He said the words with the same tone he might use to announce a change in the morning’s training schedule: flat and final. I couldn’t help but notice how Lance’s expression blanched then and he took a small step back, pulling his hand back from the pommel of his sword.
“Death is the end of usefulness, and she isn’t yet useless.”
Part of me wanted to call on my water affinity and drown the fucking lot of them, but I couldn’t do that. Not when I was surrounded by incredibly magical knights. And all of them against me wouldn’t be a fair fight: I’d be dead before I hit the ground.
“Take a very long and close look at her. At this ravishing beauty who stands naked before you, with her perfect face andbody. And recognize her as exactly what she is: a poison, a plant.”
It took everything within me, every shred of courage I still possessed, but I turned my gaze along the row of courtiers and let it move down the line of them, deliberate and unhurried. Some looked away, but others didn’t. Kay’s pale eyes moved over me like a blade finding the seam in armor. There was no heat in his gaze, or rather, there was heat, but it was heat made precise, heat made into a tool. There was the promise of retribution in his eyes. And when he caught me watching him watching me, the thin line of his mouth curved up at one corner into the slightest smile of acknowledgment and a promise.
Agravaine stood three paces behind Kay. His gaze remained fixed on my body, and his expression held that careful blankness he wore like a second skin, but his eyes were another matter. He didn’t bother to school them, obviously didn’t see the point of it since I was being paraded around like a prized pig. But Agravaine wasn’t looking at me the way a man looks at something he desires. He was looking at me the way a man looks at something heintends touse.
I moved past him, farther down the row. If they wanted to stare at me, I’d give them a closer view. Abetterview. I’d prove that not one pair of eyes in this room had bested me. Yes, I was standing here completely naked before them, but no, I wouldn’t cower.
I stood in the wreckage of it: stripped to nothing, the torchlight moving across my skin like it had something to say, but I didn’t cover myself. Didn’t cross my arms over my breasts. Didn’t cover my sex with my hand.
I’d survived worse than eyes.
Instead, I let my gaze move across them the way Arthur had walked the aisle: deliberate and unhurried. I dared them to look away from me. Some of them did, but some of them didn’t. Mostof the men watched me, their eyes landing on various parts of my anatomy, and not all of them were polite about it.
I found Percival. His eyes were on the floor, a dull red climbing his neck toward his ears. I was grateful to him. Like Percival, Lance was looking at anything but me, mostly at the wall. He was still, rigid, like a man holding something shut by force of will alone.
At the back, near the pillar, Gareth stood with both hands locked around his sword belt, his knuckles bloodless and white. He’d given me his cloak once. It was during a particularly freezing patrol. There had been ice on the ground, and I’d, or rather,Lioranhad been shaking. Gareth had his cloak off his shoulders before I could refuse. He was looking at me now,in the eyes, with an expression that couldn’t decide which wound was worse: my deception or Arthur’s treatment of me. His throat moved as if he wanted to say something, but no words came; he didn’t look away. There was something in that. Not comfort, but something.
Gawain stood at Gareth’s right hand, where he always stood. The Orkney brothers were close and always had been. Gawain’s face was stone, unreadable. His jaw was tight, and something moved behind his eyes, something brief and buried, and his gaze dropped to the floor.
The silence stretched through the room, and Arthur allowed it, reveled in it, I imagined. This display of my weakness and his power over me was, no doubt, fueling him. Then, from the far end of the knights’ row, there was a sound. It was quiet, involuntary, almost nothing, just a quick inhaled breath. I looked up and found Galahad.
He stood apart from the others, the way he always stood. And he wore that particular stillness of a man whose discipline was a physical practice. His golden hair caught the candlelight like something consecrated, but it was his gray eyes thatcaptured my attention. They were on me, just as everyone’s were, but his were...
Wrong.
It wasn’t the crude appraisal of the courtiers, and not Kay’s calculating inventory or Agravaine’s cold assessment of utility in Galahad’s gaze. Instead, strangely, it was the expression of hunger, raw and poorly hidden. It was something that struck me because Galahad had built his entire existence around hislackof appetite, his purity. Yet, the way he was looking at me now reminded me of the way a starving man eyes a meal he’s convinced himself he doesn’t want.
Once he realized I’d caught him staring, something locked shut behind his eyes, and he turned away.
Arthur approached me once again, and as he closed the distance between us, I felt it: that thing I’d always felt whenever he was near. It was something that had continued since the first time I’d met him at the lake, when I’d been Guinevere and he’d been Arthur, and something had passed between us. I didn’t know what to call it, but it felt like a vibration, or a hum beneath my sternum, low and insistent, like a string plucked. It was something warm, something that thrummed within me and almost felt like... recognition of one soul to another.
Whatever it was, it got louder.
His jaw tightened. It was just a small movement, almost nothing really, but I was standing close enough to see it. He didn’t look away, as the hum moved through me like current through still water.
He felt it too.
“The daughter of Merlin will now be offered the chance to becomemyspy,” he continued, but the tone of his voice had changed. He was now uncomfortable. That low humming had upset him, just as it upset me. “Against her father.”
He let that statement land, watching the surprise ripple through the room in small movements: a shifted weight here, a drawn breath there, the twitch of Kay’s mouth.
“If she accepts this honor, she will feed Merlin every detail we give her. She will deal in the language of disinformation and misdirection. What is more, every defense of Annwyn, she will deliver to us. Every operation the Wardens run, every weakness in Caer Gwyll will be ours.”
He tilted his head just a small angle, just an inch, but the hum in my blood sharpened to something almost painful.
“She has a choice,” he continued. “Either accept my offer or die as the witch she is.”
Then he raised his hand and snapped his fingers once in a clean, imperious gesture that barely qualified as effort. One of the guards materialized from the edge of the room like a dog that had been waiting for precisely that sound.
“Return the prisoner to her cell.”
His voice was flat and final, and he was already turning away from me, as though I were a problem he’d now resolved and set aside. He motioned downward with two fingers toward the cloak that was still crumpled and spread across the floor in a dark red pool of uselessness. The guard stooped and retrieved it, holding it out to me with the blank expression of a man paid not to think. I took it from him and then folded it very deliberately over my arm. I stared at Arthur the whole time I did, and in response, he narrowed his eyes. I smiled.
