Of course, I was aware of the stares. I could feel them without looking. They were expressions of half disgust and half satisfaction, the court confirming its assumptions about Merlin’s daughter. The witch ate like an animal. Of course, she did because that’s exactly what she was: an animal. It was all the evidence they needed.
Let them watch. I didn’t give a fuck.
A second plate arrived, which was a surprise. A servant set it down without meeting my eyes as I recognized it for what it was: an act of mercy so quiet I nearly missed it.
I didn’t look up. There was no reason to. Servants moved through the hall like water finding the low places, following thelines of least resistance between tables, chairs, and extended arms. My attention had narrowed to the radius of my own plate, my own cup, the particular problem of making my hands slow down before my stomach registered the consequences of not slowing down.
The servant set the plate down and withdrew.
And something snagged.
Not her face. I hadn’t looked at her face. It was the plate itself: the specific placement of it, the edge aligned too precisely with mine, closer than a servant’s efficiency required. The rim of her sleeve had caught something as she withdrew, a fold of cloth, and the withdrawal had been fractionally slower than the movement warranted. No one else would have noticed because it was nothing. Or, at least, it had looked like nothing.
I kept eating.
I didn’t look up. I didn’t change the rhythm of my jaw or the angle of my shoulders. I reached for the bread with my right hand the way I’d been reaching for bread for the last ten minutes, with slightly too much urgency, and under the cover of that movement, my left hand found the edge of the new plate.
There. Tucked against the underside of the rim was a small fold of fabric, a piece of linen no larger than my thumbnail, tied twice at the center. Two knots. I knew the language without having to think about it. The thinking had been done years ago, drilled until it went somewhere below conscious access.
I palmed it without looking at it. Then I reached for the servant’s sleeve in my peripheral vision, wanting to put a face to the contact, wanting something to carry back to whatever was left of my operational mind.
But she was already gone. I scanned the hall the way I’d been taught: not by moving my eyes, but by moving my gaze behind eyes that appeared still. Following the exits, the corridors, the shadows between the pillars. But she was nowhere to beseen. Whoever she was, she’d known how to move through a room without becoming memorable. She’d known how to make contact and then stop existing.
I ate the rest of the fowl. I stripped the second bone clean and set it on the edge of the plate with the others. Then I soaked the bread through the last of the gravy, and I ate that too, but I didn’t taste any of it.
The piece of linen was against the inside of my wrist, tucked beneath the cuff of the gray gown, held there by my own pulse.
It didn’t change my situation. I was still sitting at the lowest table in a hall full of people who would happily watch me burn. My magic was still bound, my hands still faintly trembling from weeks of insufficient food. None of that had changed.
But what my situationmeanthad changed. I wasn’t a dropped stone falling through darkness with nothing beneath me. Someone had their eyes on where I was going.
I scraped the plate clean. Then I picked up the last piece of bread and ate it in two bites. I drank the remainder of the ale to the bottom of the cup. Then I set the cup down with the particular care of someone who wasn’t going to let her hands shake in this room, not now, not in front of all of them.
Then I straightened, and I looked up.
Arthur was watching me and not with the open stare of the court, who were watching me the way you’d watch a dog that got into the food while you’re trying to decide whether to be offended or amused. His gaze was level, still and wholly separate from the room around him, Isolde at his right hand, the torchlight working its angles across the crown, all of it. He was watching me with an expression I couldn’t decode, and I’d spent months learning to decode his expressions.
I held his gaze for two seconds and in that two seconds I made sure my back was straight, and my chin was held uphigh. I looked away first, back at my empty plate, as I sat there, clutching the little piece of folded linen.
And once my stomach felt as if it had been pushed past the category of ‘full,’ I very carefully untied the little piece of fabric and found within it one single raven’s feather, as dark as night and as shiny as a blade. I clutched that raven’s feather so hard because I knew what it meant. Morgan. She was somehow here, and she was keeping watch over me. For the first time in a long time, I felt safer.
-GUIN-
Galahad walked me back to his room in silence.
His expression was composed, as though he were working through something with the patience he applied to all things. I’d learned to read the quality of his silences, and this one had an edge to it.
“Sit.”
I sat on the cold stone floor.
Galahad stood with his back to me, but he didn’t say anything right away. His hands were clasped behind him, thumbs hooked, head slightly bowed. He was still in his court clothes of silver thread on white wool. They were the Boundless colors, the kind of dress that saidI’m always performing the correct version of myself.
“You ate like a beast.” The words were all flat. “I watched you tear flesh from bone with your bare hands. I watched you drink from the plate like a dog at a trough. The entire court saw the demon in you tonight, the appetite, the greed, the flesh demanding to be served.”
I said nothing because this wasn’t something that required a response.
“Without grace. Without the invocation that consecrates the meal and its consumption.” His gray eyes were steady, certain, but somewhere underneath that certainty was something he was trying very hard to keep controlled. “You ate as though the body’s appetite was the only authority.”
