CHAPTER FORTY-SIX
-ARTHUR-
I dressed before dawn and didn’t bother calling for a servant.
The buckles on my bracers took longer than usual because my hands weren’t entirely steady, and I stood at the window for a long moment, looking out at the courtyard while I got them sorted.
The fountain was catching the first light of the morning. A stable boy crossed the cobblestones below, moving quickly with his head down, the way people moved when they’d heard something the night before and weren’t sure what it meant.
The whole castle had that quality this morning: low voices in the passages, servants who met my eyes and then immediately looked away.
When I stepped outside my door, I was quick to walk past hers.
I just... I didn’t want to think about her.
I wanted to not think about her. And that was why I was headed for the stables.
Two guards near the east corridor stopped talking when I rounded the corner and then resumed too quickly after I passed. I knew what they were talking about, what the whole castle was talking about: everything that had happened last evening.
I didn’t want questions yet because I didn’t have answers. I was hoping those answers would come to me this morning while I was on my ride.
The stables were quiet and warm when I walked in.
The horses shifted in their stalls, and Cabal was already tacked.
Young Nathan had seen me coming from across the yard, the way he always did, and he’d prepared Cabal for me.
I gave him a pat on the head, a nod, and a quick word of praise, and the boy walked away a little taller in his boots.
Isolde was already there, just as I’d hoped she would be.
She had her back to me because she was checking her mare’s near hind, but she didn’t startle when I walked over.
Instead, she straightened and looked at me once, the way a person looks when they’re deciding whether or not to speak.
She didn’t speak, and that was the right choice.
Instead, she dismissed her escort with a single look and mounted her horse. I followed suit, and soon we were through the gate, just the two of us, the dawning morning, and the road unrolling ahead.
We rode for a while in silence as the castle fell behind us.
The fields were damp and cold, the long grass silver at the tips, and a low mist sat in the hollows between the hills.
Still, neither of us spoke. I’d expected the silence to sit poorly: there was just too much still burning in me, but strangely it didn’t.
Instead, Isolde gave the countryside room to exist between us, and somehow the countryside used it.
By the time we reached the ridge, I felt fractionally less like a man who’d spent the night putting out fires. And when she finally spoke, I was beyond pleased to hear her voice.
“What happened last night?”
I wasn’t surprised by the question. Isolde was frank, and she was a woman who cut directly to the point, so I presented all the details: the ruined bedchamber, Galahad wounded, the frost forming on the walls. She listened to me carefully.
“She nearly killed him,” I finished. “Galahad believes it proof that she carries a demon inside her.”
Isolde frowned up at me. “Do you think she carries a demon?”
I smiled. “I don’t believe in demons.”
Isolde rode quietly for a moment, her mare picking the way along the ridge path without any guidance. A bird called somewhere in the tree line and then stopped.
“Why now?” she asked as she turned to face me.
I glanced at her and took in her lovely face and her polished expression. I didn’t respond but waited for her to further explain.
“She’s been in your custody for... what, a month?”
The question was patient, not pressing. I nodded.
“If she intended to kill Galahad, why would she wait until last night to do it? Furthermore, she’s in a fortress full of men who would cheerfully see her hanged, and she knows that. Not only that, but her magic was bound by Mordred.
I can only assume that breaking through that binding must have cost her something. So, I repeat my question: why now?”
I didn’t answer immediately, because I was searching for exactly the right words. Finally, I settled on: “I don’t know.”
She nodded as if that was the answer she’d expected to hear. “Do you know what caused the binding to fail?”
I shook my head. “I admit there is much about this I don’t know.”
She let that sit. The horses cantered on. Below us, the fields stretched south toward a tree line that had gone hazy with mist. And behind us was the first smear of Camelot’s towers, receding further and further into the distance. And that was its own kind of relief.
“It seems to me,” Isolde said carefully, “that Galahad must have done something to her to cause Guinevere to react the way she did.”
There was no malice in her comment, just the logic of it, delivered cleanly and without flair.
“How do you figure?”
She shrugged. “A caged thing doesn’t spend itself destroying the cage,” she continued, “unless staying inside the cage is worse.”
I thought about the room when I’d come upon it: the ice on the walls, the frost that was cracking in the window frame.
I remembered the blood streaming down Galahad’s face, pooling on the floor below him.
Then I remembered Guinevere’s expression of hysteria, the proof I’d taken that she’d simply snapped and lashed out against him.
Lastly, I thought about how Tristan had moved through the ice toward her as though the ice recognized him.
The point I kept returning to was that I’d gone into the room after everything had occurred leading to that point. I didn’t know what had taken place before I’d arrived. The truth of the matter was that I hadn’t thought to ask.
The specific texture of that realization wasn’t comfortable.
“I hadn’t considered that,” I said.
Isolde nodded once, as if I’d confirmed something she’d suspected. We rode on as the mist in the valley below began to thin, the sun somewhere behind the clouds doing the slow work of burning it away.
“What you most likely should do, if you’ll permit my giving you unasked-for advice,” she started.
I chuckled. “The only type of advice I’d request is the unasked-for type.”
She gave me a little smile. “I believe it would be best to hear from both of them separately. Go in with the possibility that her account is the true one. Or at least partially true.” She glanced at me. “I’m not telling you what to decide, of course.”
“No, you’re telling me how to decide it.”
“I’m not telling you anything.”
“I like it that you’re telling me, Isolde. Please continue to tell me more.”
She laughed and gave me a flirtatious smile. “If only all men thought in such a way.”
It was my turn to laugh, and once the laugh left my lips, all that remained was her suggestion and the logic within it.
“I’ll do it.”
There was no hesitation in my response, and that surprised me slightly. I wasn’t in the habit of taking counsel without negotiating it first. That just wasn’t how I navigated things. And yet... Isolde’s advice was good advice.
Something in the quality of the silence that followed made me want to account for it.
“Most people would have argued for a position,” I said while looking over at her. “Most likely condemned the prisoner and protected Galahad. You did neither. You simply followed the question.”
“Yes.”
“It’s the fair approach.”
She held my gaze for a moment longer, and as she did, she nodded slightly. “I like to try to be fair in all things.”
“You’ve succeeded.”
We’d turned our mounts a while back and now the castle was growing larger on the horizon, its towers solidifying out of the morning haze.
At the thought of returning to all the duty that awaited me, something within me rebelled.
I wasn’t ready to return to that overarching responsibility just yet.
Not when the wind was now blowing through the trees and the sun was riding the horizon.
And Isolde... well, she was easy to spend time with. The wind off the ridge moved her hair, and I watched her for a moment before I looked away.
“I enjoy spending time with you,” I said softly.
“And I you.”
The road curved down toward the gatehouse, and the portcullis was already raised, the morning watch just changing. The fountain caught the new light of the morning, and I felt a peace roll over me that I hadn’t felt in a few days at least.
-ARTHUR-
I found Galahad, not surprisingly, in the chapel. Inside, it smelled of beeswax and old stone. Two candles burned on the altar, and Galahad knelt before them with his hands folded and his back straight. He didn’t turn when I entered.
I stopped just inside the doorway and looked at him.
The wounds on his face had been cleaned and dressed.
Someone had done careful work: the edges were sealed, the skin around them no longer angry.
His left eye was dark, the bruise spreading from the socket down toward his cheekbone in shades of deep purple and yellow-green.
It should have made him look diminished, but somehow it didn’t.
Instead, he looked like a man who’d walked through something immense and come out the other side still standing.
There was no defeat whatsoever in his countenance.
He rose before I spoke. Then he turned and folded his hands at his waist and looked at me with those clear gray eyes that never seemed to blink quite enough.
“Your Grace.” His voice was unhurried. “I expected you.”
I crossed the chapel and stopped a few feet from him so that I was close enough to read him, or at least to try.
“Then you know why I’m here.”
“I know what happened last night requires explanation.” He didn’t wait for me to ask, and I appreciated that.
“Yes,” I answered.
He nodded. “I went to her in the gods’ service. You had given me charge of her soul, and I believed that sustained prayer, holy presence in close proximity, might weaken the demon’s hold upon her. I hoped I might loosen its grip on her.”
He paused. “I went to minister to her, to urge the demon from within her confines. I did so not for myself, but for her.”
I said nothing but nodded.