CHAPTER THIRTY-EIGHT #2
He folded his hands on the table. “The prisoner is not being punished through hunger. She is being cleansed by it. The flesh, when overfed, grows comfortable, and comfort breeds attachment to the earthly self. Fasting breaks that attachment. It makes the vessel porous to truth.”
He paused. “When a woman has carried corruption for as long as the prisoner has, the correction must go deep enough to reach the root of it. Hunger is one of the tools that reaches that depth.”
The table was quiet.
-LANCE-
Arthur sat at the head of the Round Table with his hands flat on the surface and his jaw set, and the candlelight made the hollows of his face look carved.
Kay was sitting three seats down from me, but I didn’t look at him directly. I didn’t need to. His presence had its own gravity, a low-grade pressure at the edge of my awareness like a splinter working its way deeper.
Arthur began speaking again about supply lines and troop movements, the rebellion’s last raid. He laid the findings out in detail, and the room listened because it always listened to the king.
Arthur’s eyes moved around the table, reading the room. He did this constantly: inventoried faces, calculated resistance, measured the temperature of a conversation the way another man might test bathwater.
I kept my expression neutral when the conversation turned to Guinevere once more, which served me because I didn’t feel as if I’d made my point fully earlier.
“She’s barely functional,” I said once there was quiet in the room.
My own voice surprised me slightly. Not the words, I’d been holding them since I’d first sat down, but the evenness of them. How calm I sounded.
Arthur looked at me.
“She’s been under Galahad’s supervision for over a fortnight,” I continued. “And—”
“—Galahad’s methods are his own concern,” Arthur interrupted, clearly uninterested in furthering this subject.
“His methods are producing a prisoner who can’t eat without shaking.”
“She’s a weapon,” Arthur said, and there was something final in his tone that was meant to close the subject. “Weapons require maintenance. If she needs time to recover before she’s useful, that’s a logistical consideration. It’s not sentiment.”
“I’m not speaking from sentiment,” I argued. “I’m speaking from practicality. A broken instrument performs poorly.”
Arthur studied me for a moment. “Noted,” he said, and moved on.
That was when I let myself glance toward Kay.
He wasn’t looking at me. He was looking at the table, one finger tracing an idle circle on the wood near his cup. His mouth held the faintest curve, but it wasn’t a smile. Perhaps just the ghost of one, the kind a man wears when something confirms what he already suspected.
He didn’t need to look at me, because the almost-smile wasn’t for me.
It was for himself: a small, satisfied noting of the fact that I’d done it again.
I’d put my voice behind her welfare in front of Arthur, in front of everyone, and Kay had watched me do it the same way a man watches a dog walk willingly into a snare.
The discussion continued. I listened. I contributed where contribution was required, kept my responses spare and tactical, and gave Arthur nothing he could interpret as anything other than strategic counsel.
Gareth asked about troop rotations. Agravaine raised the question of the northern watchtowers.
Tristan said something about supply inventory that drew a low laugh from three men who were still capable of laughing.
Kay said nothing. He never needed to say anything. That was the thing about him that most men failed to understand: they were always waiting for the blade, but what they didn’t realize was that the blade had already been positioned. He was just waiting to see how long you’d stand in front of it.
-ARTHUR-
Lance looked at me for a long moment without speaking.
The stillness in him had shifted. It was harder now, set differently.
Even though he didn’t say anything, he kept his eyes on me, not in challenge, or not only a challenge.
There was something underneath his gaze, something closer to a question he already knew I didn’t have a clean answer to, and he knew I knew he knew it, which was the specific kind of conversation Lance and I had been having for years without ever actually having it.
I held his gaze.
The dragon said nothing. It was watching, the way it did when something nearby smelled like territory being tested.
I picked up my tankard and drank. The ale was old, stale, almost as old and stale as this conversation.
I’d just told him the subject of Guinevere was something I was leaving to Galahad’s discretion and Lance clearly hadn’t liked the answer.
He’d looked away first. Then he sat back in his chair and directed his attention somewhere past the window, past the courtyard wall, somewhere I couldn’t follow and didn’t try.
Galahad inclined his head, and his expression was composed, clear-eyed, still, and entirely convinced of what he’d just said.
That was the thing about Galahad that I found simultaneously useful and difficult to look at directly.