He looked me up and down, his eyes settling on my bust before they found my face. “There have been many nights in the past when I imagined what it would be like to bed you.”
“And?”
He nodded, as though anticipating the question. “And then Guinevere came into my life.”
I smiled. “And it’s that reason that I’m going to offer you some unsolicited information. Because I recognize the look of someone who would burn down the world for the woman he adores. And I find I rather like that quality in a man.”
The truth, if not the whole truth.
He nodded once. “Thank you.”
“Don’t thank me yet, for you won’t like the information I have to tell you.”
“No?”
I shook my head. “But it’s something you should know, all the same.”
The courtyard held its breath. That was the only way I could describe it. The obsidian stones had gone quiet beneath us, the red fractures fading, and even the night air seemed to pull back. I wasn’t surprised, for the truth could be a very ugly thing.
“What I’m about to tell you,” I said, “I tell you because you’ll need to know it before you walk into that castle. Not after.”
He went still. “Tell me.”
I didn’t soften the blow because softening it would have been condescending, and Corvin deserved better than that.
“Lancelot was the first man to ever fuck her.”
The silence that followed was absolute.
I watched Corvin’s face carefully because I had the ability to read the precise moment a person’s interior world rearranged itself, and that moment had just hit Corvin like a heavy stone wall. He didn’t crumble, but men like Corvin rarely did.Yet something behind his eyes went very, very still. His jaw tightened, and his left hand, which had been hanging loose at his side, closed slowly into a fist.
“How do you know this?”
“How do I know any and all things?” I asked with a smile. “Dreams.”
It was the partial truth, but the version that would land cleanest.
“Dreams can be misleading.”
“Guinevere and I have formed... a sort offriendship, you could call it,” I continued. “And women tell each other things that would surprise men.”
“Then you know this for certain?”
I nodded. “And Lance isn’t the only one who desires her.”
“Arthur?”
I nodded again.
“Has he—”
“—I don’t know,” I answered honestly.
Corvin turned away from me, took three steps toward the far edge of the courtyard, and stopped. His back was to me, and his broad shoulders squared against the dark. The obsidian beneath his boots pulsed a deep, bruised indigo. I’d never seen the stones turn that particular color before.
“I assumed... that is to say...” He swallowed audibly. “I’d overheard Arthur mention she was no longer a maiden. So, naturally, I assumed if it wasn’t him who had deflowered her, it was one of his men.” He inhaled deeply. “At the time, I would have bet money it was Lance.” Then a sigh. “So why am I so surprised to hear as much now?”
It wasn’t a question he wanted me to answer, so I gave him a moment. And he took that moment before he turned back to face me.
