I looked at him. “For me.”
He nodded. “You are the one who must decide what is to be done with her. And that decision will say something about your soul.” He said the words without accusation and without malice. Just those clear gray eyes and that steady voice. “I pray you make the decision wisely.”
I thanked him, then I turned and walked back out into the corridor. The cold air off the stones hit the back of my neck, and I was overcome with the feeling that he wasn’t telling me falsehoods. Or, at the very least, he believed his own words.
I supposed believing your own words wasn’t the same thing as those words actually being true, but I had to wonder if they were. He’d given me a framework that was clean and theological, in which Guinevere wasn’t a woman who’d been wronged but a vessel that had been lost. And that was a problem because now every instinct I had that pushed against that framework would look like spiritual weakness.
I kept walking.
I didn’t know what had happened in that room, but I knew the cut of a man who’d prepared his testimony, and Galahad had definitely prepared his. He’d even admitted that he’d known I’d be coming with questions. It only made sense that he would prepare his side of things.
The question was whether or not his side was the honest side.
-GUIN-
I’d been up since before the light changed.
It was the kind of wakefulness that comes when your body understands something your mind is still refusing to accept, and the two of them sit in disagreement until dawn makes the argument moot.
I’d moved to the chair by the window sometime in the small hours and stayed there. The bed was fine, beyond fine, really. As this was the room adjacent to the king’s, it looked it. The linens smelled of lavender and something that might have been cedar, and the chamber was warm in a way Galahad’s had never been, but none of it helped. I still sat upright with my back straight and my hands in my lap as I watched the light change over the courtyard below.
I’d always imagined that Kay was my foremost enemy, but spending the time I had with Galahad had caused me to rethink that. I couldn’t imagine any person worse than Galahad, owing to his own hypocrisy. And it was hypocrisy he couldn’t even see because he was so brainwashed by his own beliefs. Had I to choose between rooming with Kay and returning to Galahad once more, I would have chosen Kay. At least, I knew what to expect from him. He would want my body, but he wouldn’t try to mark his claim on my soul the way Galahad had and did.
Mordred’s new binding sat on me like wet wool, dense and airless, pressing on something beneath my physical self. I’d spent the night in a specific kind of pain that was difficult to characterize. It wasn’t quite burning, and not quite crushing, but more like being slowly convinced by something enormous thatthe thing I’d believed myself to be was negotiable. The magic hadn’t liked it.Ihadn’t liked it. By morning, I’d stopped trying to breathe around it and simply breathed through it.
Mordred had asked me how I’d broken through his original binding, and I’d answered honestly when I’d said I didn’t know. Luckily, he’d left it at that. But I hadn’t. I wanted to understand how I’d been bound all this time, and yet at the moment when Galahad was going to penetrate me, something inside me had revolted and broken through Mordred’s magic like it was a thin sheet of paper.
But those thoughts only chased themselves because I couldn’t find an answer for the how and the why. So my thoughts, instead, moved to Tristan and, more specifically, to the way he’d come into Galahad’s chamber, and the chaos had simply stopped, not because he’d commanded it (and not because I’d commanded it) but just... well, justbecause. I didn’t understand him. I didn’t understand why he’d come, why he’d stayed, and why he’d put himself between me and whatever came next. One thing I did know for sure: he’d answer for it. He’d answer for acting on his own, without first getting permission from his king. And he’d answer for coming to my aid in the first place, when every other person had been convinced that I was the perpetrator against Galahad. Yes, Tristan would answer for his kindness towards me. Arthur would see to that because Arthur saw to everything. Even the fact that I was now sitting in a lavender-scented room was its own kind of statement about the way Arthur saw to things, and I hadn’t finished deciding what it meant.
Thoughts of Tristan led me to thoughts of Lance. I remembered the look on his face: that split second before his expression closed. I remembered the war of it showing in his features, the torn quality of a man who wanted to come to me and also wanted to believe the worst of what I’d done becausebelieving the worst was simpler. I understood the logic: I was the enemy. I’d been the enemy since the night they’d caught me at the tavern with Corvin’s arms around me, and whatever had followed since hadn’t shifted the fundamental equation.
And that thought process led me to a realization: no one would care what my side of the story was. I knew this the way I knew the binding hurt and that the guards outside my door wouldn’t come to my aid if I called them. To them, I was a witch. Not only a witch, but I was the witch who had attacked one of their own and left him bleeding.
Arthur came in the late morning.
He didn’t come with any fanfare either: no guards, no knights, and no Mordred. He came in alone and closed the door behind him, and I registered what that meant: that this wasn’t an official proceeding. And it also wasn’t a verdict. No, it was a question.
I hadn’t decided which was better.
He crossed the room, and I watched him, trying to figure out what it was he wanted and whether he’d admitted it to himself yet. The first thing I noticed was that he looked tired.
He sat down, and then he told me he’d heard Galahad’s side of things, and now he wanted to hear mine. That surprised me: that he’d want to hear my side.
Your version,he called it. The words snagged in me.
A version implied two things of roughly equal weight, to be held up and compared, adjudicated by someone positioned above them both. I understood how power worked. I also understood that I began any such comparison at a deficit so structural that naming it was almost not worth the energy: I was the prisoner. My magic was bound. Everything I’d done since arriving in Camelot had been filtered through a frame in which I was the dangerous one, the enemy, the vessel for something that needed containing.
I asked him what Galahad had said, what Galahad’s side of things had been.
Arthur told me, and as he did, I listened with my face very still as he prattled on about prayer, ministry, Galahad’s duty, and finally, his hand laid on me inblessing. Then he said something about the demon surfacing.
The distance between Galahad’s version of the truth and the real truth was vast. But what was even larger? The specific cold fury of being rewritten in someone else’s language and then handed a pen and told to disprove it.
I didn’t give Arthur the full truth. I’d made that decision before he’d even walked through the door. Why didn’t I? Because even if Arthur believed me, believed that Galahad had tried to force himself on me and I’d defended myself, it wouldn’t matter. It wouldn’t matter because Arthur couldn’t afford to let it matter. Taking the word of his prisoner over that of his Round Table Knight? No, it wouldn’t happen. What was more, if the truth came out, I believed most of the men in this castle would think it a shame that Galahad hadn’t succeeded.
The full truth was that Galahad had put his hands on me with a clear intention, and the word for that intention existed in every language I knew. Yet, I wasn’t going to say it to a king who’d given me no reason whatsoever to believe he would use that truth in my favor. That word, once spoken, belonged to whoever heard it, and I wasn’t ready to give it away.
So I gave him the perimeter instead.
