Every eye in the room was on me.
I kept my chin level. I didn’t scan the room the way I wanted to: systematically, the way Merlin had taught me to enter any space, taking note of exits and threats. Instead, I let my gazebe unfocused, which read as either composure or vacancy, and either was better than the truth, which was that the silence was its own kind of cruelty, and I was absorbing it one breath at a time.
The high table drew my eye.
I’d trained myself, over these weeks, to skim past Arthur in the same way you learn to look past a wound. You acknowledge it’s there, you route your attention around it, but you don’t poke it or examine it because nothing useful comes from that examination.
But I didn’t look past the woman beside him.
She sat at his right hand. Her lovely auburn hair was arranged in the way of someone whose beauty doesn’t require labor. It was loose, caught up in a style that looked both unplanned and yet still perfect. Green and gold, Corbenic’s colors, created a silk gown that was elegant without straining toward it. She wasn’t watching the hall or me. Instead, she was speaking to Arthur in a low voice, turned slightly toward him, and there was nothing in her posture that acknowledged the silence that had fallen over the room.
Arthur was listening to her, his eyes on her. And his mouth, at least the corner of it, was lifted. This wasn’t the smile he used on the court. And it wasn’t the cold expression of a king managing the performance of authority. It also wasn’t the particular smile he had before he said something that ended a man’s career or freedom. This was smaller and less constructed, candid. It was the kind of expression that happens before the face knows it’s being watched.
He gave it to her without appearing to even think about it.
I looked at the space between their shoulders: the slight angle of his body toward hers and the angle of hers toward him. I noticed the ease of it, the way two people sit when proximity is familiar rather than new. Clearly, Isolde of Corbenic had beengiven access to the man behind the crown. The real one, or whatever version of ‘real’ Arthur permitted.
I’d had that access once, or something close to it. And I’d earned it through months of deceit, a stolen name, and body. I felt my stomach drop when I watched Isolde’s hand rest lightly on his forearm, and I was instantly upset with myself. Angry with the fact that I was even noticing how it was the touch of someone who had touched him before and expected to do so again. And I was angry with myself for noticing how Arthur didn’t pull away, how he didn’t stiffen, but instead turned toward her marginally the way a man turns toward warmth without intending to.
She laughed at something he said. The laugh was warm and entirely unguarded, and it carried across the hall, settling into my awareness like an anvil dropped over my head.
The thing beneath my ribs wasn’t jealousy, and it wasn’t envy because jealousy and envy meant that I cared. And I didn’t care. Furthermore, jealousy required a claim, and I had no claim to Arthur, and I never had. Whatever I felt about Arthur Pendragon was an operational complication, a side effect of whatever strange attraction existed between us. It wasn’t anything that entitled me to feelings about this woman’s laugh.
So, I looked away, but the looking away took more effort than it should have. I filed that difficulty in the locked part of my mind where I put things I wasn’t ready to examine. Instead, I focused on the practical business in front of me: I was starving and had been from the moment I was given to Galahad’s custody, and there was food in this room. That was the only thing that mattered.
Arthur stood then and the hall, which had been watching me, shifted to watch him. The crown on his head caught the torchlight and glinted so sharply that I blinked against it.
“Guinevere.”
It was my name from his mouth. Not Lioran. Notthe prisonerorthe witch.My actual name, which he now used in a way that meant he understood that using someone’s name was also a way of possessing it, of possessing them.
He went on to announce, in words I barely registered, that I’d been granted the privilege of joining the court for the evening meal, that this was a demonstration of Camelot’s justice and mercy. A prisoner, he said, is not an animal. Thus, I was being fed, housed, and treated according to my station. And my station, he made abundantly clear, was no station at all. I sat at the court’s pleasure. I ate at his sufferance. And any knight who harmed me answered to him, just as any knight who aided me answered to him.
I wondered what he’d have to say about the harm I’d suffered at Galahad’s hands. Nothing, I imagined. Because if Arthur was nothing else, he was a hypocrite.
He sat.
His speech was beautifully done, both magnanimous and absolute simultaneously. He fed his enemies: how civilized, how just. Not only that, but he controlled everything touching those enemies: however complete, and however final. I was a trophy at the same time that I was a warning, dressed in gray and displayed at his sufferance, and the court absorbed all of it in the moment before conversations resumed at half volume with all attention now angled toward me.
It was then that I noticed Isolde was looking at me. Not with hostility. And not with the particular female appraisal I might have expected: those proprietary, assessing, and calculating gazes as if they were trying to determine a threat. Instead, she looked at me with curiosity. She appeared to be open, direct, and genuinely interested in what she was seeing, wearing the gaze of someone who’d just encountered a puzzle she wanted to understand rather than judge. Her eyes moved over mygray gown, my hollow cheeks, and my unbound hair without flinching. She was taking stock of me without cruelty, and I recognized in the quality of that attention something I hadn’t expected: competence. It was the look of a woman who didn’t miss things and also didn’t pretend to.
It was at that moment that I realized Isolde of Corbenic wasn’t stupid. She also wasn’t decorative like all the other ladies of the court. As to what she was to Arthur? I didn’t know and tried to convince myself that I didn’t care.
Our eyes held for three seconds. Then she turned back to Arthur and said something I couldn’t hear, and Arthur nodded.
They put me at the far end of the lowest table. Below the squires. Below the pages. Below the kitchen boys who ate at court only because they’d run out of room for them elsewhere. I sat, and I did so by myself. In fact, vacancy spread around me like it was a disease, people shifting down the bench by degrees, finding reasons to relocate, until I sat on an island of bare wood in the middle of a full hall.
But I didn’t care. Instead, I watched the serving trays come out from the kitchen corridor, watched the steam rise off them. I tracked one tray in particular: the one with the fowl, from the far end of the hall as it made its way toward me. And I did so with the focused attention I should have been giving to threat assessment, political intelligence, and the dozen other things Merlin’s training said I should have been doing in a room full of my enemies.
But all I could think about was that platter of roasted bird. Soon, it arrived, and when set in front of me, it was even more incredible. Root vegetables swam in gravy, dark and fragrant with something herbed. Bread came next, and this was real bread, not the dried hull that Galahad had been giving me. This bread was still warm, with a crust that gave slightly under myfingers. Next came a cup of watered ale that smelled faintly of honey at the rim.
My hands shook from the effort of not tearing into everything simultaneously and immediately. I forced myself to take three breaths, well aware of the fact that eating too fast after fasting made you sick, and that being sick in the Great Hall of Camelot in front of every knight who now wanted me dead was a complication I couldn’t afford.
I lasted about four seconds. Then my body overruled me entirely.
I tore into the bread at the same time that I pulled the bird apart with my fingers because a knife would slow me down, and there was no one at this end of the table to observe my manners anyway, and I didn’t care if there were. I stripped the meat from the bone. And I pressed the bread against the pooling gravy and put the whole soaked piece in my mouth at once. I drank the ale in three long swallows and set the cup down as I picked up the plate’s edge and drank the gravy directly because the spoon was in my other hand and the plate was closer.
My hands were still shaking, my jaw hurt from chewing, and my eyes burned with something I refused to name.
