CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
-LANCE-
The dungeon cell smelled like wet stone and old blood. Some of it was mine.
I lay on my back on the narrow cot and stared at the ceiling and breathed through my teeth because breathing through my nose wasn’t an option any longer.
Something in my face had shifted when Arthur hit me.
Something broken? Maybe. Or maybe something adjacent to broken, close enough that the difference didn’t matter.
My ribs were the real problem. Every inhale was a negotiation. Breathe in too deeply and the pain spiked white behind my eyes. Breathe too shallowly and my vision grayed at the edges. I’d found a middle distance, and I was holding to it the way a man holds to a rope above water.
Corvin hadn’t said a fucking word to me. And I hadn’t said anything to him.
He was in the cell next to mine, and his back was to me, facing the wall.
I could tell by the quality of his stillness, though, that he wasn’t asleep.
Corvin of Blackhollow didn’t sleep like that: rigid, deliberate, like a man choosing unconsciousness and failing at it.
Besides, I didn’t imagine he could sleep with all the light that was flooding his cell, purposeful light that was meant to keep him from accessing his shadow magic.
Yes, he was definitely awake, but he was choosing silence, and I wasn’t going to be the one to break it.
I didn’t have anything to say anyway.
Instead, I watched the candle on the ledge burn low. I had nothing else to do except replay that moment in the training yard, and I’d already done that enough times that the details had worn smooth, like a stone turned over too many times.
The look in Arthur’s eyes. Then the crack of his fist against my jaw. The way the ground came up to meet me with a kind of inevitability and the heavy thudding sound of my body hitting the dirt.
I tasted blood again and ran my tongue along the split in my lip, feeling the dried crust crack open at the pressure.
But my busted lip, my swollen shut eye, and my cracked ribs were the least of it.
What kept replaying in my mind was the fact that she’d sat in Galahad’s custody while I’d held that wall I’d put between us.
I’d held the stupid fucking thing through feasts, training yards, and a dozen moments where the decent thing would have been to simply...
I stopped.
There was no use in the accounting. The ledger was what it was. And I would be the one to suffer because I’d put my pride above what I’d known was right and true: that Guinevere wasn’t the enemy I’d pretended she was.
I don’t know if I slept or just lost track of time. But I was vaguely aware that the dark of night was now upon me, and I’d had a fever dream about the sword. Excalibur.
In my dream or whatever it was, I’d seen it, the sword.
It had been jutting from the stone in the middle of the lake, and I’d watched her approach it.
I’d told myself there was no way she’d be able to pull it, and I’d been so certain.
She was a woman playing at war, a spy playing at virtue, and the sword would know the difference the way the sword always knew.
I’d awakened before the dream version of Guinevere had a chance to pull it.
But I didn’t need the dream to know the truth. I’d watched her pull the sword, watched it with my own eyes. It hadn’t mattered that she was Merlin’s daughter or that she was a spy. The sword knew she was the right one because it always knew. And it knew who wasn’t right.
Then she’d touched it, and the light had come up through the stone like something waking.
Not sudden, but gradual, the way dawn comes, the way you don’t notice the dark lifting until you realize you can see everything.
I’d watched her hand close on the hilt and watched the sword respond and felt the hair on my arms rise.
The sword hadn’t chosen her because she was strong.
It hadn’t chosen her because she was worthy in the way I’d been taught to measure worthiness, through battle records, oaths sworn, or years of service.
It had chosen her the way a river finds the sea.
It had chosen her because it was simply inevitable that it would.
The sword knows who should rule.
The thought arrived fully formed, and I lay there on the cot with cracked ribs, one eye swollen shut, and blood drying on my chin and let it sit in me.
Excalibur had chosen Arthur when Arthur was a very different man to the man he was now.
When he was the golden boy pulling a kingdom out of chaos, when Merlin stood at his shoulder and the Round Table meant something, when the word justice in Arthur’s mouth hadn’t yet become a euphemism for compliance.
I knew what I’d seen, and I knew what it felt like to watch a piece of ancient metal recognize someone.
I’d built my entire life on Arthur’s reign.
Not on Arthur: I’d loved Arthur, I’d have died for Arthur, but on the institution of him, on the idea that the right man had the right sword and was building the right kingdom, and that my oath to him was an oath to something real, to something worth bleeding for.
Lying here, I was much less certain. The thought didn’t feel like betrayal, and that was the strange part. No, it felt much more like exactly what it was: something cold and true.
And I didn’t know what to do with it. What was more, I didn’t know what I could do, lying here in a dungeon with broken ribs, no rank, and a future I couldn’t see the shape of.
A future that was, to all intents and purposes, going to be a short one.
Thoughts of Excalibur, Guinevere, and Arthur now had nowhere to go.
They just sat in my chest and took up room alongside everything else that hurt.
The memory came back to me then.
Not the sword. Not the politics. Not the arithmetic of kingdoms and bloodlines and who had the right to hold what. Just that small folded square of vellum that I’d pulled from the dead soldier’s gauntlet when the bodies had been returned from Eldenvale. Gods, that felt like a lifetime ago.
I’d unfolded the sheet of vellum in the field with cold hands and found a child’s face drawn in charcoal.
Rough lines, unpracticed, it was the kind of drawing you keep because you love the person who drew it.
A daughter, I’d assumed: someone small enough that the proportions were slightly off, the eyes too large and the chin too slight, but none of that had mattered because the love in the lines was more legible than any formal portrait I’d ever seen hung in a palace hall.
I’d stood there in the mud with that folded square in my hand and felt the full weight of what it meant: another man’s war, another man’s child, another man’s dead.
And I’d taken that feeling to her cell that fateful day. I’d gone to her and laid those deaths at her feet like evidence, like an accusation, because she’d been the enemy and those men had died at her hands and I’d needed her to carry the weight of it.
“They had names,” I’d told her. Or something like that. Something that was meant to wound.
She’d looked at me and hadn’t flinched, and I’d hated her for it.
I lay on the cot now and stared at the ceiling and thought about that drawing.
I thought about the chain of it: that soldier to that vellum square to her cell to the sword rising through the water to Galahad’s custody to the training yard and the look on her face when she’d protected my secret in front of Arthur,
when she’d had every reason in the world to hand me over and had instead taken the question on her own jaw and said nothing.
I could see the whole length of it now. All of it, from beginning to end.
And what I couldn’t do was pretend that those dead soldiers and the woman who’d protected me were separate things that lived in separate rooms.
They weren’t. They were part of the same thing, the same long line.
And she was threaded through all of it, and the drawing was still out there somewhere, probably still folded and still tucked into a dead man’s gauntlet, a man who was rotting quietly into the earth.
I didn’t conclude anything from that.
I just lay there and held it.
The candle burned down to nothing and the cell went dark, and I kept holding it in the black, the whole contradictory weight of it, the dead soldier and the drawing and the child’s face in charcoal and her voice, steady and quiet,
telling Arthur she wouldn’t give him the name of the man who had taken her innocence from her.
I didn’t try to make it mean one thing or another.
I just let it be what it was.
It was then that the door to my cell opened quietly.
I didn’t move because moving cost too much.
Instead, I just lay there and listened to the footsteps, which were light and unhurried.
Not a guard’s walk. Guards had a particular rhythm, one that was purposeful and slightly bored. This was something softer.
Percival sat down on the floor beside my cot, and I was surprised to see him.
He didn’t say anything, just folded himself down onto the cold stone and rested his back against the wall as he looked at me with those blue eyes that always seemed to be watching something slightly beyond the visible world.
“You look like hell,” he finally said.
“I’m sure I don’t look half as bad as I feel,” I managed, but the managing cost me.
“That’s why I came. So I could help you.”
I knew what that meant. Healing.
“No.” He didn’t leave, and I found myself looking at the ceiling again. “I don’t want you to take it... from me.”
“Lance...”
“I don’t want—”
“—for fuck’s sake,” Corvin piped up then. “Let him heal you. If not for you, then do it for me so I don’t have to keep hearing you groaning every time you fucking move.”
I frowned over at him, and he just shook his head as he looked over his shoulder at me.
“Fine,” I said to Percival, who nodded and approached me.
“Thank the fucking gods,” Corvin finished.
Percival’s hands were warm; that was the first thing I noticed. They were warm in a way that had nothing to do with body heat and something to do with his own healing power. It was a power that came up through his palms and moved into me like water finding its level.
He started at my ribs.