CHAPTER THIRTY #3
I knew Arthur’s trust the way you know a piece of equipment you’ve used in the field: not abstractly, not as sentiment, but by its actual dimensions.
I knew what angle of pressure his trust could bear and what angle would find the seam and split it right open.
What I was carrying with me was the wrong angle. What was more, the second he opened that door, the second the words came out of my mouth, everything would change.
The door was in front of me, and on one side of it was the man I’d been for twenty years. On the other side was the man I’d be after this conversation, whichever way it ended. I could feel the distance between both of those men like a drop in temperature, like the air before a storm front came in.
I thought: if I walk away now, the walking away is the choice.
Then I thought: if I tell him the truth, there’s no unchoosing that choice afterward.
So, I walked away. Again.
I told myself it wasn’t betrayal. I told myself it was triage: that the damage was already done and the only question now was containment.
I told myself that confessing the truth would serve my conscience at the direct expense of something larger and more important than my conscience deserved.
I told myself Kay’s evidence was only circumstantial.
I told myself that I owed Arthur honesty but not self-immolation.
I told myself a great many things on the walk back to my own chambers.
Each reason I gave myself as to why I’d avoided telling Arthur the truth was technically defensible.
Yet not one of my excuses made the feeling of dread within me go away.
That night I lay on my back, looked at the ceiling, and couldn’t sleep.
Instead, the small yellow light of the candle flame grabbed my attention as it fought with the encroaching darkness.
The candle had burned down to a nub, and there was no fire in the grate.
The room had long since gone cold, but when the serving girl had come to attend to it, I’d told her to leave. She’d looked relieved.
I thought about Guinevere. Truly, she was never far from my thoughts.
And I thought about the dream with Morgan in it: the dream of Guinevere’s back riddled with wounds.
Every time I thought about it, a rage would begin to brew inside me, until I reminded myself there was no truth to the dream.
It was just simply that: a dream. Yet, it haunted me, all the same.
I thought about Guinevere’s magic being bound and how she was surrounded by people who would destroy her, about how she had no allies here.
Well, aside from Corvin, I supposed. But he wasn’t doing much for her, rotting away in his cell as he was.
Mostly I thought about the fact that she’d built herself a trap and now she lived inside it.
And I wasn’t sure how I felt about that fact or how I should have felt about it.
As it was, it just existed within me as a large and yawning void.
Then I thought about how I’d done the exact same thing to myself: built myself a trap from which I couldn’t escape. The parallel wasn’t comfortable. I turned onto my side, which still didn’t help me fall asleep.
She would recognize the story, I thought.
If I described it to her without names and specific contexts, if I just described facing Arthur’s door, the rehearsed conversation, the walking away, the rationalizations that were each just barely sufficient...
she would know exactly what I was describing.
She’d recognize the shape of it, the specific way a person can stand at the threshold of the worst version of themselves and choose that version not out of weakness but out of cold, clear-eyed calculation that felt, in the moment, almost like wisdom.
She’d say nothing, I was fairly sure. Just like she’d continued to say nothing all along.
That was the part I kept returning to. She wouldn’t name me or condemn me, even when she had the power to do just that.
And I couldn’t fucking understand why. Why was she protecting me?
Why wouldn’t she just tell Arthur the damned truth every time he ordered it from her?
I thought about the last thing I’d said to her.
You’re dead to me.
What a fucking lie. I’d known it was a lie when I’d said it, but I’d said it anyway because it was something a man says when he wants to wound someone badly enough to stop wanting her.
Yet, all the words had accomplished was making her expression blanch.
She hadn’t said anything hateful to me in response to me. She hadn’t cried, or begged, or argued.
She’d just looked at me with those huge violet eyes that looked as if they were breaking on the inside.
I stared at the ceiling until the candle guttered out.
The dark came in, and I lay in it and thought about how I’d spent the majority of my life being the man who could be trusted above all others.
Then I thought about how that was the thing I was most afraid of losing, and how I’d lost it anyway.
The worst part was that I’d done it so quietly.
With no witnesses. And no echo of precognition to warn me.
And now all that remained was just Arthur’s door, the walk away from that door, and the weight of what I was carrying now that I hadn’t been carrying before.