CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE #3
I clutched that raven’s feather so hard because I knew what it meant.
Morgan. She was somehow here, and she was keeping watch over me.
For the first time in a long time, I felt safer.
-GUIN-
Galahad walked me back to his room in silence.
His expression was composed, as though he were working through something with the patience he applied to all things. I’d learned to read the quality of his silences, and this one had an edge to it.
“Sit.”
I sat on the cold stone floor.
Galahad stood with his back to me, but he didn’t say anything right away.
His hands were clasped behind him, thumbs hooked, head slightly bowed.
He was still in his court clothes of silver thread on white wool.
They were the Boundless colors, the kind of dress that said I’m always performing the correct version of myself.
“You ate like a beast.” The words were all flat. “I watched you tear flesh from bone with your bare hands. I watched you drink from the plate like a dog at a trough. The entire court saw the demon in you tonight, the appetite, the greed, the flesh demanding to be served.”
I said nothing because this wasn’t something that required a response.
“Without grace. Without the invocation that consecrates the meal and its consumption.” His gray eyes were steady, certain, but somewhere underneath that certainty was something he was trying very hard to keep controlled. “You ate as though the body’s appetite was the only authority.”
“I was hungry.”
He gave me a look that said he wasn’t happy with my response. “Saint Aldric fasted forty days at the temple gate. He denied the body so the spirit could stand guard. You lasted merely days and fell on that table like a creature without a soul.”
He moved to the small table, under which he kept the scourge laid neatly across the folded linen. He picked it up.
“Remove the gown.”
At this stage, I didn’t even care about what was coming.
Instead, I just thought about my full stomach and how good it felt to no longer be starving.
The stone floor was cold against my bare feet as I stood up.
My fingers found the laces at the back of my neck, and I loosened the ties, then I let the gray wool fall from my shoulders.
“Fold it.” He didn’t look up. “Place it on the pallet.”
The specificity of it was the point. It wasn’t about folding the gown.
It was about making me careful, making me deliberate, making me perform the small domestic courtesies of a well-ordered household in the sixty seconds before he hurt me.
He wanted my hands to smooth the fabric.
He wanted me to arrange the sleeves. He wanted me to set the gown down gently on his white wool blanket like a girl preparing for sleep in her own chambers.
I folded the gown, and my hands were steady. I set it on the bed. Then I turned and stood in the center of the room in nothing, and I waited.
The torchlight moved. Shadows climbed the stone walls and settled back down. Somewhere outside the narrow window, two guards were laughing about something. The sound was obscenely ordinary.
Galahad didn’t move immediately.
“The flesh indulged,” he said, “must be disciplined.”
He crossed the room slowly, and I kept my eyes on the far wall. There was a small crack in the mortar between two stones, shaped vaguely like a river delta, spreading and splitting, and I’d spent a great deal of time looking at it.
“The appetite fed must be starved back into submission.” His voice had that quality it got during the formal invocations, measured and resonant, the voice of a man performing a sacred rite. “But first, the contamination must be driven out. Drenath’s refinement. The burning away of weakness.”
I knew the phrase. I’d heard it enough. He moved behind me.
The river delta in the mortar branched into three distinct channels before the plaster swallowed them. I’d counted the branches eleven times across as many nights. It helped to count. It helped to find the small fixed things and hold onto them while the rest of the world became very loud.
I fixed my eyes on the crack in the wall.
“The body,” he said, “is not evil. Verath does not teach that it is evil. What is evil is submission to it. Allowing appetite to dictate action rather than the will. Tonight, you allowed your body to humiliate you in front of the entire court of Camelot. And because you are my ward,
you not only humiliated yourself, but you humiliated me. Whatever perception of strength or dignity you might have preserved, your hunger stripped it from you publicly.”
I looked at him.
Something moved across his face, but it was gone before I could adequately categorize it. He stood, and with his back to me for a moment, I heard the quiet sound of the scourge being lifted.
“Kneel,” he said.
My stomach plummeted, but I knelt, knowing it was better than fighting him. When he was in these quiet, reflective moods, it was just best to do whatever he asked me to. So, I knelt, and as soon as I did, I felt it. The whip was light; the lashes were exact.