“You will submit—”
“—You don’t have any right to do that to me.” It was easier to say than I thought it would be.
“Yes, I do.” He stepped toward me with the scourge in hand, and his face didn’t change even a little, which was the most frightening part about it. “The king put you in my care to cleanse you of sin. But after all your praying, you have not been cleansed yet, nor are you even close to it. Your demon is stronger than I imagined. And it’s still there because your body is not inhospitable to it. Tonight, that will change.”
“Don’t touch me!”
He didn’t. Instead, he came for me.
I threw a punch. A real one, the way Corvin had taught me. There was weight behind it because I pivoted from the hip. Myfist caught Galahad across the jaw hard enough that his head snapped sideways, and I felt the blow in my knuckles.
He stopped and touched his jaw, and when he did, there was real surprise in his gaze. Then he just looked at me. When he moved this time, he was faster than he looked. He caught my wrist before I could swing again, used my own momentum against me, and then I was facing the wall with my arm wrenched up behind my back and his weight pinning me there.
I screamed at the magic that was still inside me. Tore at it the way I had every day since Mordred had bound it. But the binding held. It always held. There was nothing there to be called: no current, no cold, no answer from the water in the air around me. Just silence where my power used to live.
“Stop.” Galahad’s voice was close to my ear. And his tone was quiet. Almost kind. “You will only hurt yourself.”
“Get off me—”
“—the demon dislikes pain as much as its host.” He stepped back but kept hold of my arm, walking me forward until I stumbled against his cot and had to grab it to stay upright. “That is the mercy in this. One flesh, one suffering. One purification.”
“There’s nothing to fucking purify—”
The first strike landed across my shoulders, and the sound it made was worse than the pain. The pain came a half-second later, bright and specific, and I bit down on whatever noise was trying to come out of my throat.
“By pain the corruption is named,” he said. The prayer had taken him again, as had that smoothed-out voice. “By suffering the unclean is made visible.”
He pulled at the back of my tunic. I felt the laces give.
“Don’t—”
The fabric fell. The cold air of the room hit my skin, my knuckles going white as I stared at the wall. I kept my breathing even because I wouldn’t give him the sound. I refused.
The second strike was lower than the first, and that was when I heard his breathing change. It was also when I understood something I wished I didn’t. He wasn’t doing thisdespitethe fact that it disturbed him. He was doing it purely because it disturbed him. Whatever he’d purged from himself, whatever he’d flagellated, fasted, and prayed out of his own flesh, it was right here, close to the surface, alive and watching.
The scourge landed again.
I counted the candles reflected in the dark window glass. Three. The shadows they threw were long. Outside, someone in the courtyard laughed at something: a guard, ordinary and oblivious, not twenty feet below us.
I thought about Corvin in the dungeon. I thought about the water in the well at the center of the courtyard and how I could feel its shape now, even bound as I was, even silenced. It felt like a dull, distant ache. I thought about Merlin’s voice telling me:survive first. Everything else comes after.
Galahad said something else from Drenath’s prayer, but I’d stopped hearing the words. Instead, I counted the candles, and I survived.
-KAY-
As soon as I walked into the solar and saw Arthur, I realized he was restless, or the beast within him was restless.
I’d sensed as much in the walls. Not literally, of course; I was no Percival who dealt in mysticism or some other such guff. I simply had forty years’ worth of experience reading the frequency of this particular castle, sensing how sound traveledthrough its walls, and how the guards held themselves according to what they’d heard inside the rooms they were guarding.
Arthur sat behind his writing table. But he wasn’t writing. The candles were lit, but the documents in front of him were untouched. Arthur didn’t wear his crown here. That alone marked this room as different from every other room in Camelot. Here he was allowed to be other than what he was.
He looked up.
“Kay.”
“Arthur.”
I shut the door behind me softly.
