The room was quiet around us, twenty pairs of wings holding still. I could hear the faint draft moving under the door.
Something crossed his face. Irritation, maybe? It was always so hard to tell with Galahad. He was like trying to read a blank wall.
He moved to his side of the room and put his back to the stone as he faced me, and the quality of his attention was nothing like the vigilance he’d kept before. Before, he’d watched me the way a guard watches a prisoner, but this was different.
Now he watched me the way you watch a threat you don’t know anything about, with fear deep in your eyes.
The candle on the table burned down by a finger’s width, but neither of us said anything, and the moths didn’t move. I was suddenly highly aware that whatever ground we’d been standing on before he’d opened that door, whatever careful, hostile, structured distance we’d built between us, it was now gone. The moths had dissolved it simply by existing, by arriving, by circling me, and refusing to even notice Galahad at all.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
-CORVIN-
On the third day of my imprisonment, I instituted the rule.
It would be fifteen minutes. That was how much time I gave myself. It was timed according to the beat of my own heart, which could drop to a steady pace of around fifty beats per minute. I’d done this back in Blackhollow, lying still in a trench as a raiding party marched overhead.
Fifteen minutes to think about Guin before I forced myself to think of something else. Usually, I failed because I mostly worried that Arthur had done something...permanentto her. Although I’d argued for the fact that keeping her alive made the most sense to him, the mind has a way of arguing with its own logic when you’re imprisoned with nothing more to do than argue with yourself.
Of course, Arthur didn’t want to keep us together in my cell. That would have been a reward, especially after he’d seen us together in the heat of passion. So he’d split us on purpose, immediately, before I’d gotten my bearings back. That wasn’t an accident. That was someone who understood the structure of what he was dealing with, someone who understood that twopeople who mattered to each other are two separate pressure points, and that a pressure point only works when you can apply it without the other person present to absorb the blow. He’d read the situation correctly.
My thoughts again turned to Guin, and gods, I wished more than ever before that I could hold her in my arms just one more time. No matter what happened to either of us, that was the one thing I focused on more than any other.
When my fifteen minutes were up, I thought about Kay.
He’d come to visit me again, bringing water I hadn’t asked for and information I didn’t want, and delivered both with the attentive care of a man who’d been waiting some time to have the right audience. Kay had always been that way: capable of patience that read as indifference until the moment he chose to spend it. I’d watched him dismantle men in a single sentence with exactly the smile he’d worn walking into my cell.
And even though I couldn’t stand Kay and I knew just what a snake he was, I found I looked forward to his visits because it was the only way I ever got any information about her.
She’s been moved, he’d said.Out of the dungeon. Into Galahad’s custody.
He’d watched my face while he relayed the news.
I gave him nothing. I was good at giving nothing, better than most, worse than some, but with Kay, there was an additional layer because Kay’s ability to read people meant he was always looking for the exact place the knife would do the most damage. So I gave him less than nothing. I gave him the face I used for receiving intelligence I’d already suspected.
He left before he could tell whether his information had landed.
Ithadlanded. But that wasn’t the useful part.
The useful part was this: Kay had come to get information from me. Whether Arthur had put him up to as much or it wasKay just trying to win favor was anyone’s guess. But it meant I was something that needed managing, which meant I was still a variable in the equation, which meant someone, Arthur or Kay himself or some calculation the two of them had made together, hadn’t yet decided what to do with me.
Undecided was better than decided. Undecided was still a gap, a question mark.
I set the subject of Kay down for a moment and focused on the guards’ rotation.
The man with the limp was approaching the turning point in the distant hallway. Forty-three steps. Every time he reached step number forty-one, he’d pause for three seconds to transfer his body weight off his damaged knee joint.
Even though my fifteen minutes were already up, I let myself have another three.
She was better in Galahad’s custody than she was in a dark, dank cell. That was the one thing I kept returning to because it was the only thought that brought me any joy. From what I knew of Galahad, I didn’t believe he was cruel. He was pious, and he was dull, but that was all I really knew of him. Even though we’d been Knights of the original Round Table together, I’d never sought out his company just as he’d never sought out mine.
It wasn’t a surprise that Arthur had picked Galahad. He was the only one who wouldn’t force himself on her, mainly because he would never undignify himself with the pleasures of the flesh.
Yet, Morgan had been correct when she’d said we all were essentially helpless to the call of water, to the call of the Lady of the Lake and Guinevere. And Galahad, when you stripped away his piousness, was just a man. A man spending most of his time with the most beautiful woman in Camelot...
My thoughts were interrupted when two of the guards appeared outside my cell. I was on my feet before the door finished opening. The taller one entered the cell and then movedbehind me. He was holding chains while the other held the door open, and neither of them spoke, which told me they’d been given specific instructions about engagement:Don’t talk to him. He’ll use it against you.
I’d given that same instruction myself, years ago, about other men. It was oddly flattering to hear it now.
