CHAPTER FIFTY #4
He nodded like that satisfied him. Then he pulled the chair out from the table, turned it backward, and sat with his arms folded across the top rail, chin resting on his wrists. His blue eyes found mine and stayed there.
“How are you faring?”
“I’m okay.”
The silence between us stretched as outside, somewhere across the courtyard, metal rang against metal in a single clumsy note; then there was nothing.
“Percival.”
“Mm.”
“You didn’t walk across Camelot in the dark to look at my new quarters.”
He lifted his head from his wrists and nodded, giving me a look that had gone quieter and thinner, the way a candle flame goes when there’s not enough air to keep it alive.
“Stay in your bedchamber tomorrow if you can help it,” he said. “Don’t go to court in the morning.”
I looked at him. “You know I have little say in where I go or what I do.”
He nodded as if he’d expected that response. “Feign illness if you can.”
“Why?”
“Don’t go to the training yard either,” he added. “Just... stay here. Read something. Sleep. Whatever you like.”
“What’s happening tomorrow?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Percival.”
“I genuinely don’t know,” he insisted, and the particular flatness in his voice told me that not only was it true, but it bothered him considerably.
“I’ve been dreaming of things that make little sense to my rational mind,” he explained, shaking his head.
“But in those dreams, there is always the feeling that you should be in hiding. I can’t explain it more than that,” he continued, knowing I would ask more than he could tell me.
“But that isn’t all. I have heard... conversation that stopped when I walked into a room. Two of the younger guards from Galahad’s former retinue left chapel three nights ago looking...”
He paused and chose the next word carefully. “Illuminated.”
“I don’t understand your meaning.”
He unfolded himself from the chair and stood. “When people come out of things looking illuminated, it means someone has told them they are instruments of something larger than themselves. And that is almost always the beginning of someone else getting hurt, and I worry that someone else is you.”
I crossed to the window and noticed not for the first time that the glass was old and slightly warped and the courtyard below appeared wavy and buckled, but I could see it enough. Percival came to stand beside me, not close enough to crowd me, but simply looked out at the courtyard.
“When Galahad is angry,” he said quietly, “he breaks things, as you know. Controlled breaks that are precise, like a surgeon’s scalpel. You can predict it, work around it, wait for it to pass.” He paused. “When Galahad is quiet—”
“—then he’s planning.”
Percival looked at me and nodded.
“I know,” I said.
Below, a figure emerged from the shadow of the Great Hall’s eastern arcade. He moved without hurry, and it was that unhurried quality that made me realize it was Galahad below us. The way he moved, as if he didn’t have a care in the world, had always been one of the things I’d hated about him.
Now he crossed the courtyard in a straight line toward the chapel, and his white-gold hair seemed to reflect the moonlight.
His posture was perfect, just as it always was.
You would never guess that the knight had been reprimanded, humiliated in front of the other knights and, truly, the whole court.
Almost as if he’d picked up on my thought, he stopped walking. Then, in the middle of the courtyard, twenty feet below my window, he looked up.
Our eyes met, even as I knew that was an impossibility because the warped glass didn’t allow for eyes to meet. But, regardless, Galahad still stood there, looking up at my window, where I was sure he could make out the shape of the figure standing behind the window, looking down at him.
I didn’t step back. Some stubborn thing in my chest wouldn’t allow me, so I stood there in the warped glass, and we looked at each other across the cold evening air and the space between us.
Then he turned and continued toward the chapel. I stood at the window long after the dark had swallowed him.
“Guin.” Percival’s voice was quiet. “Come away from the window.”
I didn’t move immediately. The courtyard below had settled back into its usual evening: torches burning at the gates, the fountain running, two men in cloaks talking near the stable doors. Ordinary. The picture of ordinary.
I came away from the window.
The bread was still on the table. I picked it up and tore off a piece and ate it standing up, which was the only way I knew how to eat anymore, like every meal might be interrupted, like sitting down committed you to something.
“I’ll stay in tomorrow,” I said. “As best I’m able.”
Percival nodded. He didn’t say anything more, though he also didn’t look relieved. He just nodded like a man marking something in a ledger he wished he didn’t have to keep.
“I’ll come back in the morning,” he said. “Early.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know.” A pause. “I want to.”
“You’re a good friend.”
“I’m not a friend.”
I nodded because I understood. We might have been friends, or something closest to it, when I was Lioran, but we weren’t friends any longer, not after who and what I was. Not after everything I’d done.
“Whatever you are,” I tried again. “I’m grateful for you. And to you.”
He left, and I listened to his footsteps go quiet down the corridor. All the while, the brazier crackled, and the bread sat in my hand, half eaten. Outside the warped glass, Camelot settled into its nighttime patterns: knights in pairs, torchlight, the fountain going on and on in the dark.
I finished the bread.
Then I dragged the chair across the room, wedged it under the door handle, sat on the edge of the mattress, and stared at the door as I waited for the kind of quiet that meant everyone in Camelot was finally asleep.
It took a long time.