I slept in fragments.
The pallet was thin, and the stone sucked the warmth from me regardless of which way I lay. I had pain in my hip, and I had pain in my shoulder. Not to mention that Mordred’s binding felt like a stone I’d swallowed: it didn’t hurt any longer, but it reminded me of the absence of something that belonged there. It reminded me of my magic that I could no longer call on.
I must have fallen asleep after at least an hour but before I knew it, Galahad was waking me.
“It is Orath’s Hour. It is time,” he said.
The candles had burned partway down. The room was dark except for them and the thin gray line of window that told me nothing about the hour.
I knelt.
“When the vessel is cracked, corruption enters through the fracture,” Galahad intoned. “The woman who wields unnatural fire carries the crack within her womb, for it is through the womb that abomination enters the world. Her magic is the corruption’s breath. Her body is its door through which the demon enters.”
I listened to my body described as the entry point for spiritual contamination, but this time I didn’t get upset about it. I just let it enter one ear and leave the other. Then I imitated Galahad’s closing prayer, and I was done.
I slept again but was awakened maybe two hours later when I was told it was now Illara’s Hour. I knelt again, listened to a litany of my offenses again, repeated the closing prayer, and was done. Again.
By the third waking, my thoughts had gone thin, not with the clean sharpness of exhaustion that passes with a breath of cold air, but something more: like the threads pulling out of cloth worn past its usefulness. I knelt, but the stone no longer registered as painful, mainly because I was numb against it. I said the closing prayer and couldn’t have repeated whatever I’d agreed to.
I knew what this was.
Merlin had described it once, obliquely, in the context of something else: how sustained wakefulness undoes the structure of a person’s mind. The way the self becomes negotiable after enough hours without sleep. Merlin had been speaking about interrogation, but the point was still the same.
Whether Galahad knew this about what he was doing, I couldn’t say. His face during the third waking was the same as it had been during the first and second: composed, earnest, no trace of satisfaction in it. He seemed like he’d simply accepted the fact that prayer at this hour was required. Not only that, but it was normal. He was already on his knees before I’d managed to sit up.
Between the third waking and the fourth, I dropped into something shallow that wasn’t quite sleep. My body had stopped shivering from the perpetual cold in the room, and I was fairly sure it was just as numb as my knees. The candles had burned tostubs, and they’d been replaced, but I hadn’t heard Galahad do it. Regardless, the icons still watched from the walls.
This time, he hadn’t awakened me. I’d surfaced on my own, drawn up by a sound I couldn’t place. It was rhythmic and strangely wet, punctuated by sharp exhales through the nose: controlled, deliberate, the kind of breathing you learn on purpose.
I lay still and listened.
It came again. And again. The specific sound of leather on skin isn’t a sound you mistake for anything else once you’ve identified it. I’d heard it before: Merlin’s training had included enough unpleasant lessons that I’d learned to place sounds without having to see their sources.
I turned my head slowly. Galahad was kneeling near the window, his back to me, his tunic stripped off his shoulders. The single candle left burning threw his shadow long and broken across the floor. His arm moved, and the scourge caught the light on its downswing: a braided leather whip ending with numerous iron hooks.
“Strip from me what is unworthy, Drenath. Let the fire find the weakness and burn it clean. I offer this flesh: this vessel, this burden: to the refining flame. What remains when the burning ends is Yours. What was lost was never mine.”
He didn’t know I was awake.
That was the thing that held me still for three full breaths. Then I was captured by the complete absence of performance in what he was doing to himself. This wasn’t a demonstration because he believed I was still asleep. His lips moved, and I caught fragments of what he was saying in the same desperate register as his prayers. But now his voice was quieter, more intimate, like something said in a dream. His breathing stayed controlled through each stroke, but at the edges of the control was something that wasn’t control at all.
I sat up.
I didn’t know why I did, but I was suddenly overcome with the need to stop him from harming himself. It didn’t make any sense, of course, because he was my jailer. Not to mention how he’d described my body to his gods as a vessel of corruption and how he’d structured the night specifically to dismantle me.
None of that was the thing I registered when I crossed the room, though. All I could see were the rivulets of blood that were trailing down his back, which was already a canvas of scars.
“You’re bleeding.” I reached for the scourge or his shoulder or some middle point between them. “Let me —”
Galahad moved so fast I couldn’t even track it. One moment I was reaching, and the next the wall was at my back, and my shoulder was ringing from the impact, and then he’d jumped a foot or so away with his hands raised as though he was warding off something that had lunged at him.
“Donot.” His voice shook. “Do not touch me... ever.”
His face in the candlelight was nothing like I’d ever seen before. The usual calm was gone, something raw now underneath it, something he was working to contain even as I watched. His chest heaved, and the scourge hung at his side, dripping with his blood. I could see the welts across the tops of his shoulders, bright and wet, and it was all I could do to look away from them and back at his face.
“I was trying to help,” I started.
“I don’t want nor need your help.” The words came out wrecked as he turned away from me. “Go back to your pallet.”
