CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN #2
It was the feeling of standing in front of a cathedral after someone has put an axe through the windows.
It was the feeling of something sacred and irreplaceable being ruined on purpose, and for only the satisfaction of the ruin.
And layered beneath it, quieter but no less devastating, was something else entirely: shame.
The sick, marrow-deep shame of a man who had failed at the only thing that mattered.
I had told myself it was righteousness that kept me away from her.
But the truth was more along the lines that I’d built a wall out of my own wounded honor and stood behind it like it meant something…
while she’d been in that room. Alone and unable to protect herself.
All I could think about was the fact that I’d let it happen.
I was the best swordsman in all of Logres. I’d held the line at sieges where lesser men broke and ran. I’d killed men who were larger than me with my bare hands and never once questioned whether I was capable of protecting what needed protecting.
But I hadn’t protected her.
My hand was still holding the torn edge of her tunic, and she’d gone completely still under my grip.
Not compliant; she wasn’t a woman who went compliant, but she was still in the way a creature goes still when it understands that struggling is beside the point.
Her eyes were fixed on mine, and her jaw was set hard.
In her gaze was a demand that I not pity her.
And I didn’t pity her. I raged for her. I raged at myself.
I raged at the weeks I’d spent turning my back on her and telling myself it was justice.
She hadn’t said a fucking word about this to anyone. Of course, she hadn’t. Because she’d known there wouldn’t have been a point, not when she was a prisoner, an enemy of the crown, and he... wasn’t.
He.
He’d done this to her.
My grip on the torn fabric tightened until my knuckles went white. I made myself release it. I made myself breathe.
I released the ripped fabric slowly but brought my hand to her upper arm, though I wasn’t sure why.
The gesture was useless. It changed nothing.
But I couldn’t seem to stop myself from touching her, from putting my hand as gently as I knew how against the same arm that bore those fingerprints, as if I could somehow override them.
As if my hands on her now could mean something different than his hands on her then.
I vaguely noticed that Percival was standing three feet back, and he was very quiet, the practice sword hanging at his side.
He wasn’t looking at her body, but I was sure he’d seen the bruising.
I was sure everyone in the training yard had by now because the sounds of sparring had completely died, and now the entire place was void of any sound at all.
Percival was looking at my face, which told me my face was doing something I wasn’t able to control.
I held her in place, and she just stood there. Neither of us spoke. Her expression was one that said she hadn’t wanted me to discover her secret. I was certain my expression was one that said now that I had discovered her secret, something monumental was about to happen.
I’d been in enough campaigns to know the difference between the damage of combat and the damage of captivity. I’d interrogated prisoners. I’d pulled men out of sieges who’d been worked over for information. I knew what deliberate looked like, and I knew what sustained looked like.
This was both.
Finally, the shock left me and I was able to think. “You never told me.”
Her breathing hitched, the fear and anger in her eyes shifting. It wasn’t gone, necessarily, but it had moved as if she’d been braced for a different kind of attention and had gotten something else entirely and didn’t know what to do with it.
“I was… dead to you.”
Her response moved through me like a blade. Clean. Final. Unbearable.
As if it had happened only yesterday, I remembered how I’d stood in the dungeon and said those exact words t her, and I’d tried to mean them. I’d built a wall out of righteousness, and of pride and I’d stood behind that wall for weeks.
While she’d been in that room for weeks, subjected to Galahad.
She reached down and yanked what was left of her tunic back into place as best she could.
Her hands were steady as her eyes came up, and she dared me to do something with what I’d seen, dared me to make it into something she’d have to manage.
Her chin was up, and her voice, when she finally spoke, was flat and even.
“You were never dead to me,” I managed.
She glared up at me.
“Don’t.” The word came out low and sharp, a warning. Her jaw was tight. “You don’t get to do this now.” Her chest was heaving. “You don’t get to stand here and tell me I matter or that you care—”
“—I fucking more than care,” I growled.
The words came out rough. I didn’t try to dress them up into something more dignified because they were the truest thing I’d said in weeks.
She stopped and pressed her lips together hard. Her eyes went glassy but her jaw was so tight, she clearly had no intention of letting the unshed tears become anything.
“No, you—”
“—Yes, I do.”
I turned away from her then because there was nothing I could say, nothing I could do to reverse what had been done to her.
The guilt would have to wait. There would be time to hate myself properly later, and I intended to be thorough about it.
But right now there was only one thing left that I was capable of doing, and it wasn’t standing here.
Now, there was only attempting to make amends for it.
I took four steps toward the edge of the yard and stopped there with my back to both of them and my hands closed at my sides. My jaw ached, so I unclenched it.
Galahad, I thought. The name settled in my chest like a coal as he came into my vision, and I could suddenly only see red.
Arthur called my name from the far end of the yard.
Obviously, he could see the murder in my eyes, even from his distance.
But I heard him the way you hear someone calling after you in a dream: yes, his voice was present but it was also irrelevant in equal measure.
Regardless, I didn’t stop. I kept walking at a brisk pace, and then faster than a brisk pace, because the thing in my chest was no longer something I could contain by walking.
Galahad was at the far end of the yard, still running a drill with Agravaine.
He turned and saw me coming. He must have read something in my face, because his expression changed.
Good. I wanted him to see it. I wanted the last clear thing he saw to be the face of the man who knew exactly what he’d done.
I didn’t know how many seconds it was before I reached him, but I saw the punch I laid against his cheek before I even delivered it.
There was no warning, no challenge, no announcement of grievance or request for answers. It was just my fist finding his jaw and the sound of him going down at the same time as Agravaine stumbled back. Then there was the sound of the yard, which had been quiet, going quieter still.
He tried to get up. I didn’t let him.
I hit him again, and I heard myself trying to say something, but the ire wouldn’t allow the words to fully form. Instead, they came out as the sound of the pressure in my chest trying to get out. Soon, though, the words did come, punched out between blows.
“You had her under your protection.” My knuckles connected with his nose.
He went sideways. Another blow to the other side of his face.
My fist was covered with the sticky syrup of his blood, but I didn’t stop.
“You put your hands on her.” Another blow.
“You put your fucking hands on her when she had no way to protect herself.”
He was screaming something about demons, about purging, about the work of the gods or the light or whatever doctrine he’d wrapped his sickness in.
And that was when another piece of the puzzle suddenly fell into place.
The thought arrived the way the worst ones always did: whole and certain, the way truth tends to arrive when you’ve been looking at evidence long enough that your mind finally stops arguing with itself.
The other night when she’d broken through her binding and attacked Galahad, I thought about the bruises all over her body, about the fingerprints pressed four and a thumb into her upper arm.
I thought about the welts along her lower back laid down with the kind of patience that told you everything about the man who’d applied them.
And then I thought about the look on her face that night.
She hadn’t looked like a woman who’d attacked someone.
She’d looked like a woman who’d survived something.
“You tried to force yourself on her, you piece of fucking shit.”
The rage, which had just barely begun to cool, came back with a vengeance. Not the hot variety that makes men stupid and loud, but the cold kind. The kind that doesn’t burn out. The kind that calcifies into purpose and stays there forever.
“I had to… force the demon out of her.”
My boot found his stomach before I was aware of deciding to do it.
I heard his ribs go. It was a sound I knew well, like a green branch under too much weight: a dense, wet give that you feel in the sole of your boot.
Galahad folded around the impact, both arms coming in toward his middle, his whole body curling inward the way bodies do when they’ve lost the argument with pain.
Still, he made no motion to call on his magic. Instead, he made a sound. It took me a moment to register it was screaming.
“Last night you tried to fuck her, and she defended herself.” I crouched down over him, and my voice dropped further still, into something that wasn’t anger anymore. Anger was too human for whatever this was. “You worthless piece of shit.”
He tried to speak between the sounds he was making, something about the demon inside her, about how he was trying to draw it out, about how what he’d done was sanctioned by the Boundless.
His words were thick and wet where I’d split his lips, but he still sounded absolutely convinced of himself, and that was the worst part.
There was no guilt in it. No shame. Just doctrine.
I crouched down so he could see my face.
“She couldn’t fight back.” I had him by the throat now, and my voice had dropped, and that was somehow worse.