CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
-LANCE-
The training yard smelled like it always did in the morning: wet stone, iron, and the sourness of men who’d already been at it for over an hour.
Arthur walked beside me at a pace that meant he hadn’t decided anything yet about what he was planning on doing with Guinevere, as far as her imprisonment was concerned. I knew that pace. I’d been watching it for years.
“For now, she stays where she is,” he said.
“In the bedchamber beside yours?”
He nodded.
I didn’t say anything to that, but I thought it was for the best.
There was something about the situation the other night, between Galahad and her, that was still rubbing me the wrong way.
Yes, on the surface, it appeared as if she’d attacked Galahad, but I couldn’t get the image of the tears streaming down her face out of my mind.
There had to have been a reason for them.
The gravel crunched under our boots as we walked to the far side of the training yard to observe the others who were still in the middle of their drills. Two of the King’s Guard stood at the far gate, their gold and red catching the pale morning light.
“She can’t be trusted with any of my men,” Arthur continued. “Not after what happened between her and Galahad.”
“I admit, I feel as if there’s more to that story than meets the surface.”
Arthur stopped walking in order to turn and look at me. “She attacked him, Lance.”
“I know what the report says.”
“It’s not just what the report says.”
“What does that mean?”
“It means that I went to both of them to try to understand what happened in the events that led up to the situation we witnessed that night.”
“And?”
“And Galahad told me she attacked him. She didn’t deny it.”
“She attacked him unprovoked?”
“They were in the middle of prayers, and when he touched her in blessing, she apparently had had enough, as she called it.”
“That’s what she said? That she’d had enough?”
He nodded. “Those were her exact words.”
I didn’t push it. There was a version of events that had been written down, witnessed, and signed.
I’d read the report, read about how Galahad had been kneeling in prayer, attempting to minister to the ‘dangerous prisoner,’ and the prisoner retaliated with a magical explosion that had brought half the wing to its knees.
That was the version on paper, but paper had a way of leaving things out.
Arthur started walking again. “I’ve called for her to be brought to the yard this morning, as I wish to test Mordred’s newest binding on her.”
I looked at him. “It’s too soon, Arthur. After what happened the other night—”
“—she’s a prisoner, not a guest.” His voice was flat, with no room for argument. “We don’t consider her state.”
He said the words like he meant them, but there was something in his eyes that said he didn’t mean them.
I’d known Arthur long enough to hear the difference between the king’s pronouncement and the man beneath the king, who was convincing himself of something he felt should be true. This was the second thing.
But I didn’t comment further on it. Instead, my attention was drawn to the far side of the training yard as she came through the gate between two guards. The first thing I did was take her in the way I always looked at soldiers coming off a bad stretch. It was a head-to-foot inventory.
I was pleased to note that she walked straight and her chin was up. Her hair was pulled back, and her color was reasonable. She didn’t appear to be exhausted or in any way harmed from the other night.
Galahad was the only one who was harmed, I reminded myself and then swallowed hard as my eyes naturally shifted to the east end of the training yard, where Galahad was sparring with Agravaine.
The former appeared to be recovered from his ordeal from the other evening, even if the wounds on his face hadn’t fully resolved themselves.
I turned my attention back to her and noticed she moved without favoring anything obvious. As far as I could read her, she looked like herself. At the thought, something in my chest released that I hadn’t known I was holding.
Arthur paired her with Percival as he said something about needing to tend to something important at the moment.
I watched him return to Mordred, who had appeared at the gate, and together they returned to the castle.
I had to admit I was pleased with the pairing because I knew Percival didn’t mean her any ill will.
As to why I was feeling so generous when it came to Guinevere, I didn’t know.
All I did know was that something had changed within me after I’d witnessed the situation from the other night.
And I didn’t know if that change was a good thing or a bad one.
I watched Percival give her that open, guileless smile of his, the one that made men underestimate him, and saw her shoulders drop a fraction with what I assumed was relief.
She was as pleased to be paired with Percival as I was for her, most likely because we both knew Percival wouldn’t push her; indeed, he had a gift for knowing when not to push.
I went back to my own business: I had a new squire I was supposed to be correcting on his footwork, and the boy was going to lose a hand one day if he kept dropping his left guard. I focused on that, and then I focused on the sound of the yard, the ringing of steel, the rhythmic grunt of effort.
I didn’t watch her.
Well, I didn’t watch her entirely, anyway. But from the corner of my eye, I did keep a general awareness of her, simply because I couldn’t help it.
She and Percival found their rhythm, but she was rusty: her timing was off, the magic binding no doubt throwing her balance somewhere she hadn’t accounted for, but the foundation was still there, as were the instincts. You can suppress a soldier, but the body still knows where to go and what to do.
As she was protecting herself against a downward arc of Percival’s practice sword, her tunic caught on something or perhaps it gave at a seam that was already weakened. Regardless, the result was that the fabric split at her shoulder and peeled back along her left side.
And that was when I saw it.
A bruise that was purple-black and running the full length of her ribcage. It was the type of bruise that didn’t come from a fall or from a bad parry. No, this was the type that came from something sustained and intentional, a wound that had been laid down with patience and brute force.
I was already moving toward her before the thought completed itself, and I had no control over what I was doing.
My legs had simply decided for me. Percival saw me coming and stepped back automatically, reading whatever was on my face.
He dropped his sword at the same time that she turned and looked at me.
At the expression on my face, she went very still.
The nervousness hit her eyes immediately, but I didn’t stop.
Instead, I reached for her, saying nothing as I took the torn edge of her tunic and pulled.
It took her perhaps a second to understand what I was doing and once she did, she fought me.
Bringing both hands up, she attempted to twist away from my grasp, which only made her tunic rip harder and faster.
She was sharp and fast; she still had the instincts of a warrior, but I had the reach, the strength, and I wasn’t asking for permission.
The fabric gave completely, and then I saw that it wasn’t just one bruise running along her side, but a map of them.
They were all along her back, her upper arms, and down both of her sides.
The array of bruises and welts was exactly as it had appeared in my dream, when Morgan had come to me and then offered a vision of Guinevere’s back.
It was difficult to put into words the rage that overcame me. I could only stand there, my chest heaving as I held the tattered remains of her tunic, and she stared up at me with panic in her eyes.
All I could think about was the fact that I knew her body, not in the way a man knows a woman he’s studied from a distance.
No, I knew her body the way a man knows something he’s held in his hands repeatedly, something he’s mapped by feel and then, afterward, by the low light of a dying fire.
I remembered the smoothness of her back under my palm and the particular way the skin at her waist gave when she breathed.
I’d run my thumb along her ribs so many times and found nothing but the faint warmth of her, the clean, unmarked expanse of unmarred, beautiful skin, and I remembered thinking, in the scattered, half-formed way a man thinks when he’s not really thinking, that she was flawless.
Not soft-flawless, not the pampered smoothness of a court woman who’d never known labor.
This was a different type of flawless altogether; it was a flawlessness of something that’s been tested and survived without being marked by it.
She had never had a single flaw in her porcelain skin, but now that same skin was stretched taut, revealing a canvas of deliberate damage.
The yellow-green color underneath the bright blue and purple told me how long the damage had been sitting there, while the new purple sat on top of it, still angry, still wet-looking in the cold morning light.
The welts on her lower back were spaced in such a way that made my stomach turn because they weren’t random.
They’d been applied with thought, with patience, the way you’d apply something you meant to last.
And then the fingerprints. Four and a thumb, pressed so deep into her upper arm that the bruising had bloomed out from each point of contact. I knew the span of a man’s hand; I’d spent thirty-five years learning what a man’s hands could do to another man.
But not to a woman. Not until now, and not to this woman.
Something moved through me then that I didn’t immediately recognize because it wasn’t anything I’d felt before.
I knew rage: I’d felt how clean and functional rage could be when it was useful, when it sharpened your aim and narrowed your thinking.
I’d felt grief also, though I tended not to call it that.
And I’d felt the cold, purposeful fury of a man who intends to settle something.
This was none of those things, and yet it was all of them at once.