He shook his head, then moved to the table and adjusted one of the candles a quarter inch to the left. “The comfort of the body is a distraction from the work ahead.”
“What work?”
He turned and looked at me fully for the first time since I’d entered the room. His eyes were gray but not the gray of Lance’s. Galahad’s were lighter, clear, and as cold as ice.
“Healing,” he said. “Of a kind.”
-GUIN-
Galahad’s religion, called The Vow of the Boundless, wasn’t like any religion I’d ever heard of. As he explained it (for over an hour), it was an ancient polytheistic faith predating both Arthur’s reign and any other organized institution. It was one of the oldest surviving religions in Logres.
The faith centered on a pantheon of seven gods called the Boundless; they were vast, elemental forces that existed before the world took shape, and on the principle that the mortal body is a sacred vessel that must be kept ritually pure to serve as a conduit for divine will. Galahad had been very clear in his beliefs that only men were worthy of magic. Women, in his estimation (and probably that of his gods), were incapable of possessing magic, owing to the fact that they were inferior to men in all ways.
“Then what do you make of women who do possess magic?” I’d naturally asked, after deciding not to be offended by his very limited view of my sex.
He looked at me with that same deadpan expression and replied, “Women cannot possess magic. Those who appear to do so do not. They possess demons who present as magic.”
It was at that point that I realized I probably wasn’t going to enjoy my imprisonment with Galahad as my warden.
But back to the Vow of the Boundless; many of its teachings were genuinely beautiful: compassion, discipline, stewardship of the natural world, and caring for the weak. But like any faith, it contained tenets that could be twisted by zealots (and by the end of the conversation, I was fairly sure Galahad could be considered exactly that: a zealot). Galahad had gravitatedtoward the most extreme, ascetic sect of the religion: the Order of the Scourge.
I was interested to learn that Camelot not only had The Royal Chapel, which was the primary chapel of the castle that served the common faith of Logres, but there was a secondary chapel that Galahad had claimed for the Vow of the Boundless, and this was the place he visited every day to be closer to his gods.
The first prayer came an hour after sundown. For this prayer, Galahad directed it to one of the gods named Verath, whom Galahad explained represented stability, obligation, and the weight of responsibility. Galahad then kneeled before the biggest religious image, which was that of a man dressed in a white robe (whom I assumed was Verath). Galahad’s hands were extended with his palms open, and he looked like a statue himself, one carved in polished marble. Before he began his prayer, he turned to look at me in an impatient and expectant way.
I knelt as he faced forward once more.
“I am rooted. I am bound. I do not bend to wind or want,” he started. “The ground beneath me holds because I hold it. My duty is my breath. My charge is my blood. Where I am planted, I remain, until the Boundless call me home to deeper earth.” Then he was silent for a moment as he bent his head to the ground and closed his eyes. I just watched him. Then he sat up once more and stared up at the icon of Verath before him. “I have been given a charge, to act as warden to a witch.”
“I’m not a witch,” I started, but Galahad’s hiss made me stop talking entirely. Instead, I watched as he grew quiet for a few seconds before he began ardently nodding as if he could hear something I couldn’t. “I listen when you say, Great Verath, that I must fulfill this charge absolutely.”
The stone bit into my kneecaps, and my entire body was aching from Mordred’s binding. Even so, I settled my weight as best I could and stared at the icon’s blank face and hoped the prayer would be a short one.
It wasn’t.
Instead, Galahad droned on for at least another hour. And his voice when he prayed was different from his speaking voice. It was warmer and had a sort of texture to it, a grain. It was as though he’d taken the smooth control he used for everything else and set it deliberately aside.
“The witch carries the taint of wild magic, Verath, the corruption of unnatural power flowing through a vessel never consecrated to receive it. She has deceived righteous men. She has wielded the darkness against the innocent. Her body has been made into a weapon against virtue, and she has not repented of this.”
“I haven’t done any of those things,” I insisted.
Galahad turned around and gave me the look of death, so I stopped talking. But soon my knees were aching so much that I had to stand up.
“I ask not for her condemnation but her reformation. I ask that the fire of your righteousness burn away what is corrupt in her and leave only what is salvageable. Guide my hand, Verath. Purify my sight. Let me see her not as she is but as she might become.”
He paused, and the silence had weight. And when he turned around to face me, that weight became a physical thing. He immediately stood, as if he didn’t like it that I was looking down at him.
“You will soon learn,” he began in a soft tone. “That if you fight me, things will be very difficult for you. But if you lend yourself to the truth, to the purification of the evil within you, our time together will be much more... easy on you.”
I took that as the warning it absolutely was and weighed my options: I was basically at Galahad’s mercy. But there would be no mercy if I didn’t do as I was told and pray to gods I didn’t believe in as I listened to a litany of all my evils. I figured it was a bet worth taking because I’d rather be in a clean bed chamber instead of a cold, wet, and rodent-infested dungeon. What was more, Galahad and his gods couldn’t reach my mind. My thoughts would always be my own, regardless of what he forced me to say or do.
“Where I am planted, I remain,” he said, then he looked back at me.
“Where I am planted, I remain,” I said.
CHAPTER TWENTY
-GUIN-
