Well, I didn’t watch herentirely, anyway. But from the corner of my eye, I did keep a general awareness of her, simply because I couldn’t help it.
She and Percival found their rhythm, but she was rusty: her timing was off, the magic binding no doubt throwing her balance somewhere she hadn’t accounted for, but the foundation was still there, as were the instincts. You can suppress a soldier, but the body still knows where to go and what to do.
As she was protecting herself against a downward arc of Percival’s practice sword, her tunic caught on something or perhaps it gave at a seam that was already weakened. Regardless, the result was that the fabric split at her shoulder and peeled back along her left side.
And that was when I saw it.
A bruise that was purple-black and running the full length of her ribcage. It was the type of bruise that didn’t come from a fall or from a bad parry. No, this was the type that came from something sustained and intentional, a wound that had been laid down with patience and brute force.
I was already moving toward her before the thought completed itself, and I had no control over what I was doing. My legs had simply decided for me. Percival saw me coming and stepped back automatically, reading whatever was on my face. He dropped his sword at the same time that she turned and looked at me. At the expression on my face, she went very still.
The nervousness hit her eyes immediately, but I didn’t stop. Instead, I reached for her, saying nothing as I took the torn edge of her tunic and pulled. It took her perhaps a second to understand what I was doing and once she did, she fought me. Bringing both hands up, she attempted to twist away from my grasp, which only made her tunic rip harder and faster. She was sharp and fast; she still had the instincts of a warrior, but I had the reach, the strength, and I wasn’t asking for permission.
The fabric gave completely, and then I saw that it wasn’t just one bruise running along her side, but a map of them. They were all along her back, her upper arms, and down both of her sides. The array of bruises and welts was exactly as it had appeared in my dream, when Morgan had come to me and then offered a vision of Guinevere’s back.
It was difficult to put into words the rage that overcame me. I could only stand there, my chest heaving as I held the tattered remains of her tunic, and she stared up at me with panic in her eyes.
All I could think about was the fact that I knew her body, not in the way a man knows a woman he’s studied from a distance. No, I knew her body the way a man knows something he’s held in his hands repeatedly, something he’s mapped by feel and then, afterward, by the low light of a dying fire. I remembered the smoothness of her back under my palm and the particular way the skin at her waist gave when she breathed. I’d run my thumb along her ribs so many times and found nothing but the faint warmth of her, the clean, unmarked expanse of unmarred,beautiful skin, and I remembered thinking, in the scattered, half-formed way a man thinks when he’s not really thinking, that she was flawless. Not soft-flawless, not the pampered smoothness of a court woman who’d never known labor. This was a different type of flawless altogether; it was a flawlessness of something that’s been tested and survived without being marked by it.
She had never had a single flaw in her porcelain skin, but now that same skin was stretched taut, revealing a canvas of deliberate damage. The yellow-green color underneath the bright blue and purple told me how long the damage had been sitting there, while the new purple sat on top of it, still angry, still wet-looking in the cold morning light. The welts on her lower back were spaced in such a way that made my stomach turn because they weren’t random. They’d been applied with thought, with patience, the way you’d apply something you meant to last.
And then the fingerprints. Four and a thumb, pressed so deep into her upper arm that the bruising had bloomed out from each point of contact. I knew the span of a man’s hand; I’d spent thirty-five years learning what a man’s hands could do to another man.
But not to a woman. Not until now, and not to this woman.
Something moved through me then that I didn’t immediately recognize because it wasn’t anything I’d felt before. I knew rage: I’d felt how clean and functional rage could be when it was useful, when it sharpened your aim and narrowed your thinking. I’d felt grief also, though I tended not to call it that. And I’d felt the cold, purposeful fury of a man who intends to settle something.
This was none of those things, and yet it was all of them at once. It was the feeling of standing in front of a cathedral after someone has put an axe through the windows. It was the feeling of something sacred and irreplaceable being ruined onpurpose, and for only the satisfaction of the ruin. And layered beneath it, quieter but no less devastating, was something else entirely: shame. The sick, marrow-deep shame of a man who had failed at the only thing that mattered. I had told myself it was righteousness that kept me away from her. But the truth was more along the lines that I’d built a wall out of my own wounded honor and stood behind it like it meant something… while she’d been in that room. Alone and unable to protect herself. All I could think about was the fact that I’d let it happen.
I was the best swordsman in all of Logres. I’d held the line at sieges where lesser men broke and ran. I’d killed men who were larger than me with my bare hands and never once questioned whether I was capable of protecting what needed protecting.
But I hadn’t protected her.
My hand was still holding the torn edge of her tunic, and she’d gone completely still under my grip. Not compliant; she wasn’t a woman who went compliant, but she was still in the way a creature goes still when it understands that struggling is beside the point. Her eyes were fixed on mine, and her jaw was set hard. In her gaze was a demand that I not pity her. And I didn’t pity her. I raged for her. I raged at myself. I raged at the weeks I’d spent turning my back on her and telling myself it was justice.
She hadn’t said a fucking word about this to anyone. Of course, she hadn’t. Because she’d known there wouldn’t have been a point, not when she was a prisoner, an enemy of the crown, and he... wasn’t.
He.
He’d done this to her.
My grip on the torn fabric tightened until my knuckles went white. I made myself release it. I made myself breathe.
I released the ripped fabric slowly but brought my hand to her upper arm, though I wasn’t sure why. The gesture was useless. It changed nothing. But I couldn’t seem to stop myselffrom touching her, from putting my hand as gently as I knew how against the same arm that bore those fingerprints, as if I could somehow override them. As if my hands on her now could mean something different thanhishands on her then.
I vaguely noticed that Percival was standing three feet back, and he was very quiet, the practice sword hanging at his side. He wasn’t looking at her body, but I was sure he’d seen the bruising. I was sure everyone in the training yard had by now because the sounds of sparring had completely died, and now the entire place was void of any sound at all. Percival was looking at my face, which told me my face was doing something I wasn’t able to control.
I held her in place, and she just stood there. Neither of us spoke. Her expression was one that said she hadn’t wanted me to discover her secret. I was certain my expression was one that said now that I had discovered her secret, something monumental was about to happen.
I’d been in enough campaigns to know the difference between the damage of combat and the damage of captivity. I’d interrogated prisoners. I’d pulled men out of sieges who’d been worked over for information. I knew what deliberate looked like, and I knew what sustained looked like.
This was both.
Finally, the shock left me and I was able to think. “You never told me.”
Her breathing hitched, the fear and anger in her eyes shifting. It wasn’t gone, necessarily, but it had moved as if she’d been braced for a different kind of attention and had gotten something else entirely and didn’t know what to do with it.
“I was… dead to you.”
