It lasted less than a second, but his blue eyes found mine across the room, and what was in them wasn’t anger. It wasn’t cold. It wasn’t even disappointment, exactly. It was grief. But it was the settled kind, the kind that has already done the acute work, mourned the loss, and moved on. It was the kind of grief you see in a graveyard: after the body is long cold, in the ground, and the grief dissolves like mist over the dirt.
He’d already mourned Lioran, and he wasn’t going to start again for me. And I didn’t and couldn’t blame him because I understood.
His gaze went back to the door as I pulled myself to my feet and moved to the far side of the cot. I just needed to put as much of the room between us as the room allowed. Once there, I sat down with my back against the cold stone wall and didn’t try again.
But I wanted to. That was the honest part. I wanted to keep talking, keep pushing, keep looking for the right combination of words that would make him look at me like that again, even if it hurt, because even grief was contact, and contact was something.
But that wanting was mine and only mine. It had nothing to do with him.
Percival stood his post as I sat against the wall. Outside, the guards had moved on from the horse and were now talking about the horse’s owner. The candle on the table burned down a visible measure as I realized that this was exactly what my disloyalty looked like. Not a confrontation I could replay and pick apart afterward. Not an argument with clear positions to examine. Just a room, and two people in it, and one of them no longer believed the other one existed.
Galahad had told me not to mistake Percival’s kindness for weakness, but he’d gotten it wrong. Percival’s kindness wasn’t a weakness. It never had been. It was the reason I couldn’t talk my way out of this, the reason none of my usual tools worked, the reason the room felt like it did.
You couldn’t charm someone whose goodness was the exact thing you’d used against them. What was more, the worst liars were the ones who knew exactly what they were doing, but they did it anyway. And I’d always known. I just hadn’t expected to care as much as I did.
CHAPTERTWENTY-ONE
-ARTHUR-
The reports had been sitting there since early morning.
I hadn’t read them yet.
They lay ordered in terms of importance. Well, in order ofKay’simportance, since Kay thought like that. He was always classifying everything, putting things into categories, assigning a mathematical value to governance. On top was the name ‘Corvin’. Second in line was the name ‘Guinevere’. Third was an account of border movements from the northeast border, including men riding with a force of armed horsemen bearing no known symbol. After that followed six other sheets: trade problems, food shortages, a plea from the western region regarding the drought, and a letter from the Archbishop that I’d been ignoring for two weeks because whatever it said would require me to do something I didn’t feel like doing.
I had a good idea that the Archbishop was complaining about the fact that months ago, I’d allowed Galahad to take the unused chapel of Camelot and make it his own. The Archbishop’s last letter had said something about the Vow of the Boundless being an abomination to the current religion of Logres and blah blah blah.
I held a cup of tea that had long since gone cold while I stared at the wall. But then a piece of paper that was sticking out from the middle of the pile caught my attention, and I reached for it. It was a report from Renhaven, one of my garrison leaders. And what it mentioned didn’t make much sense.
‘A river running backward’followed by‘a man forgetting his wife’s name.’I’d had stranger things reported to me: the borderlands bred rumor the way wet grain bred rot; but Renhaven didn’t deal in rumor. He dealt in bodies, blades, and the precise accounting of both. The man had once written me a three-line report after holding his garrison against forty raiders for six days. Just three lines with no embellishments: ‘We held. Eight dead. Supplies adequate.’That was Renhaven.
Yet this letter had paragraphs.
I stood and walked to the window. The training ground spread out below, a few squires already working the archery butts. The sound drifted up in the thunk of arrows finding wood and the low commands of the drill master. They were ordinary sounds, the sounds of a kingdom at work.
But then I thought about the part of Renhaven’s report that mentioned a lamb born with two faces.
I’d heard something similar from the northwest, maybe three weeks ago. It was a report I’d filed under superstition and peasant anxiety. Before that, there had been a report about a well in the village of Morrath that ran black for a day and then ran clear again, and the priest who’d blessed it swore afterward he could not remember the words of the blessing he’d spoken a hundred times. I’d filed that one away too, under the heading: ‘I have no idea what to make of this, so I’ll ignore it for now.’
I turned from the window.
The reports were still on the desk. Corvin’s name on top. Guinevere’s beneath it. The letter from Renhaven was still in my hand. I set it down on top of both of them.
The pattern was the wrong shape for coincidence, and I knew it. I’d known it for longer than I wanted to admit, in the way you know a wound is infected before you’re willing to look at it directly. They were a myriad of small wrongnesses: little things behaving as if something large and heavy had pressed against them from the other side.
Merlin would have had a name for it.
The thought arrived the way thoughts of Merlin always did: unwelcome, accurate, and followed immediately by the familiar cold anger that had replaced grief somewhere in the last several years. I wasn’t certain exactly when I’d stopped mourning what we’d been to each other and started simply resenting the space he’d left. Probably around the time I realized he’d been lying to me since before I could hold a sword.
But that didn’t change the fact that Merlin would have had a name for whatever in the hell was going on. He would have known something odd was going on for months leading up to these reports. He would have been watching the strangeness building, but he would have said nothing because saying nothing was Merlin’s preferred instrument. He believed in information held rather than shared, in knowledge used as a leash.
I sat back down.
Outside, an arrow struck the center of a butt with a sound like a knuckle cracking. Someone down there cheered. The drill master told them not to.
I picked up the quill.
At the bottom of Renhaven’s report, in the narrow margin, I wrote: ‘Send eyes to the eastern pass. Daily reports. Any recurrence, ride immediately.’Then I set it aside and looked at the stack.
