“I was hungry.”
He gave me a look that said he wasn’t happy with my response. “Saint Aldric fasted forty days at the temple gate. He denied the body so the spirit could stand guard. You lasted merely days and fell on that table like a creature without a soul.”
He moved to the small table, under which he kept the scourge laid neatly across the folded linen. He picked it up.
“Remove the gown.”
At this stage, I didn’t even care about what was coming. Instead, I just thought about my full stomach and how good it felt to no longer be starving. The stone floor was cold against my bare feet as I stood up. My fingers found the laces at the back of my neck, and I loosened the ties, then I let the gray wool fall from my shoulders.
“Fold it.” He didn’t look up. “Place it on the pallet.”
The specificity of it was the point. It wasn’t about folding the gown. It was about making me careful, making me deliberate, making me perform the small domestic courtesies of a well-ordered household in the sixty seconds before he hurt me. He wanted my hands to smooth the fabric. He wanted me to arrange the sleeves. He wanted me to set the gown down gently on his white wool blanket like a girl preparing for sleep in her own chambers.
I folded the gown, and my hands were steady. I set it on the bed. Then I turned and stood in the center of the room in nothing, and I waited.
The torchlight moved. Shadows climbed the stone walls and settled back down. Somewhere outside the narrow window, two guards were laughing about something. The sound was obscenely ordinary.
Galahad didn’t move immediately.
“The flesh indulged,” he said, “must be disciplined.”
He crossed the room slowly, and I kept my eyes on the far wall. There was a small crack in the mortar between two stones, shaped vaguely like a river delta, spreading and splitting, and I’d spent a great deal of time looking at it.
“The appetite fed must be starved back into submission.” His voice had that quality it got during the formal invocations, measured and resonant, the voice of a man performing a sacred rite. “But first, the contamination must be driven out. Drenath’s refinement. The burning away of weakness.”
I knew the phrase. I’d heard it enough. He moved behind me.
The river delta in the mortar branched into three distinct channels before the plaster swallowed them. I’d counted the branches eleven times across as many nights. It helped to count. It helped to find the small fixed things and hold onto them while the rest of the world became very loud.
I fixed my eyes on the crack in the wall.
“The body,” he said, “is not evil. Verath does not teach that it is evil. What is evil issubmissionto it. Allowing appetite to dictate action rather than the will. Tonight, you allowed your body to humiliate you in front of the entire court of Camelot. And because you are my ward, you not only humiliated yourself, but you humiliated me. Whatever perception of strength or dignity you might have preserved, your hunger stripped it from you publicly.”
I looked at him.
Something moved across his face, but it was gone before I could adequately categorize it. He stood, and with his back to me for a moment, I heard the quiet sound of the scourge being lifted.
“Kneel,” he said.
My stomach plummeted, but I knelt, knowing it was better than fighting him. When he was in these quiet, reflective moods, it was just best to do whatever he asked me to. So, I knelt, and as soon as I did, I felt it. The whip was light; the lashes were exact.
He came to stand behind me, and I heard his breathing, heard how it was elevated. He gathered my hair to one side, clearing my back, and his fingers stilled for one second at the nape of my neck, where my hair was the thickest.
“For the appetite indulged,” he whispered. “For the will surrendered.”
He was standing closer than the inspection required, and his breath moved against the back of my neck. It was warm, slightly ragged, and the small hairs along my skin rose up in disgust.
“The body that indulged,” he said very quietly, “must be reminded of its purpose. The flesh exists to serve the spirit. When the flesh forgets, the spirit must reassert dominion.”
His hand landed on my hip, his fingers curving forward over the crease where my hip met my thigh.
He turned me to face him, and his eyes dropped.
I watched them do it, watched them move across my collarbone, my breasts, and down to my stomach. The fasting had made me angular for weeks, until all that was left of me was concave planes and visible structure. One meal had changed that. Gently, barely, the way a breath of wind changes the surface of water. But his eyes stopped there.
He stared at my belly the way another man would stare at a plate of roast hare in the Great Hall. It was that same quality of hunger wearing the costume of disgust. Appetite dressed up ascondemnation because that was the only wardrobe his theology allowed.
“Your belly is full,” he said.
