CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO #2
And she couldn’t be alive to me. Because if she was, then I’d looked into her eyes through the bars of that cell, and I’d said something unforgivable to a woman I was now failing.
I fell asleep with my boots on and my hands at my sides.
I dreamed of her, which was no surprise because on the nights I did dream, she was usually featured.
This time, she was in a cold room, sitting at a small table with bread in front of her.
I was sitting just out of reach, and I could see the body of a skeleton beneath her gown.
She reached for the bread, but as soon as she touched it, it turned to ash in her fingers.
She looked at it with no expression as I sat at my table and watched.
She looked up. Looked directly at me, but she said nothing.
The ash sifted through her fingers onto the table.
I woke before the bell, and then I just lay there in the dark with my hands against my ribs, my heart beating too fast, and I told myself it was nothing. I told myself she was a prisoner of the crown and she didn’t deserve to even still be living.
But my hands were still shaking.
I told myself that too was nothing, but I knew better.
-MORGAN-
The approach to Percival’s mind was like walking into a room where someone had left all the windows open.
Most minds had walls. Lance’s had been a fortress of iron doors and deliberate dark, everything locked behind a soldier’s discipline.
Entering it had felt like picking a lock in the cold.
I’d had to shove, had to drag what I wanted into the light by force.
Percival’s mind opened before I even touched it.
I stood at the threshold and simply waited, the way you wait at a stranger’s hearth before announcing yourself.
His sleeping consciousness settled around me like warm water.
No defenses. No sharpened edges. Just that extraordinary, aching openness: a mind built to receive, to absorb, to hold the weight of other people’s pain without ever setting it down.
It was the most exhausting kind of mind to inhabit. I didn’t stay long in the feeling of it. Instead, I went looking.
The impressions were already all there, every one of them. He hadn’t discarded a single detail; that was the thing about Percival. He never discarded anything. He just buried it under the habit of not wanting to see what seeing would cost him.
The first one surfaced easily.
The way she’d flinched.
It was inside a corridor a week or so ago, maybe more.
Percival had been walking behind her and Galahad, and she’d stumbled on a loose stone: just a minor stumble, and Galahad’s hand had shot out to steady her in a standard reflex, nothing alarming.
Except she hadn’t been grateful. She’d gone still.
The kind of still that isn’t relief. The kind that’s a held breath. The kind that has fear in it.
Percival had noticed it, filed it, and then moved on. I pulled it back into focus.
The next one was harder to find. He’d pressed it deeper. Deliberately, I thought. Not out of cruelty, because Percival wasn’t capable of being cruel, but out of the specific kindness of a man who didn’t want to see something he couldn’t fix.
Her wrists.
They hadn’t been bound; of course, it was nothing so obvious as that.
But it was in the way she’d held them, those first days under Galahad’s supervision.
She’d kept her wrists close to her body and angled down in the posture of someone mapping their own pain.
Percival had seen it before: in men dragged off a battlefield, in women who’d survived things no one asked them directly about.
He recognized the body language the way he recognized a poorly set bone.
He’d told himself it was from her time in the dungeon and the cold. I opened it fully so I could show him it wasn’t the dungeon or the cold. It was Galahad.
Then the meal.
This one sat closest to the surface for Percival and hurt the most to look at.
He’d been there, of course, and he’d watched her eat.
He’d watched the way she’d gone at that food like it was the last meal before a sentence was carried out, her shoulders curved inward, her head down.
He’d watched her chew fast and swallow even faster with something behind her eyes that wasn’t hunger.
Or not just hunger, but with an awareness that she knew the food could be taken away.
Percival had watched and he’d felt something move through his chest: that deep, involuntary resonance his gift made when it registered suffering.
He’d pressed it down. He’d told himself she was thin because prisoners weren’t treated to multiple-course meals.
He’d told himself Galahad was severe but not cruel. He’d told himself a great many things.
I stopped telling him those things. Instead, I laid it all out in sequence: the flinch.
The wrists. The meal. The way she stood in Galahad’s presence: slightly turned, one shoulder forward, which wasn’t deference, but was shielding.
I pointed out the hollows under her eyes, the new economy of her movement, the realization of someone who’d learned that taking up space had a cost.
I didn’t invent a single thing. I just made him finish reading what his own body had been writing on the walls for weeks. Then I stepped back and let the dream do what dreams did.
The image that rose up next wasn’t mine. It came from him, from the deep stratum of Percival’s consciousness. It came up rough and unpolished, the way true things do.
A girl in a cold room. The candles burning low. And the certainty, the terrible, animal certainty, that no one was coming.
His healing gift moved through his sleeping body like a current with nowhere to go.
I felt it. Even standing outside the core of the dream, I felt it: that particular quality of pain that belongs to healers who can’t heal the thing in front of them.
It was like watching someone drowning and finding your hands tied.
It was unbearable. For him, at least.
I’d made my peace with unbearable a long time ago.
I withdrew carefully. I always withdrew carefully from minds like his: the open ones, the empathic ones. You could do real damage if you weren’t gentle. You could leave a healer broken in places he’d never find.
That wasn’t the point. The point was for him to wake.
To wake and to know. Not suspect. Not worry in the quiet hours and then talk himself back from the ledge with reasonable explanations like what Lance was doing.
No, the point was to know the truth the way you know a broken rib: because your body tells you and there’s no arguing with your body.
I rose out of Percival’s dream mind the way smoke rises. When I came to, my own room was dark and cold. The candle had burned to a nub. My hands were trembling slightly, but they always did after dream work. I pressed my palms flat against the stone floor and breathed.
Percival would wake within the hour. And unlike Lance, he wouldn’t lie back down and stare at the ceiling and convince himself it was nothing.
Lance was a man who moved only when the cost of stillness exceeded the cost of action.
I’d calculated that threshold wrong with him, apparently.
He’d absorbed what I’d shown him and then retreated into that infuriating male discipline of his: all that trained restraint, all that loyalty folded over guilt like armor.
He was still lying there, still deciding, still weighing.
Percival didn’t weigh things. Percival felt them and moved.
That was the difference. That was why I’d gone to him second instead of first: because a man who moved on feeling could be unpredictable.
He’d do something. I just couldn’t entirely control what.
Lance would have been a scalpel, precise and targeted, if only he would have acted.
But what I’d failed to remember about Lance was that he never rushed in without making the decision to rush in first.
And usually, that was a good quality to have.
Where Guinevere was concerned, though, I didn’t need a scalpel.
I needed a hammer, and Percival was going to be that hammer.
I pulled my knees to my chest and waited in the dark. Somewhere in the east corridor of Camelot, a young man with straw-colored hair and blue eyes full of too much old wisdom was waking up.
His hands would be shaking, and his gift would be screaming. And he’d become the friend that Guin so desperately needed.
-GUIN-
The book was heavier than it looked.
Galahad set it on the table between us without ceremony, the way you’d set down a tool. The cover was dark leather, cracked along the spine, stamped with Kaelthar’s open eye in faded gilt. I knew what it was before he said anything about it.
“The Book of Abominations.” He smoothed the cover with two fingers as if it were a revered family member. “You will read the first three sections before midday. When Sir Tristan comes to relieve—”
“—Tristan?”
The word came out before I could stop it.
Galahad’s jaw tightened as he gave me a look to further emphasize his irritation at being interrupted. “Yes. As I have a sermon to deliver to the chapel, you will be under the watch of Sir Tristan.”
I frowned. “A chapel sermon?” I hadn’t been aware that Galahad gave sermons. In fact, I hadn’t been aware that there was anyone other than him who even went to his chapel.
“Yes.”
“You have followers?”
He looked at me the way one looks at a spider in the corner.
“Of course.” Then he cleared his throat.
“I expect you to be on your best behavior. I have decided that you will explain to Sir Tristan the core doctrines of the Cracked Vessel chapter in the Book of Abominations and the prescriptions that follow.”
I looked at the book and then at him. “You want me to recruit him.”
“I want you to be useful for something other than testing my patience.” He paused. “One of the foremost tenets of the Vow of the Boundless is introducing others to the teachings so they may save themselves.”
He moved to the door and held it open as I picked up the book and followed him into the corridor.
He walked at least four paces in front of me, but I didn’t argue.
The further I could be from Galahad, the better.
Soon, I followed him from the castle and into the courtyard, which was quiet at this hour.