CHAPTER FORTY-EIGHT
-KAY-
The first blow landed before anyone knew it was coming.
That was the thing about Lance. He didn’t telegraph.
Most men, even good ones, gave you a half-second of intention before they moved.
It might just be a shift in the shoulders or a tightening around the jaw, but Lance gave you nothing.
One moment he was standing at the edge of the yard with his arms crossed, and the next Galahad was on the ground with blood coming out of his severely broken nose.
I hadn’t moved.
There’s a certain type of man who rushes forward when violence breaks out.
Such is the peacemaker type of man, someone who has good instincts but a poor survival rate.
I have never been that kind of man. And that was the reason I stayed where I was, my back against the cold stone of the yard’s outer wall, and I watched as Lance hauled Galahad up by the collar and hit him again.
The yard erupted then, and squires scattered. Two of the younger guards had started forward but then thought better of it. Percival had stood very still with his arms at his sides. Tristan was the one who had taken a half-step toward the girl.
The girl.
She’d just stood there in the middle of it all, which was where she always seemed to end up without appearing to try. Her arms had been at her sides, and she hadn’t flinched exactly, but she wasn’t watching either.
I noted the bruises. Galahad’s work, presumably. He’d been thorough about it.
When Lance hit him a third time, Galahad went down properly and didn’t come back up.
There was a sound from the assembled men at that, not cheering, of course; no, this was something lower and more complicated.
It was the sound men made when something they’d all been privately thinking got said out loud.
Arthur arrived at a run, which was unusual enough to be significant.
He never ran, but seeing your First Knight attacking the most pious of the knights would encourage any king to run, I supposed.
Regardless, Arthur had crossed the yard in a fury and grabbed Lance by the arm, and I could see, even from where I’d stood, that his grip was iron.
Lance allowed himself to be pulled. He didn’t resist.
Instead, he’d looked down at Galahad where he lay on the ground, and Lance’s expression was that of a man who’d done exactly what he’d intended to do and was now waiting to see what it would cost him.
Galahad was already being helped to his feet by two of the guards. His face was a ruin, blood running down the front of that immaculate white surcoat. He was looking at the girl.
She was looking at the ground.
Arthur said something low and sharp to Lance and walked him out of the yard.
The crowd began to dissolve then, men finding reasons to be elsewhere.
Servants evaporated. Within two minutes the yard had gone from a spectacle to an ordinary stretch of cold flagstone with a few puddles of blood darkening the gaps between the stones.
I remained where I was.
The girl stood alone for a moment. A long moment. Then she turned, and I got a clean look at her face before she composed it again.
There it was.
She looked like a woman who had just been reminded that other people’s choices could reach across a room and land on her without her consent. She looked like a woman who was taking stock.
I knew that look. I’d worn it often enough.
Galahad was being steered toward the infirmary by the guards, but he kept looking back over his shoulder at her.
There was something in his face that had curdled past obsession into something more dangerous.
He was certainly a man who believed he was righteous, and being publicly humiliated was one of the least predictable things in the world.
I’d seen it happen before. It tended not to end cleanly.
She turned and walked toward the corridor, accompanied by both Percival and Tristan, who, it seemed, were now her maidservants. Her steps were steady. Whatever was happening behind her eyes, her body had learned to keep its own counsel.
I let her go.
When she passed within twenty feet of me, she didn’t see me. People rarely saw me when I didn’t want them to. It was one of the few advantages of being the man everyone had already decided to stop looking at.
She was thinner than she’d been. Galahad’s version of hospitality had left its mark upon her in ways that weren’t just superficial. The bruising would heal. The other things were harder to measure.
I pushed off the wall.
She’d arrived here as a variable. That was how I’d initially categorized her: an unknown quantity that Arthur didn’t quite know what to do with. A prisoner with an inconvenient effect on all the men who came into contact with her. She was a problem to be managed.
I’d revised that assessment twice already. I was revising it again now.
She was currently at the center of three separate crises, none of which she had chosen and none of which she seemed entirely aware of.
There was Arthur and his dragon, which was becoming less a metaphor for temper and more an actual governance problem.
Then there was Lance, the blackmail and the thing behind the blackmail, which was desire so strong it had eaten through his judgment like acid through cloth.
And now there was Galahad, who had been an instrument of religious discipline and was tipping over into something that would require a different word.
Three crises. One woman.
And she hadn’t arranged any of it. That was the interesting part.
I’d known plenty of women who accrued power deliberately.
Morgan Le Fay being the obvious example, though hardly the only one.
Good thing that bitch was now dead, or so the rumors had insisted.
Regardless, deliberate power had a texture to it, a smell almost.
It was the particular quality of attention that came with sustained effort and intention.
Women who worked for their position had tells the same way card players did.
This one had none of those tells. She wasn’t working any angle I could identify.
She was surviving. That was all. And in surviving, she was becoming necessary to the stability of multiple men simultaneously, not because she’d maneuvered herself into that position but because circumstances had placed her there and she’d simply refused to collapse.
That was either a tool or a threat.
I walked out of the yard. The blood on the stones was already going dark. By tonight it would just look like old stone. By next week no one would remember exactly where Galahad had fallen.
I would remember, but that was no surprise because I always remembered.
-KAY-
The corridor outside Lance’s quarters was quiet.
I’d chosen the hour deliberately; it was late enough that the torches had burned down to stubs, but early enough that the night watch hadn’t made its second round.
That meant there was no one to witness my visit, no one to misread the visit as anything other than what it wasn’t.
I knocked once.
He answered faster than a man who’d been sleeping. His tunic was unlaced, his hair pushed back like he’d been running his hands through it. He filled the doorway like the castle had been built around him.
“Kay.” Not a question. And definitely not a welcome.
“Lance.” I let the silence do its work for a moment. “May I come in?”
He stepped back, not because he wanted to.
The room was sparse for a man of his rank: immaculate black armor on its stand, a single candle burning on the table, a cup of something untouched beside it. No woman, no evidence of the habits he’d been cultivating to try to forget her.
Interesting.
I didn’t sit. Neither did he.
“The council meets tomorrow,” I said.
“How do you—”
“—I’ve just come from seeing the king. He told me as much.” He nodded as I continued. “Arthur will put Galahad to the table, and I assume we will all discuss whether to strip his titles further.”
“Arthur said he’d already made up his mind where Galahad was concerned.”
“And yet you did not tell me of this?”
He cocked his head to the side. “I admit, this situation between us is taking some time to get used to.” Then he frowned. “And, in case you haven’t noticed, I’ve been… detained.”
I gave him a smile he didn’t return. “Don’t make the same mistake again.”
He nodded as I cleared my throat. “Returning to the conversation you had with the king, I’m sure he’s already made up his mind, but he still has to make it look like we all came to that conclusion together, correct?”
He nodded again as I continued. “No matter what happens, no matter your own outrage, I need you to stay quiet.”
The room went very still.
He was looking at me the way men look at something they want to hit.
I’d seen that expression on better men than him, and it had never once troubled me so it didn’t trouble me now.
His left hand had closed into a fist at his side.
The knuckles were already split from his brutal attack on Galahad and they began to bleed once more.
He was clearly a man who was trying very hard not to feel what he was feeling. “You expect me to sit at that table,” he started, “and say nothing.”
“I want you to let me manage it.”
“Manage it.” He repeated the words like they tasted wrong. “Galahad nearly—”
“—I know what Galahad nearly did.”
That stopped him. I watched him recalculate; he was fast for a man who led with his body, I’d give him that. He understood immediately that I’d just confirmed the shape of my knowledge without specifying anything more, and that the uncertainty was the point.
“There are forty men in his oratory... forty men who listen to him, who follow him,” I said. “You know this.”
He nodded. “Forty men who will be angry when he gets rebuked publicly.”
“Yes,” I said. “They will be angry, which is exactly why I need to understand them before Arthur decides to scatter them to the four winds.”
I paused. “If tomorrow Galahad walks out of that council with another visible wound, those forty men stop being a faction with a disgraced leader and start being something else entirely. Something harder to read. Harder to use.”
Lance looked at me for a long moment.
“Use? You’re planning to exploit them,” he said.
I said nothing. I didn’t need to.
He turned away from me and crossed over to the table by his bed.