CHAPTER THIRTY-FIVE
-LANCE-
I sat in the chair by the window and watched the last of the firelight die in the grate, but I didn’t move to feed it.
Outside, Camelot settled into its nighttime sounds: the changing of the guard, boots on stone, someone laughing two floors below. They were normal sounds, orderly sounds, the sounds of a fortress that ran because I helped make it run.
Tristan.
I turned the name over repeatedly, unable to clear it from my mind.
Sir Tristan of Lyonesse, with his poet’s hands, his beautiful face, his accent, and that way he had of leaning toward a person like they were the only soul in the room.
I’d watched him cross the Great Hall toward her table and felt something lock tight in my chest.
He had no reason to sit with her. She was a prisoner. A spy. By all accounts, she was an enemy. The sensible move, the obvious move, was to eat with his fellow knights and keep his distance from her just the way everyone else was.
Clearly, Tristan wasn’t sensible.
I thought about the way he’d pulled out the bench across from her, then how he’d settled in like his doing so was nothing remarkable, like it was the most natural thing he could have possibly done.
I thought about her face when he sat down: I’d been watching; I wasn’t going to pretend otherwise.
I’d witnessed the small loosening around her eyes, the way her shoulders dropped a half-inch from where she’d been holding them.
Surprise had immediately taken hold of her, the same way it had with the rest of us, but soon that surprise had melted into something different.
She’d been glad for his company.
My jaw tightened, and I stood up from the chair, walked over to the window, and braced both hands on the sill as I looked out at nothing in particular. The courtyard below was empty except for a stable boy crossing with a lantern, the flame guttering sideways in the wind.
Tristan wanted something from her; I was sure of it.
Men like Tristan always wanted something.
They wrapped that want in courtesy, warmth, and that infuriating, practiced attentiveness, but underneath it was the same as everything else.
He’d seen a beautiful woman sitting alone, and he’d gone to her the way water finds the lowest point.
Of course, all of us at the high table had been shocked.
Some had commented; others hadn’t. Some had even joked that he was moving in to see what he could get from her.
I’d been the most interested in Arthur’s reaction, which hadn’t really been much of a reaction at all: an eyebrow raise, a few whispers back and forth with Mordred, and then the subject had been forgotten as he spent the rest of the evening in rapt conversation with Isolde.
As to the subject of Isolde, I had no idea what Arthur was doing, nor why she was here.
It was fairly obvious that many of the court believed this was his way of courting her, and I wouldn’t have been surprised if she thought the same.
But I wasn’t so convinced. Regardless, Arthur hadn’t consulted me on the subject of Isolde, and I tried not to wonder why.
It had seemed in most recent days that the two of us weren’t quite as close as we had been.
But my thoughts didn’t linger long on Arthur. Instead, I kept thinking of Tristan’s hands, those careful, deliberate hands, and the thought of those hands being anywhere near Guinevere made something ugly move through me.
I stepped back from the window.
I had no claim on her. What was more, I’d sworn to forget her.
I’d promised myself I’d tamp out every last feeling I harbored toward her, and that would be the end of it.
But that hadn’t been the end of it. Far from it.
Thoughts of Guinevere were just as present in my mind as they always had been, and now? Now even more so.
The door to the bathing room opened.
The woman stepped out in a wash of candlelight and steam.
Dark blonde hair hung loose around her shoulders, and her skin was still flushed from the water.
A linen wrap held loosely at her waist but not much else.
She caught me looking at her and allowed the wrap to fall in a practiced movement, the kind that usually worked on me. Usually.
I allowed my eyes to scan down the length of her body. She was beautiful. Objectively. The kind of woman I would have pulled into this room without a second thought months ago, the kind of woman I would have fucked then forgotten before the candle burned down an inch.
I looked at her, but all I could see was silver-white hair.
The shape of her face was wrong, and her eyes were brown where they should have been violet.
Her mouth was softer, but also less precise.
She was the wrong woman in the right light, and my body knew it before my mind had the indignity of admitting it.
But I wouldn’t let this best me again. I would fuck her, and I would enjoy it.
“Come here,” I growled.
She came to me, and the second she was within my grasp, I pulled her against me and kissed her. She made a small sound against my mouth as her hands found my chest, and I waited.
But there was nothing happening downstairs.
I pulled back and looked at the wall over her shoulder and tried to locate the appropriate part of myself.
The part that had never failed me until recently.
The part that had been, for over twenty years, entirely reliable in every circumstance except the ones that actually mattered.
Gone. That part of me seemed to be completely, humiliatingly gone. I made the mistake of glancing down and found my cock as flaccid as a used sock.
Again.
The woman looked up at me with an expression that hovered between confusion and the professional concern of someone who needed this evening to go a certain way.
This was the third time in two weeks. The third blonde woman. The third failure. My body had apparently made a decision that I hadn’t been consulted on, and it had made it with the cheerful finality of a gate swinging shut.
I stepped back.
“Get dressed,” I said.
“My lord—”
“I said get dressed.”
She read something in my face and decided not to push it.
Then she gathered her things from the chair where she’d left them and dressed quickly, as I walked back to the window and listened to the small sounds of her preparing to leave: the rustle of fabric, the soft step on the rushes, the door latch lifting.
“Take the coin on the table,” I said, without turning around. “It’s yours.”
A pause. Then the door opened and closed, and I didn’t check to see if she’d taken the money.
The fire ticked in the grate; it was most definitely dying.
I stood at the window, looked out at the empty courtyard, and thought about Tristan leaning toward her over a dinner table.
Then I thought about those violet eyes going quiet when someone finally treated her like she existed.
I thought about what it meant that I knew exactly how her eyes went quiet because I’d been watching her face at dinner from across a room like a man who had completely lost his mind.
I pressed two fingers to the bridge of my nose.
She means nothing to you. She’s your enemy. She used you, and she lied to you repeatedly.
And that was when I made my decision, even though I was sure I was going to regret it.
-LANCE-
The cloak was already in my hand before I’d finished thinking.
That was how I knew I was in trouble. A man in control of himself decides first.
He gathers his reasons, weighs them against each other, and then arrives at a conclusion with something approaching dignity.
He doesn’t find himself standing at his chamber door with his hand on the latch, inventing justifications after the fact like a drunk reconstructing the night before.
I told myself it was a test. Just a test. That was the word I used: test. I needed to know if the problem with my cock was a mechanical one: if whatever had gone wrong with me these past weeks was a general malfunction or something specific. Something about her.
I was, I told myself, simply gathering information.
The lie was almost convincing.
I didn’t remember walking the long corridor between my room and Galahad’s, but suddenly I was outside his door and knocking.
Galahad answered with that particular brand of serene attention that made you feel you’d interrupted something holy, which I no doubt had.
His chambers smelled of something faintly astringent.
“Sir Lancelot.” The words weren’t a question, just an acknowledgment of the fact that I was standing outside his door at an ungodly hour.
“The... king wishes... to see her, the prisoner.” I said the words with the flat certainty of a man delivering the weather. “In his solar.”
Then I paused, and it was the type of pause where another man might have asked why, or pushed back, or at a minimum looked uncertain. Galahad just nodded, although his jaw was tight.
“Of course.”
He stepped aside. She was already standing, and I assumed she must have heard my voice.
When my eyes found hers, my stomach dropped, though I didn’t know why.
She looked at me without expression, which was its own kind of expression.
She was thinner than I ever remembered seeing her, I was convinced, even though it made little sense because I’d seen her at dinner.
But noticing as much did something unpleasant to the inside of my chest that I immediately set aside.
“Come,” I said.
She came. Because she had no choice.
I didn’t look at her while we walked, which was intentional though it worked poorly because I was aware of the distance between us the way you’re aware of a fire in a room: not by looking at it directly, but by feeling the heat of it.
I could hear her footsteps on the stone, and they were so much lighter than mine, softer than mine.
I took the long route. I told myself it was because the longer corridor was quieter at this hour, with less foot traffic, and more sensible for an escort of a prisoner. I had reasons; I always had reasons. But the reasons I fed myself weren’t the real reasons I did what I was doing.
She knew something was amiss; I was almost certain she knew.