CHAPTER FORTY-SIX #2
“I prayed over her,” he continued. “I spoke scripture such as I’d been doing for some time. But when I felt moved to lay a hand on her in blessing, in only the manner of a shepherd, of a healer...” He looked at me steadily as he breathed in deeply.
“Go on.”
“The moment I made contact, it surfaced.”
“It.”
“The demon.” His expression didn’t shift.
“What I saw in that room was not the prisoner. Whatever was behind her eyes in that moment, whatever tore the ice from nothing and drove it at my face, that was not the woman you brought to me.”
He let that settle before he continued. “I have seen possession before. Twice, in my years of study. This was the worst instance.”
He then described what happened next: the cold that arrived before the ice, the way the air had changed, the sound the room made as it came apart around him.
A man could have fabricated those details, but the lie would have revealed itself, I was sure: a flicker of effort, a fraction of a second’s hesitation. Galahad gave me none of that.
“This proves something important,” he continued, nodding.
“What does it prove?”
“That the demon is strong enough to resist holy intervention. It is strong enough that my presence, my prayers, not only failed to weaken it, but they provoked it.” He paused. “I provoked it.”
“If the demon was able to resist you, what does that mean?” I asked the words, but like I’d said to Isolde, I didn’t believe in demons. But that wasn’t the point of the matter. The point of the matter was what had happened in the minutes leading up to the chaos that nearly killed Galahad.
“I believe it means that the prisoner is beyond saving. The demon may have displaced whatever soul remains within her. She may well be a vessel that has already been emptied.”
He said the words quietly, with no amount of cruelty, and sounded like a man who was delivering a verdict he’d spent the night hoping to avoid.
I kept my voice even. “Why did this happen only last night and not earlier?”
There was a pause that was less than a heartbeat.
“Because it knew what I intended,” he answered.
“Evil is perceptive, my lord. I believe the entity read my purpose and struck before the prayer could take hold, before I could drive it out of her.”
He held my gaze. “It was not random. It was a response.”
I breathed in deeply, accepting what he said as it made sense to me.
“My lord, I wish for you to understand something.”
He took one step toward me, not close enough to be threatening but close enough to be deliberate.
“I am not afraid of her. Even after the events of last night, I am not afraid. In fact, I believe this is my calling: the work of expelling a demon from its host is dangerous, and the result is uncertain, but I am prepared to continue.”
“She very nearly killed you.”
He nodded. “I was able to defend myself with my own divine magic, my king. But that doesn’t change the fact that I believe I am meant to deliver the evil from her. But I can only do so if you leave her in my custody.”
I didn’t say anything because I hadn’t made that decision for myself. In fact, it seemed it was the wrong decision simply because of the fact that he’d very nearly died at her hands.
“I fear for you, my lord, more than I fear for myself.”
I looked at him. “For me.”
He nodded. “You are the one who must decide what is to be done with her. And that decision will say something about your soul.” He said the words without accusation and without malice. Just those clear gray eyes and that steady voice. “I pray you make the decision wisely.”
I thanked him, then I turned and walked back out into the corridor. The cold air off the stones hit the back of my neck, and I was overcome with the feeling that he wasn’t telling me falsehoods. Or, at the very least, he believed his own words.
I supposed believing your own words wasn’t the same thing as those words actually being true, but I had to wonder if they were.
He’d given me a framework that was clean and theological, in which Guinevere wasn’t a woman who’d been wronged but a vessel that had been lost.
And that was a problem because now every instinct I had that pushed against that framework would look like spiritual weakness.
I kept walking.
I didn’t know what had happened in that room, but I knew the cut of a man who’d prepared his testimony, and Galahad had definitely prepared his. He’d even admitted that he’d known I’d be coming with questions. It only made sense that he would prepare his side of things.
The question was whether or not his side was the honest side.
-GUIN-
I’d been up since before the light changed.
It was the kind of wakefulness that comes when your body understands something your mind is still refusing to accept, and the two of them sit in disagreement until dawn makes the argument moot.
I’d moved to the chair by the window sometime in the small hours and stayed there.
The bed was fine, beyond fine, really. As this was the room adjacent to the king’s, it looked it.
The linens smelled of lavender and something that might have been cedar, and the chamber was warm in a way Galahad’s had never been, but none of it helped.
I still sat upright with my back straight and my hands in my lap as I watched the light change over the courtyard below.
I’d always imagined that Kay was my foremost enemy, but spending the time I had with Galahad had caused me to rethink that.
I couldn’t imagine any person worse than Galahad, owing to his own hypocrisy.
And it was hypocrisy he couldn’t even see because he was so brainwashed by his own beliefs.
Had I to choose between rooming with Kay and returning to Galahad once more, I would have chosen Kay.
At least, I knew what to expect from him.
He would want my body, but he wouldn’t try to mark his claim on my soul the way Galahad had and did.
Mordred’s new binding sat on me like wet wool, dense and airless, pressing on something beneath my physical self.
I’d spent the night in a specific kind of pain that was difficult to characterize.
It wasn’t quite burning, and not quite crushing, but more like being slowly convinced by something enormous that the thing I’d believed myself to be was negotiable.
The magic hadn’t liked it. I hadn’t liked it.
By morning, I’d stopped trying to breathe around it and simply breathed through it.
Mordred had asked me how I’d broken through his original binding, and I’d answered honestly when I’d said I didn’t know.
Luckily, he’d left it at that. But I hadn’t.
I wanted to understand how I’d been bound all this time, and yet at the moment when Galahad was going to penetrate me, something inside me had revolted and broken through Mordred’s magic like it was a thin sheet of paper.
But those thoughts only chased themselves because I couldn’t find an answer for the how and the why.
So my thoughts, instead, moved to Tristan and, more specifically, to the way he’d come into Galahad’s chamber, and the chaos had simply stopped, not because he’d commanded it (and not because I’d commanded it) but just...
well, just because. I didn’t understand him.
I didn’t understand why he’d come, why he’d stayed, and why he’d put himself between me and whatever came next.
One thing I did know for sure: he’d answer for it.
He’d answer for acting on his own, without first getting permission from his king.
And he’d answer for coming to my aid in the first place, when every other person had been convinced that I was the perpetrator against Galahad.
Yes, Tristan would answer for his kindness towards me.
Arthur would see to that because Arthur saw to everything.
Even the fact that I was now sitting in a lavender-scented room was its own kind of statement about the way Arthur saw to things, and I hadn’t finished deciding what it meant.
Thoughts of Tristan led me to thoughts of Lance.
I remembered the look on his face: that split second before his expression closed.
I remembered the war of it showing in his features, the torn quality of a man who wanted to come to me and also wanted to believe the worst of what I’d done because believing the worst was simpler.
I understood the logic: I was the enemy.
I’d been the enemy since the night they’d caught me at the tavern with Corvin’s arms around me, and whatever had followed since hadn’t shifted the fundamental equation.
And that thought process led me to a realization: no one would care what my side of the story was.
I knew this the way I knew the binding hurt and that the guards outside my door wouldn’t come to my aid if I called them.
To them, I was a witch. Not only a witch, but I was the witch who had attacked one of their own and left him bleeding.
Arthur came in the late morning.
He didn’t come with any fanfare either: no guards, no knights, and no Mordred. He came in alone and closed the door behind him, and I registered what that meant: that this wasn’t an official proceeding. And it also wasn’t a verdict. No, it was a question.
I hadn’t decided which was better.
He crossed the room, and I watched him, trying to figure out what it was he wanted and whether he’d admitted it to himself yet. The first thing I noticed was that he looked tired.
He sat down, and then he told me he’d heard Galahad’s side of things, and now he wanted to hear mine. That surprised me: that he’d want to hear my side.
Your version, he called it. The words snagged in me.
A version implied two things of roughly equal weight, to be held up and compared, adjudicated by someone positioned above them both.
I understood how power worked. I also understood that I began any such comparison at a deficit so structural that naming it was almost not worth the energy: I was the prisoner.
My magic was bound. Everything I’d done since arriving in Camelot had been filtered through a frame in which I was the dangerous one, the enemy, the vessel for something that needed containing.
I asked him what Galahad had said, what Galahad’s side of things had been.