The words came out wrong, though. They were too thick.
“The flesh, fed. The beast, satisfied.”
His hand moved from my hip to my stomach. His fingers spread across the slight curve of it, pressing gently, and I kept my hands at my sides, my face neutral and my eyes on the far wall past his ear while every nerve I possessed screamed at me to step back.
His thumb traced a line below my navel, and his hand slid even lower.
I drove my nails into the center of my palm. The crescent bite of it was precise and clarifying. I thought about the location of his hand, the pressure of his fingers, the way his breathing had changed from controlled to ragged in the space of thirty seconds.
His fingers found the crease of my inner thigh and traveled inward. There was nothing tentative about his touch. No, this was purely deliberate. It was the path his imagination had worn smooth enough that his body followed it without hesitation. When he pushed his finger further against my flesh, his breathing broke apart. His entire body was shaking in a fine, continuous tremor like a man holding a heavy weight at the end of his reach. The binding in my blood roared.
I felt his fingers enter me, and my magic hit the cage of the binding, the reverberations traveling up through my vision in pulses of white. Somewhere very deep in my chest, something threw itself against the bars with enough force to blur my sight for one terrible second.
Flood the room with your magic and drown him!The thought railed at me. But I knew better. As much as I might want to draw on my powers to destroy him, I couldn’t. I was bound. And if I tried to fight him, I’d lose. No, the better move was tojust wait until the thinking part of him took over, as it always did.
Almost as if reading my mind, Galahad pulled away.
The withdrawal was a full-body recoil, and he stumbled backward three steps, his raised hand out before him like it was a foreign object that had somehow become attached to him at the wrist. He stared at his own fingers, which had just been inside me.
The horror on his face was genuine.
That was the part that cost me something I hadn’t budgeted. The horror was completely genuine: not performed, not calculated, not the strategic expression of a man managing a room. He looked at his own hand with the expression of a man who’d just found a wolf wearing his skin, who’d only now understood the wolf had been there all along.
He couldn’t look at me. His eyes, instead, moved to the wall.
“The corruption—” He started but then fumbled his words and swallowed hard. He tried again. “You projected... the Book warns that the vessel breathes outward, that the contaminated... the purification is—”
I watched the mask of the pious and devout reassemble. It was like watching someone reconstruct a shattered plate: the pieces didn’t quite line up, and the cracks still showed.
“The purification is incomplete.” The liturgical register was quickly returning but still unsteady at the edges. “We will fast tomorrow. Both of us. Aethon to Illara. No food. No water. The flesh must be reminded of its proper station.”
There it was.
My meal, the one hour of relief after days, would be paid for with a full day of starvation. His hand between my legs would be converted, through the alchemy of his theology, into an affliction that originated inmybody and had spread outward through the corrupted air I exhaled. An affliction that had landed in hisinnocent palm entirely against his will. And therefore, my body would bear the consequence.
The logic was complete. In fact, it was airtight. And it was also the most obscene thing I’d heard in twenty-three years of living, and I’d grown up believing magic was an abomination.
He left for the chapel, and I was beyond relieved to see him go.
CHAPTER THIRTY-TWO
-LANCE-
The candle was on the table. I hadn’t lit it.
I sat on the edge of the bed in the dark and told myself it was because I was tired. I’d trained hard earlier in the day, and my shoulders ached from the weight of the poleaxe. Not only that, but my knuckles had split during the last bout, and dried blood had cracked into the creases of my fingers. In truth, I was only now noticing it, in the shred of moonlight that was flitting through the window.
My hands were shaking again. I wasn’t sure when they’d started up. Perhaps the moment I’d seen her in the training yard with Arthur, when Agravaine had said what he had?
I pressed them flat against my thighs and felt them tremble there against the cloth, but I didn’t look down at them. Looking at them would only draw more attention to the fact that I was losing control of myself. And I couldn’t afford to lose control.
It had been days, maybe even weeks of the same: discipline in everything that mattered, including my morning drills, weapon rotations, and the slow systematic dismantling of anything that complicated my loyalty to the crown. I’d been rigorous, and I’d been thorough. I’d taken the image of her face in the dungeon, her voice, and the set of her jaw when she lookedat me without flinching after I’d told her she was dead to me, and I’d placed it behind a wall the same way I placed pain behind a wall during battle. It was something acknowledged, then something sealed away. And the reasons were never far from my conviction: she was a spy, and she was a traitor. Not only that, but she’d lied about everything from the beginning to the end, and the end was Eldenvale burning and twelve of my men in the ground.
How many times had I told myself the same? So many, I’d now lost count. Either way, shewasdead to me. Just as I’d told her. I’d looked at her through the bars of her cell, and I’d spoken the words clearly, and I’d meant them.
Fucking dammit, I’d meant them!
But the wall didn’t account for the hollows in her cheeks.
