I bowed my head.
I will not look away.
The flames burned steadily. All sixteen of them, motionless now, throwing small yellow pools of light across the granite altar and the rough-hewn pews and the cold floor where I knelt.
I remained there until my knees grew numb. And then I stayed longer still.
There was no rush because the decision had been made, the way was known, and the knowledge gave me the peace of clear water that reflects perfectly and without blemish what lies before it.
I would be prepared. I already was.
-CORVIN-
Kay came at the end of the afternoon watch.
I heard him before I saw him, as I recognized that particular cadence of his walk, including the slight drag of his heel on the left, the way he never quite lifted his foot. I’d noticed it perhaps three weeks ago. In truth, I’d noted everything about everyone who came down these stairs because it was the only work available to me, and I wasn’t built for idleness.
Kay carried nothing with him this time, no games meant to trap me into commentary I preferred not to have. He sat on the low stool outside the bars and looked at me with an expression that was difficult to name. Regardless, I knew enough of Kay to know he’d come with something prepared, and he was taking his time opening it.
“Good news,” he said finally.
The warmth in his voice was constructed, and I kept my expression where it was as I waited. He gave me a broad smile as he related that Guinevere was no longer in Galahad’s custody. She was now inside her own bedchamber bordering the king’s. And in that bedchamber, there was a hearth and a fire, a bed with exquisite linens, and all the trappings of comfort. Kay said she was, by all accounts, better than she had been.
I asked what that meant.
He took a small breath, one that was almost imperceptible, the breath of a man who had been waiting for exactly that question, and he told me. Not all of it, I was sure, but enough of it. He mentioned the bruises and wounds that had been uncovered in the training yard, how Lance had attacked Galahad in front of witnesses. Kay relayed the information the way a man says something he knows will draw blood: carefully, watching the blade go in. What was more, there were rumors, Kay called them, rumors that Galahad had done more than just bruise her. There were rumors that he had raped her. Or that he’d tried. Kay delivered this information in the measured tone of a physician relaying a prognosis, watching my face the whole time.
I gave him nothing, just as I was trained to do.
It was the hardest thing I’d ever done.
Because what Kay had just told me, beneath the clinical language and the careful pacing, was that a man had put his hands on Guin. Not in combat. Not in the course of a fair fight between two people who had chosen to be there. No, he had puthis hands on a woman who was bound, who had been stripped of her power, who had nowhere to go and no one to call on. He’d done it and called it holy.
And I’d been forty feet below the ground, counting a guard’s footsteps.
Inside me was another situation altogether. Inside me, there was a war brewing as emotions battled against one another for supremacy. There was rage, first and foremost. And it was a rage that was so clean and absolute that it didn’t feel like emotion at all. And if he had, in fact, attempted (whether he’d succeeded or not) to force himself on her… On my Guin. On the woman whose safety I’d staked my name on, whose trust had been given to me at a cost I was only beginning to understand… I would tear him limb from limb.
If I could ever get the fuck out of this fucking cell.
I thought about the binding Mordred had placed on her. I thought about what it meant to be bound, to be stripped of every defense you had ever built, every instinct you had ever honed, every piece of yourself you had hardened into armor over a lifetime of needing armor. I thought about what it meant to be in that condition, in that room, with a man who believed his god had sanctioned him.
I thought about Guin bearing the abuse alone.
I had to breathe very carefully for a moment.
There was gratitude to Lance for delivering the justice Galahad was absolutely due. Though gratitude was perhaps too small a word for it. Lance had done what I couldn’t. He’d been there, and I hadn’t. He’d acted where I couldn’t. And while that absolutely ate at me, I couldn’t afford to resent him for it, though some animal part of me did, because it had been my place to be there. It had been my place, and I was here, underground, counting fucking steps.
“She mentioned you once,” Kay had continued and then he’d paused as he pretended to pick something off his tunic. “About three weeks ago.” He’d smoothed one hand down his knee. “From what I understand, she asked one of the guards about you. She hasn’t asked since.”
He’d stood then, leaving me with exactly what he’d planned to leave me with. He’d said he hoped this information was reassuring and then he’d said goodnight.
I’d watched him go.
I’d kept my expression exactly where it had been since the moment he’d sat down, and I kept it there until his footsteps reached the top of the stairs and the door at the end of the corridor closed behind him and the echo of it finished moving through the stone.
Then I sat very still as I took each piece of information and laid it out the way I would lay out intelligence: separate, ordered, and examined without the noise of what I wanted it all to mean.
The bruises.I had to sit with that word for a moment before I could move past it. Bruises. As if that were a clean, neutral thing. As if that word adequately described what had been done to her. Regardless of how the word made me feel, I believed that part to be true. I’d known something was wrong three weeks ago when Morgan’s cat had come, and the message it carried had been fragmented, half-formed, enough to understand that Guin was alive but not enough to understand what was being done to her. I’d built a picture from the sounds that moved through the walls, and I hadn’t liked the picture so I hadn’t let myself finish building it. I understood now that some part of me had known, and had chosen not to know, because knowing and being unable to act would have unmade me entirely.
