They all touch her.
I pressed two fingers against the bridge of my nose.
Outside, the morning light moved across the stones and lit nothing.
CHAPTERFORTY-EIGHT
-KAY-
The first blow landed before anyone knew it was coming.
That was the thing about Lance. He didn’t telegraph. Most men, even good ones, gave you a half-second of intention before they moved. It might just be a shift in the shoulders or a tightening around the jaw, but Lance gave you nothing. One moment he was standing at the edge of the yard with his arms crossed, and the next Galahad was on the ground with blood coming out of his severely broken nose.
I hadn’t moved.
There’s a certain type of man who rushes forward when violence breaks out. Such is the peacemaker type of man, someone who has good instincts but a poor survival rate. I have never been that kind of man. And that was the reason I stayed where I was, my back against the cold stone of the yard’s outer wall, and I watched as Lance hauled Galahad up by the collar and hit him again.
The yard erupted then, and squires scattered. Two of the younger guards had started forward but then thought better ofit. Percival had stood very still with his arms at his sides. Tristan was the one who had taken a half-step toward the girl.
The girl.
She’d just stood there in the middle of it all, which was where she always seemed to end up without appearing to try. Her arms had been at her sides, and she hadn’t flinched exactly, but she wasn’t watching either.
I noted the bruises. Galahad’s work, presumably. He’d been thorough about it.
When Lance hit him a third time, Galahad went down properly and didn’t come back up. There was a sound from the assembled men at that, not cheering, of course; no, this was something lower and more complicated. It was the sound men made when something they’d all been privately thinking got said out loud.
Arthur arrived at a run, which was unusual enough to be significant. He never ran, but seeing your First Knight attacking the most pious of the knights would encourage any king to run, I supposed. Regardless, Arthur had crossed the yard in a fury and grabbed Lance by the arm, and I could see, even from where I’d stood, that his grip was iron. Lance allowed himself to be pulled. He didn’t resist. Instead, he’d looked down at Galahad where he lay on the ground, and Lance’s expression was that of a man who’d done exactly what he’d intended to do and was now waiting to see what it would cost him.
Galahad was already being helped to his feet by two of the guards. His face was a ruin, blood running down the front of that immaculate white surcoat. He was looking at the girl.
She was looking at the ground.
Arthur said something low and sharp to Lance and walked him out of the yard. The crowd began to dissolve then, men finding reasons to be elsewhere. Servants evaporated. Within two minutes the yard had gone from a spectacle to an ordinarystretch of cold flagstone with a few puddles of blood darkening the gaps between the stones.
I remained where I was.
The girl stood alone for a moment. A long moment. Then she turned, and I got a clean look at her face before she composed it again.
There it was.
She looked like a woman who had just been reminded that other people’s choices could reach across a room and land on her without her consent. She looked like a woman who was taking stock.
I knew that look. I’d worn it often enough.
Galahad was being steered toward the infirmary by the guards, but he kept looking back over his shoulder at her. There was something in his face that had curdled past obsession into something more dangerous. He was certainly a man who believed he was righteous, and being publicly humiliated was one of the least predictable things in the world. I’d seen it happen before. It tended not to end cleanly.
She turned and walked toward the corridor, accompanied by both Percival and Tristan, who, it seemed, were now her maidservants. Her steps were steady. Whatever was happening behind her eyes, her body had learned to keep its own counsel.
I let her go.
When she passed within twenty feet of me, she didn’t see me. People rarely saw me when I didn’t want them to. It was one of the few advantages of being the man everyone had already decided to stop looking at.
She was thinner than she’d been. Galahad’s version of hospitality had left its mark upon her in ways that weren’t just superficial. The bruising would heal. The other things were harder to measure.
I pushed off the wall.
She’d arrived here as a variable. That was how I’d initially categorized her: an unknown quantity that Arthur didn’t quite know what to do with. A prisoner with an inconvenient effect on all the men who came into contact with her. She was a problem to be managed.
