CHAPTER FORTY-NINE #3
I frowned, and she continued. “I came because I heard about what happened the other night; of course, the whole castle heard about what happened the other night, but I thought someone should bring you breakfast… someone who wasn’t a guard or a politician or a man with an agenda.”
She paused. “Someone who wasn’t a man at all.”
I looked at her.
“Why?” I asked again. My tone wasn’t necessarily suspicious, but genuinely curious. I’d spent too long in a world built from secrets and lies to accept kindness without examining its load-bearing walls.
She considered the question, taking it seriously rather than deflecting it.
“Because when I arrived at Camelot, the entire court was discussing the captured spy. The dangerous witch. The infiltrator.”
She paused. “And the other night, the dangerous witch’s magic exploded from a room where she was locked alone with a man known for extreme religious devotion and a particular hatred of female magic users. And yesterday we learned she was covered with bruises all over her body.”
Her voice stayed even throughout, which said this wasn’t performed outrage.
“I grew up managing an estate,” she continued.
“And I know what happens to women who are locked in rooms with men who believe they have divine permission to do whatever they want.”
I swallowed hard, and she held up a hand.
“I didn’t come here for the details. I already know the shape of it and that’s enough.”
The words arrived without drama, and I had no defense prepared for words without drama. I’d been braced for pity or curiosity or the specific horror people wear when they want to be seen reacting. Isolde offered none of those things.
“Thank you,” I said.
She nodded as she picked up the gown she’d earlier draped over the bed. It was dark blue, and the cut was slightly out of fashion but still well-made, good wool, with long sleeves. It wasn’t in Corbenic’s green and gold, but it also wasn’t penitential gray. And that was something.
“This was mine,” she said. “And we’re close enough in size that I thought you might want something to wear that isn’t dull and also wasn’t chosen to humiliate you.”
I took it. The wool was soft, the kind that held warmth without scratching the skin. When I pressed it against my face, it smelled of horses and something sweet, apples or meadow grass, the smell of a life lived largely outdoors.
“Arthur won’t like that you did this,” I said.
She smiled as she nodded. “I know.”
Then she started for the door, and at the threshold, she stopped to turn and face me.
She didn’t say anything, and neither did I.
We both just smiled at one another, which was sort of a strange thing to do, I thought.
And then she opened the door and disappeared through it, and my visit with Isolde was over for the time being.
I sat with the gown clutched against my chest and the bread still warm in my stomach, and I tried to assemble what had just happened into something that made some sort of sense.
But I couldn’t reconcile it. Isolde of Corbenic had walked into my room and given me food and her own gown.
But it was everything she hadn’t said that still rang through me: I know what was done to you.
I know you didn’t deserve it. And then she’d left.
I put on the gown. It was slightly loose, but the fit was close enough. The sleeves fell to my knuckles. In the water basin, I caught a reflection that looked, for the first time in weeks, like a person rather than a project.
I sat on the bed once more as I thought about her: the practical boots, the loosening braid.
The way she’d slid the tray toward me without comment.
The way she’d looked at the fire that wasn’t really a fire at all, but cinders.
I was supposed to resent her, I supposed.
She was obviously Arthur’s intended. Of that, I was fairly certain.
What other reason would she have for being here?
What was more, every feast she sat at his right hand, and she made him smile.
She touched his arm, and he didn’t pull away. And he’d told me he was courting her.
Because I hated him, I was meant to hate her too, wasn’t I? Especially if she would soon be queen and I’d remain exactly what I was: a prisoner.
I tried to hold onto that mantle of hate, but I found I couldn’t really wear it because the woman who occupied that chair beside him, who laughed at his side, who cut meat from his plate and touched his arm with casual intimacy…
that same woman had walked into a prisoner’s room with breakfast and her own clothing, and she’d given me the grace of not being watched while I ate.
Isolde of Corbenic deserved the place she occupied beside the king, even if I believed she was too good for him. Regardless, she deserved his attention, deserved the life she was building in the spaces between diplomatic visits and easy laughter.
The recognition sat in my chest, heavy and immovable: under different circumstances, in a different life, in the one where I hadn’t been sent to betray a king and hadn’t ended up in a cell and hadn’t passed through Galahad’s room like cloth through a mangle...
under those circumstances, Isolde was the kind of woman I would have wanted as a friend.