CHAPTER FORTY-TWO #3
The hall settled back into itself albeit hesitantly. The meal resumed. Across the room, Tristan had moved closer to her, and she hadn’t moved away. He was now leaning down to tell her something, and she was nodding. Her eyes were still wide.
I looked away.
The torches burned steady. The dark was gone. Whatever had extinguished every flame in a hall of one hundred people simultaneously had retreated back behind whatever it lived behind, and the evening continued as evenings did, and no one at my table said a word about it.
I thought about Tristan’s face. Two seconds of white before the recovery.
I thought about what he’d seen in those two seconds that the rest of us hadn’t.
-PERCIVAL-
Once light flooded the room again, a collective breath was released.
At first, no one had spoken, but as soon as the light was reintroduced, someone laughed, and then the rest of the room followed suit.
Cups were lifted, and conversation resumed the way it always does when people decide collectively that a thing hadn’t really happened.
But I knew something had happened.
I kept my hands flat on the table as I remembered the third pillar in the corner because that was where the thing had stood.
And it hadn’t been a shadow, nor a trick of extinguished light or wine or the particular way fear reshapes familiar things.
The shape had been a man, of that I was certain.
Or it had been the glow of one. The man had been wearing armor, but the armor was outdated, older than anything in this hall, older than anything I could name.
The entity had stood with its head turned toward my table, but its focus had been on her.
Then the candles were lit, and the thing was gone.
I stared at the pillar where the entity had wavered.
The stone was unscored, and there was no frost on the floor, no residue of any kind.
Nothing to confirm what I’d seen except the fact that I’d seen it, and I’d learned a long time ago that my certainty about such things meant very little to anyone else.
A hand touched my arm, and I looked over as I blinked.
Guin was watching me. Her violet eyes had that quality they sometimes held: careful, assessing, reading the surface of a thing for what moved underneath it.
She’d been doing that since the first day I’d met her, when she’d been disguised as Lioran.
And I’d learned that her mannerisms hadn’t changed even if her outside appearance had.
“Are you all right?” she asked.
“Fine,” I lied.
Her hand stayed on my arm for one more second as if she didn’t believe me. Then she withdrew it and turned back to face her plate. She knew I wasn’t fine, but she was polite enough not to say so, which I appreciated more than she probably realized.
I reached for my cup, and even though the wine was warm and had been since before the candles went out, I drank it anyway. And I did so slowly, while the hall continued its determined return to normalcy around me.
Tristan was talking, blabbering on about something to do with the eastern roads.
His voice carried easily in a way that suggested he’d grown up being listened to.
Of course, my first thought was that he had had something to do with what had just happened.
Or, more pointedly, his death magic. But he seemed as much at a loss as the rest of us.
Down the high table, Kay was watching Arthur. And Arthur was watching Guin just as Lance was watching her, but both wore very different expressions. Where Lance’s was concern, Arthur’s was suspicion. Guin was watching her plate.
The hall was full of people watching other people and deciding what they were and were not permitted to have seen.
I looked at the third pillar again. The armored shape hadn’t cast any darkness. That was the detail I kept returning to. It had been standing inside the darkness, the way a body stands inside its own skin.
I turned the cup in my hands.
She was eating now but only small and deliberate bites, the way she now ate since she’d been assigned to Galahad: like she was rationing the pleasure of her food, reminding herself not to eat too fast.
She was talking to Tristan about nothing or, perhaps it was more fitting to say she was simply responding to Tristan.
Her voice was light and her shoulders were level and everything about her said, “I’m fine. Everything is fine.”
But she was a terrible liar, at least where this subject was concerned.
The truth of as much was the shaking of her hands.
As soon as she noticed me noticing the tremor, she shifted them to her lap.
She’d looked at the pillar too. She’d seen it, the entity of the man standing there. I was sure she’d seen it because I’d watched her eyes go wide.
I wasn’t going to say any of this, not in a room full of people who had just loudly agreed that the last two minutes had been nothing but a draft and a trick of the dark. But I knew better. I think we all knew better, but most of us couldn’t come to terms with what we knew.
The third pillar was just stone now; and the hall was just a hall.
I reached for my wine and finished it in one large gulp. When Guin glanced at me sideways, I gave her the same expression I gave everyone else: the expression that said I was also perfectly fine.
I raised my cup. “To drafts,” I said.