“The king,” I agreed. “The king protects her and by protecting her, he protects the demon. And now it is up to us to protect the king and, in so doing, to protect the people of Logres against an evil that would see them all dead.” I paused. “An evil that would see all ofusdead.”
I walked to the side table where I had left the Purging Texts. The binding was cracked from years of handling, not mine alone, of course. These passages had been read by generations of the faithful. The truth was that I did not need the book, and I had not needed it for a very long time. But there was power in holding it, for people believed what they could see.
I opened it to the passage I had marked for this hour.
“Where darkness takes root in the seat of power, the faithful must not wait for the seat to speak. The seat has already spoken. Its silence is its testimony.” I closed the book.“The king was told the truth about the demon, for I reported what I had witnessed: the demon’s magic breaking through Mordred’s binding. He experienced the terrible cold for himself. But when I told him of the demoness in our midst, he removed the witch from my care and gave her a bed chamber of herown.” The word landed flat and strange, the way a wrong note does. “Now she eats the same food that feeds the other knights. She trains in his yard, and she breathes his air.”
Calogrenant made a small sound. Not a word, just air leaving him, but it was telling, all the same.
“Brother,” I said, and he looked up. His eyes were wet. “What you saw was real. What you felt in that corridor: that cold that went beneath the skin: that was your soul recognizing what your mind had not yet named. The Boundless gave you that instinct.”
“It was fear,” he said. His voice cracked halfway through it.
“Yes,” I said. “And faith is what you do with fear.”
I set the book down and folded my hands together.
“Tomorrow, I will invoke the Trial of Purity during the morning court.”
The silence that followed had weight.
Bonney spoke first. “The king will refuse it.”
“He may try,” I said as I shook my head. “But the ancient right of trial cannot be refused without confession. It is written in the Burning Laws, which predate Arthur’s reign by three centuries. Even though he does not practice the Vow of the Boundless, he cannot erase what is written in his own book of laws without erasing the legitimacy of every law that followed it.” I paused. “He knows this.”
“So he accepts the trial,” Lionel said slowly. He was working it through. Good. I needed men who were capable of advanced thought.
“He will accept the trial because he will have no other choice,” I said. “The witch will then be brought forward. Lord Mordred will be called to administer the testing that will decide what she harbors within her.” I looked at each of them again. “But we do not require such a test, do we?”
They all shook their heads, but their expressions revealed their confusion, so I continued. “No, we do not require it, for we know what she harbors within herself.” They began to nod. “She will not live to receive that test from Lord Mordred.”
Another silence. Longer this time.
“You mean to kill her,” Bonney said, though the tone of his voice wasn’t one of accusation but more a man squaring himself to a fact, trying to understand it.
“I mean to end the demon,” I answered. “Cleanly and fully, before the king can intervene and before Mordred can wrap his tests in procedure and delay. The witch will be brought forward in open court, in the sight of every lord, knight, and servant in that hall, and I will perform the Rite of Severance. It will be witnessed. It will be lawful. It will be done, and the kingdom will be saved.”
“He’ll hang us all,” Calogrenant said, shaking his head.
“He will try,” I said again. I let the repetition do its work. “And every man in that hall will have watched a confirmed witch destroyed before their eyes by men invoking ancient holy law. Arthur is a king who has survived because he understands optics, and that means he understands that he cannot execute four knights of the Boundless for performing a sanctioned rite. Not now. Not when our own numbers are growing by the day.”
I had thought about this for a long time. I did not speak of things I had not considered from every angle.
Lionel uncrossed his arms slowly, like a man setting down something heavy.
“Where do you need us?” he asked.
I told them, and I was specific. I gave them positions, timing, the exact moment when we would need to act: not before she was brought forward to the center of the hall, not after I had spoken the first line of the rite, but the moment between, the threshold moment, when the law had been invoked and the court had no choice but to witness what happened next.
Bonney asked three questions, and they were good questions. I answered each of them with patience.
Calogrenant said nothing more. But when I finished, he pressed his forehead to the floor in the full prostration of the Boundless, the gesture of a man who had stopped arguing with himself.
We prayed together for a long time after that, and I led them through the Canticle of Right Action, then the Litany of Witnessed Truth, then the short prayer that had no name in the texts but that every monk at the monastery had known by heart:“Let my hand be the hand of the Boundless. Let my eye be the eye of judgment. Let what I do in this hour be counted, not against me, but among the works of the faithful.”
Their voices joined mine, the sound rose into the vaulted ceiling and dispersed there, the candles burned without flickering, and I felt, as I always felt in moments of true alignment, a perfect and absolute stillness. This wasn’t the feeling of peace, for I had given up the word “peace” as imprecise. This was something more exact. It was certainty.
When it was done, they left one at a time, at intervals, the way I had instructed them to do. No one saw the three King’s Guard leaving the old chapel together in the dark hours of the morning. Instead, if they were looking, they saw individuals, each going separately about their own private devotions. Camelot was full of men with private devotions.
