“Manage it.” He repeated the words like they tasted wrong. “Galahad nearly—”
“—I know what Galahad nearly did.”
That stopped him. I watched him recalculate; he was fast for a man who led with his body, I’d give him that. He understood immediately that I’d just confirmed the shape of my knowledge without specifying anything more, and that the uncertainty was the point.
“There are forty men in his oratory... forty men who listen to him, who follow him,” I said. “You know this.”
He nodded. “Forty men who will be angry when he gets rebuked publicly.”
“Yes,” I said. “They will be angry, which is exactly why I need to understand them before Arthur decides to scatter them to the four winds.” I paused. “If tomorrow Galahad walks out of that council with another visible wound, those forty men stop being a faction with a disgraced leader and start being something else entirely. Something harder to read. Harder to use.”
Lance looked at me for a long moment.
“Use? You’re planning to exploit them,” he said.
I said nothing. I didn’t need to.
He turned away from me and crossed over to the table by his bed. He didn’t pick up the tankard that was sitting there. Instead, he just stood with his back to me, and I filed away the set of his shoulders, the quality of his silence. He was a man who was weighing something he couldn’t put down but also couldn’t carry.
“Tomorrow,” I said. “Stay quiet. If I need you, I’ll ask you directly. You’ll agree with whatever position I’ve taken. That’s all. Nothing complicated.”
He said nothing.
I took that as the answer it was and left.
-MORGAN-
The raven’s eye wasn’t like a human eye.
Everything it caught came back to me in hard lines and flat light: the training yard, the packed dirt, the pale winter sky hanging over Camelot like a held breath.
I was in my chair by the window at Dunhaven. My hands were folded in my lap. My body was still, the way it always went still when I sent myself out through the birds: slack-jawed, cooling, something that looked recently vacated. Vaelen had learned not to touch me when I was like this. It had taken him twice to learn that lesson, though.
The raven was perched on the gatehouse lip, feathers ruffled against the cold. Through its eyes, I watched the yard below.
Guinevere had walked out first.
Even through the bird’s indifferent gaze, I could see it: the way she moved that was so careful and yet also deliberate. Her shoulders were set too high and too still in the controlled posture of a person who’d learned that flinching invited attention. I couldn’t see the bruises clearly at this distance, but I didn’t need to. I’d already seen them.
I’d walked Galahad’s dreams twice now. The second time I’d come back and sat for an hour with my hands pressed flat against the cold stone floor just to feel something grounded and real. What lived in that man’s sleeping mind wasn’t what people expected from a saint. Nothing in there was clean.
Lance appeared at the far end of the yard.
I recognized him by the way he took up space. He didn’t walk so much as he simply arrived, with that quality certain men had of making a room reorganize itself around them. Arthur had it too, though Arthur’s version came with intent. Lance’s was just gravity that was both unconscious and habitual. He’d never had to think about it.
He stopped.
The raven tilted its head, and so the image tilted with it, the yard canting sideways for a moment before I corrected. I had to be careful about that because I was getting too absorbed, losing the distinction between where the bird ended and I began.
Lance was looking at her, but it was the type of look that said he was calculating something and despised the sum.
He crossed the yard.
I didn’t breathe. My body, sitting in the chair at Dunhaven, didn’t breathe. Whatever my lungs were doing was automatic and far away.
He stopped in front of her and said something. She said something back. I couldn’t hear through the raven: that was the limitation, always the limitation, the eyes without the ears, but I could read the line of her spine and the set of his jaw and the way his hand came up and stopped short of touching her face.
He’d seen them. The bruises. Whatever she’d tried to hide, whatever she’d arranged her expression to conceal, he’d seen them anyway.
