morning, comfortable in her own skin down to the bones.
Arthur looked at her the way you look at a beautiful reflection in still water. He looked at me like I was the thing living underneath it.
I turned from the window before I was ready to, irritated with myself that I even noticed the things I had. What did I care who made Arthur almost smile? I didn’t.
“You find her interesting.”
Galahad’s voice came from behind me. I hadn’t heard him cross the room. He had a talent for that: appearing in a space without disturbing it, like light moving through glass.
“I find the garden interesting,” I lied.
He came to stand beside me. Not close. He never stood close. But close enough that I could see, in my periphery, the direction of his gaze.
“Lady Isolde,” he said. The name settled in his mouth like something approved. “She is what a woman should be: a lady.”
I looked back out the window even though I didn’t want to, but it was better than looking into Galahad’s smug face.
Arthur had stopped walking. He was listening to her again, his head bent slightly, and there was something in his posture that I’d never seen on him before.
An ease. A loosening, like a fist opening.
Isolde got this side of him. She got the ease, the affability, the... courtship?
I got the fist curled around a sword hilt.
“The gods look well upon her,” Galahad continued with a quick nod. “You can see it in the way she moves, the way she speaks. Grace settles on a person when they’ve earned it.”
Down in the garden, Arthur said something, and Isolde laughed.
Then his almost smile became a fully blown one, and he appeared to be seconds away from laughing along with her.
And somehow I found that completely shocking, yes, but strangely encouraging.
I hadn’t believed the king knew how to smile and laugh.
“She carries no war inside her,” Galahad continued. “No hunger she can’t master. There’s no darkness she has had to cut out of herself.” He paused. “That is what purity looks like when it’s natural. When it does not require a battle.”
Arthur touched the small of Isolde’s back. Just briefly. Just to guide her around the edge of a rose bed so the thorns wouldn’t reach out and damage her gown.
My chest did something I refused to notice.
“You will never be that.” Galahad’s voice was entirely calm.
That was the worst part of him: he never raised it.
He delivered verdicts like cruelty and certainty were the same thing.
“The demon in you has soaked too far into the grain. You could scrub yourself down to nothing, and it would still be there. The evil within you lives in the marrow of your bones.”
I watched Arthur’s hand drop from Isolde’s back.
“A pox does not become a rose by wishing it were,” Galahad continued. “A disease does not become wholesome because it has learned to dress itself well.”
I kept my eyes on the garden.
Arthur was looking up at something now, the tower maybe, or just the sky, and for one suspended second, I thought he was looking at this window.
At me. But the angle was wrong, and the light was in his eyes, and he was looking at nothing that was me.
And that was a relief at the same time that it was a disappointment.
He looked peaceful. In fact, I’d never seen him look peaceful before, and if someone had asked me if it was possible for him to appear peaceful, I would have said no. And yet... yet this.
I didn’t know, standing there with Galahad’s words still hanging in the air like smoke, what I was jealous of.
Whether I wanted what Isolde had: Arthur’s gentleness, this version of him that could exist in a rose garden and make idle conversation and laugh about it.
Or whether I wanted what Arthur had: the freedom to be soft with someone. The permission.
“Dress,” Galahad said. “The morning will not wait for you.”
He moved away.
I stayed at the window one more moment. Long enough to watch Arthur and Isolde disappear around the far corner of the garden, into the shadow of the arcade, where I couldn’t see them anymore.
Then I turned, picked up the rough linen tunic from the chair where Galahad had left it, and I put it on.