“Through the Vow of the Boundless,” he began, “a person may be brought to repentance. The corruption does not have to be permanent, and the vessel can be cleansed. The path is one of discipline, of prayer, of stripping away the false self that sin has built until the true person underneath is able to receive truth.” He spoke with a confidence that wasn’t arrogance so much as it was certainty in a process he understood better than anyone else in the room. “The prisoner is making improvement. She participates in the Hours. She hasn’t resisted instruction as she did in the first days.”
He paused.
“I want to be clear that this is not a quick answer. It is a path, and paths require time. The man who abandons a path because it has not ended yet has not failed the path. He has simply failed his own patience.”
No one at the table said anything to that.
“Trust in the process,” Galahad said. “I do, and I have already seen results.”
“Is part of her penance starving her?” Lance didn’t move when he asked the question. That was the tell. Most men leaned forward when they were angry, or they pushed back from the table, or they did something with their hands. Lance always went still. He’d learned it from combat, from years of standing in front of men who were trying to read him, and he’d carried the stillness into every other room he’d ever occupied.
Yesss,the dragon hissed.Our mate does not do well in her captivity. She must be released to us.
The question dropped into the silence as every head at the table turned toward him. Lance didn’t bother to look at any of them, though. He kept his gaze on Galahad, and what was behind his eyes was anger that had been carefully contained.
Galahad met his gaze without any visible change in his expression. Lance pressed on before Galahad could answer.
“She wolfed her food at dinner,” he said. “Both times I’ve seen her at the table. Not quickly, but as if she was ravenous. Like a starved animal.” He paused. “And she’s thinner than she was three weeks ago. Noticeably thinner.” He looked around the table then, not at me, but at the others. “Tell me none of you noticed.”
Percival’s jaw tightened, and his hand went flat against the table in the way it did when he was absorbing something he’d rather not be absorbing. “I have noticed,” he admitted and Lance nodded at him.
Gawain’s gaze dropped to the table’s surface.
“She is definitely thinner,” Tristan noted, and Gareth nodded, murmuring something along the same lines.
Agravaine watched Lance with the attention of a man who was noting something useful. Galahad, meanwhile, waited for the room to settle. He didn’t look discomfited. In fact, he looked the way he always looked, as though he existed at a slight remove from the emotional weather everyone else was caught in.
“Ritual fasting,” he said, “is among the most ancient disciplines of the Vow. The Order of the Scourge prescribes three fasting days per week for all practitioners.” He folded his hands on the table. “The prisoner is not being punished through hunger. She is beingcleansedby it. The flesh, when overfed, grows comfortable, and comfort breeds attachment to the earthly self. Fasting breaks that attachment. It makes the vessel porous to truth.” He paused. “When a woman has carried corruption for as long as the prisoner has, the correction must go deep enough to reach the root of it. Hunger is one of the tools that reaches that depth.”
The table was quiet.
-LANCE-
Arthur sat at the head of the Round Table with his hands flat on the surface and his jaw set, and the candlelight made the hollows of his face look carved.
Kay was sitting three seats down from me, but I didn’t look at him directly. I didn’t need to. His presence had its own gravity, a low-grade pressure at the edge of my awareness like a splinter working its way deeper.
Arthur began speaking again about supply lines and troop movements, the rebellion’s last raid. He laid the findings out in detail, and the room listened because it always listened to the king.
Arthur’s eyes moved around the table, reading the room. He did this constantly: inventoried faces, calculated resistance, measured the temperature of a conversation the way another man might test bathwater.
I kept my expression neutral when the conversation turned to Guinevere once more, which served me because I didn’t feel as if I’d made my point fully earlier.
“She’s barely functional,” I said once there was quiet in the room.
My own voice surprised me slightly. Not the words, I’d been holding them since I’d first sat down, but the evenness of them. How calm I sounded.
Arthur looked at me.
“She’s been under Galahad’s supervision for over a fortnight,” I continued. “And—”
“—Galahad’s methods are his own concern,” Arthur interrupted, clearly uninterested in furthering this subject.
“His methods are producing a prisoner who can’t eat without shaking.”
“She’s a weapon,” Arthur said, and there was something final in his tone that was meant to close the subject. “Weapons require maintenance. If she needs time to recover before she’s useful, that’s a logistical consideration. It’s not sentiment.”
“I’m not speaking from sentiment,” I argued. “I’m speaking from practicality. A broken instrument performs poorly.”
