CHAPTER THIRTY-SIX #2
(Trigger Warning: skip the rest of this scene if you aren’t comfortable reading on)
For one moment, she simply looked at me, blinking slowly the way people do when sleep hasn’t fully released them. Then her whole body snapped awake, and she scrambled back against the wall. Her elbow caught the wall hard, and she made a short pained sound.
“Hold still,” I said. “This is a disciplinary session.”
“Get away from me—”
“—hold still.”
I caught her ankle. She kicked. I was stronger than her, and she knew it, but she fought anyway.
It was yet another example of that animal stubbornness she had, that refusal to simply accept the examination.
I caught her other ankle and pressed her flat, and her hands came at my face.
I grabbed her wrists and pinned them above her head and leaned my weight across her.
“You are making this worse for yourself,” I said. My voice was steady. I was proud of that.
“I’ll scream,” she said. “I’ll alert the guards!”
“And tell them what?” I laughed. “You have no rights here. You are a prisoner, a whore.” I reached down with one hand, keeping both her wrists pinned with the other forearm. “Hold still.”
She stopped fighting. Not because she’d accepted it. I could feel her heart slamming against her chest, fast and panicked, and her eyes were doing that thing they did when they went very flat and present at the same time.
My hand moved up her inner thigh, and she made a sound low in her throat that sounded like a growl.
See? the voice said. The demon speaks through her.
The examination required information. I gathered it by finding the hole between her legs and pushing my finger inside her.
She is so tight. Imagine what that tightness would feel like wrapped around your…
No. I find no pleasure in this.
I pushed my finger deeper inside her channel of sin until my index finger was all the way to the knuckle.
Her cunt walls closed around me, and I had to breathe deeply to slow my heart rate.
I pulled my finger out and then shoved two back in, all the way inside her as she bucked beneath me.
I could feel no maiden wall, nothing that would confirm her innocence.
She’s a whore. Just as you knew she would be.
I pulled my fingers out and shoved them back in again, enjoying the expression on her face, which was one of hatred against me. It was the demon looking out through her eyes, the demon promising retribution.
I began to penetrate her with my fingers even harder. “You are impure, witch. Your cunt traps those who walk the righteous path.”
“You are anything but righteous.”
I slammed my fingers as far into her as they would go, and she yelped beneath me. “You will watch what you say to me, demon.”
She said nothing more.
The anger arrived behind my ribs and spread. Not the clean anger I’d felt earlier. Something older and uglier, and I didn’t know what to do with it, so I put it somewhere useful.
“The demon within you has lured some poor fool, or perhaps even more, into fornication,” I said. “You have corrupted an innocent...”
I thrust my fingers inside her again. And again after that. She made a sound that was short and sharp. Almost a laugh, except it wasn’t.
“Did Lancelot penetrate you?”
“No,” she answered, glaring at me.
“Who was it that you lured into your bed of sin?”
She looked at the ceiling but didn’t speak.
“You will tell me his name.”
Nothing.
“I will know regardless. I will simply—”
“—then know it regardless,” she said flatly.
My hand moved before I’d decided. The crack of it was very loud in the room, and her head snapped to the side, but she didn’t make a sound, which somehow made it worse, the silence, the way she simply turned her face back to me afterward and waited.
“This is your own doing,” I said. “Every moment of what is happening to you now is a direct consequence of your refusal to cooperate with me, with the examination. Do you understand?”
There was nothing from her. Just that flat watching.
I stood, then I crossed to the altar and took down the scourge, and when I turned back to her, she was standing, which surprised me.
She’d scrambled upright while my back was turned, and she was now pressed against the far wall with her chin up, her tunic torn at the sleeve, and something in her eyes that wasn’t fear any longer.
“Kneel,” I said.
Her jaw moved. She didn’t kneel.
I crossed the room, and she flinched—finally, finally, a flinch—and I caught her shoulder and brought her to her knees.
I bared her ass and pushed her legs apart so I could see the part of her the demon worked from.
The first stroke of the scourge caught her across the back of her shoulders, and she made a real sound this time, sharp and raw.
It did something to me that I shoved immediately beneath the words of the Litany of Correction.
“The body is the vessel. The vessel must be cleansed. What is impure cannot be permitted to persist in the presence of the holy—”
My fingers were back inside her. The next stroke hit her across the hips, and she bucked.
I pulled my fingers from her and though I could not say what overcame me to do so, I smelled them.
The scent did something to me that I didn’t understand.
It roused the beast within my braies, the appendage that had been more vexing and uncooperative in the last three weeks than it had ever been.
The scourge hit her across the ass and left bright red welts. I shoved three fingers inside her.
Put your cock inside her. Fuck her.
No. I cannot. I will not.
Another hit of the scourge. I stopped after six blows.
My arm was shaking. Not from exertion.
I made her kneel there for a long time after I’d pulled my fingers from her and stopped beating her. I didn’t know exactly how long I sat there, chest heaving as I stared at the unclean flesh between her thighs.
Then I told her to cover herself and return to her pallet, and I went to the altar and prayed.
At some point before dawn, I stood to replace a burned-out taper. The candle in my hand threw light across the small mirror beside the altar. It was a steel mirror, not glass, polished to a dim but functional reflection. I used it to check the state of my tonsure, nothing more.
I looked into it now without meaning to, and the man looking back at me had blood on the hem of his robe. His hair was disheveled. His eyes were wide and very bright in the way eyes get when something in a man has been running hard for a long time without rest. There were marks on his knuckles.
I stared at him for a long time. The candle flame between us trembled.
Then I set the taper in its holder and turned away, dropping to my knees on the stone floor, and pressed my forehead to the cold as I began to pray.
“I am your instrument. I am your instrument. I am your instrument.” The repetition was a rope in dark water. I held onto it. “What is done in your name is not done in mine. I am only the vessel. Only the hand. I am not... I am not...”
Behind me, she breathed, slow and even. Either asleep or very skilled at pretending.
“I am your instrument.”
The cold stone pressed back against my forehead, impartial, unimpressed.
I prayed until the light changed.
-ARTHUR-
The solar was quiet when Tristan arrived.
I’d chosen the hour deliberately: mid-morning, when the court was occupied with its own noise and no one paid attention to a knight walking through a side corridor.
Mordred stood to my left, near the window, hands folded at his waist.
His mismatched eyes tracked Tristan from the moment the door opened.
I didn’t rise.
Tristan crossed the room without being told where to stop. He planted himself at the correct distance from my writing table: not so close it was presumptuous, yet not so far it suggested nerves. That, too, I noted.
“You wanted to see me,” he said.
Not Your Grace. Not Sire, just a statement of fact delivered in that slight accent that softened the consonants and made everything sound unhurried.
“Sit.”
He sat. He folded one ankle over the other, rested his arm along the chair back, and looked at me with the quality of patience that belonged either to very calm men or very practiced ones. I hadn’t yet decided which he was.
I let the silence stretch. Mordred didn’t move. The fire in the grate ticked.
“You sat with her last night,” I said. “At dinner.”
Tristan’s expression didn’t change. “I did.”
“She talked to you.”
“She did.”
“She appears to be comfortable with you.” I turned my cup once on the desk. “That’s unusual.”
He said nothing and his expression conveyed the fact that he believed there was nothing to say about it.