He inclined his head, picked up his vellum, and he left.
I stayed at the table after he was gone.
The rebellion was running a clean campaign, clean enough that someone had planned it. Clearly, this hadn’t been improvised, nor had it been stumbled into effectiveness. No, it had been designed from the beginning to bleed me slowly. The convoy routes had been chosen deliberately, the maintenance materials taken because someone understood what they sustained.
This was from someone who knew Camelot’s operational patterns. My thoughts then turned to the bedrock anomaly beneath the northern junction that Mordred had just mentioned. I had no idea what he even meant but hadn’t been in the mood to hear a long explanation that would probably still make little sense to me.
Outside, in the courtyard, I could hear the training yard beginning its morning noise. There was the slashing of steel against steel and boot leather on packed earth. Someone was calling a correction.
The ward-stones degraded in two months if the materials remained gone.
I needed to know what was in the bedrock before then.
-LANCE-
The cold air of the corridor hit me as I walked out.
I’d known, when I opened my mouth, what it would cost me. I’d done a rapid and uncomfortable calculation in the seconds before I spoke and arrived at the same answer I always arrived at, which was that I was going to speak anyway, and the cost was going to come due regardless. Every word I said in that room was another thread of the picture Kay was building, another line of color, another detail rendered more sharply.
She matters to you when she shouldn’t.Here is the proof again.
I knew this, but I’d said what I’d said anyway.
Outside, the sky was pale and cold, the kind of morning that felt like something overdue. My breath came out in a thin white cloud, and I watched it disperse.
There were very few things in my life I’d wanted that I hadn’t eventually taken. The shape of this particular wanting was different, maybe because it was more inconvenient, more poorly timed, more thoroughly against my interests in every direction I turned it. But the wanting itself was the same animal it had always been: impatient and uninterested in my arguments against it.
Kay would use what I’d said today in the council meeting against me. Of course he would. That was what Kay did with the things he found: he held them at the exact angle where they caught the light and became undeniable.
My hands were cold inside my gloves. I pulled them tighter and walked toward the training yard because there was nothing else to be done with the morning, and because standing still made the calculation feel worse.
I would speak up for her again, even though it probably wasn’t the smartest thing to do. But how could I not when Galahad was absolutely starving her, and no one seemed to care? Well, no one except Percival, Tristan, and Gareth. They’d sided with me when I’d brought the subject up. Perhaps the next time I did, there would be four voices on my side instead of three.
CHAPTER THIRTY-NINE
-GUIN-
I was back in the training yard once more, awaiting the appearance of the king who had requested my company.
As to why he continued to train me, I wasn’t sure. I figured he wanted information from me and had decided the easiest way to get that information was to put me in surroundings that were most comfortable for me. Begrudgingly, I had to agree that the training yard was the one place that felt like home.
I’d been given practice leathers that didn’t fit: the shoulders sat wrong, and the belt was cinched too high. I’d rolled the cuffs three times, but they were already unrolling. I was fussing with the left one when Tristan crossed the yard toward me.
I stopped fussing and looked up, noticing the way he moved. His movements seemed to characterize him as a whole, how he was unhurried, like he’d already decided the destination wasn’t going anywhere, so why should he rush? A practice sword hung loose in one of his hands, and his dark curls were pulled back at the nape of his neck. That was when I noticed he had a small scar at the corner of his jaw that I hadn’t noticed before.
“Partner with me,” he said.
“I’m awaiting the king.”
He looked around. “Unless he’s become invisible, I daresay he isn’t here.”
That earned him a smile, one he returned.
“I’ll partner with you until he arrives.”
I looked past him at the other knights and the few who had turned to watch. Galahad stood near the wall with his arms folded, and his expression was unreadable.
“The attention you’ve been paying me lately isn’t going to make you popular,” I said as I turned to face Tristan once more.
