He nodded once, then he walked toward the eastern gate.
I stood in the middle of the empty yard with morning light across the stones and the ghost of his arm still warm against my chest, and watched him go. The guard who was meant to return me to Galahad’s chambers was already moving toward me, but I couldn’t say I even cared.
Instead, my mind was on Arthur. He was the enemy. I knew that. And yet... yet the draw between us, the pull I’d felt that he’d felt too...
I didn’t know what to do with it.
-GUIN-
The Great Hall was already full when the guard and I arrived.
The guard opened the door, stood aside, and I walked in. Every head didn’t turn at once. It was more like a wave. The people nearest the door noticed me first, and then the ones behind them, their collective attention moving through the room in a slow ripple. Soon that ripple reached the far end of the room where the knights sat at the high table, and even a few of them glanced over with the practiced disinterest of men who wanted to look like they weren’t looking.
I’d learned to walk through it. Pick a point at the far end of the room and move toward it without rushing, without hesitating, without doing anything that could be read as either defiance or submission. The walk itself was the performance, and I’d gotten better at it. Or so I thought.
The servants’ end of the table was half-empty. It always was at this hour: the kitchen staff ate in shifts, and the ones who’d already finished had gone back to work. The remaining seats were empty because no one was going to fill them.
Not next to me, anyway.
I sat. A girl came by with bread, and I took a piece before she could think better of leaving it. A boy followed with the soupladle, and I held out my bowl without making eye contact, which was the fastest way to get served.
The soup was thin, but it was hot. I ate, but this time I tried to employ a little more decorum than last time because I remembered what awaited me if I was too demonstrative in my hunger.
Around me, the hall continued its own life. Two serving women at the far end argued about something in low voices. A dog worked its way under the table and found my feet and settled there, which I chose to take as a kindness. The fire in the central hearth had gotten high, and the nearest torches along the wall were unnecessary, their flames small and pale in comparison.
I tore the bread and began to eat it as someone sat down across from me.
I looked up and I caught dark curly hair, olive skin, and a face that belonged in a painting of a sea voyage rather than a drafty Great Hall. Tristan. He was looking at the bread basket in the center of the table with genuine interest, like he’d only just noticed it was there.
He was, by any measure, exactly where he wasn’t supposed to be. I knew it, he knew it, we both knew it.
I stared at him, frowning.
He didn’t seem to notice, or if he did, he chose not to. Instead, he picked up the tankard in front of him, considered the ale, took a sip, and set it back down with the careful expression of a man recalibrating his expectations.
“The ale is worse than last week,” he said. Not to me specifically, possibly to the table, even though we were the only ones sitting here.
I waited for the rest of it: the conversation that I was sure would follow: questions about my crimes, about Merlin and Caer Gwyll, about Lioran, or what I was doing here. Something.
Instead, he reached toward the bread basket and stopped, looking at me directly for the first time.
“Would you mind passing that?”
I looked at him and then I looked at the basket, which was closer to him than to me by at least a hand’s width.
“It’s right there,” I said.
“It is,” he agreed. “But you’re still closer.”
I wasn’t, but I passed it to him anyway. My fingers grazed the side of his hand when he took the basket from me, and the cold hit me like stepping into a river in January. Not cool. Not the chill of a drafty room or a man who’d come in from outside. He was cold the way stone is cold when it’s been underground. Cold the way things are cold when they’re no longer alive.
I pulled my hand back without even realizing it.
He didn’t seem to notice. Instead, he broke off a piece of bread with the focused pleasure of a man who’d earned his meal, then spread it with the thin butter and ate half of it.
“The weather’s been strange,” he continued. “Too warm for this late in the season. The horses don’t know what to make of it.”
“Why are you so freezing cold?”
