My blood ran cold.
“You know what?” I asked. Tonelessly. Reflexively. I decided to play the game as a soldier’s first reaction is to deny anything unless there’s too much proof.
But I could tell by his expression that Kay wasn’t interested in playing the game.
“I know it was you who fucked her, Lance.” He paused for a moment. “You who spoiled what the king was so obsessed about spoiling for himself.” Another pause. “You. Fucked. Her.”
The word ‘fuck’ was chosen on purpose. I recognized that immediately: the bluntness of it, the deliberate vulgarity, stripping the thing of any context that might soften it. Not ‘bedded’. Not ‘lay with’. He’d chosen the one word that made the act itself nothing but a transaction. Nothing but error.
I didn’t move. Instead, I kept my expression schooled, kept my breathing even, and felt the gate in me slam shut with the finality of something that had been waiting to close.
“I don’t know what you’re talking about.”
“Yes, you do.” He picked up his tankard again and drank without looking away from me. “The witch. The spy. Merlin’s daughter, who walked into this court wearing a fake man’s face and name... and you, the First Knight, the king’s sword hand, the man who swore an oath of loyalty that is in fact quite specific about not compromising the crown through personal conduct... yet you decided to fuck her. While she was disguised as a knight under your command. While she was feeding information to the enemy.”
The details.
That was what made it something other than an accusation. The details were the threat: the timeline, the proximity, the specific facts laid out in sequence like stones across a river. Kay hadn’t guessed; Kay had built something. And what he’d built was accurate enough that denying it outright was going to require me to commit to a lie that wouldn’t be easy to maintain.
“Those are heavy offenses to lay at my doorstep, Kay.”
He nodded. “Indeed, they are.”
I needed to know how much he had before I could calculate how badly I was bleeding.
Kay set down the cup.
“You were careful,” he said. “I’ll give you that. Arthur couldn’t see it. Mordred, even with all his wards and his psychomantic nonsense, couldn’t see it. Not one of them.” There was an almost approving note to his voice, the tone a man takes with a well-designed machine he doesn’t much like. “But Lance, there is one thing you’ve forgotten. I’ve seen your face for thirty years now, and I know just how your expression appears when you want something. And in the days before her exposure...” He cocked his head to one side. “There was something new to your expression. Something I hadn’t seen in it before.”
Silence filled the space between us, but something in my chest was pulling tight.
“I admit to nothing,” I answered, shaking my head. “Because this is nothing more than another example of your scheming mind reaching for possibilities that are far from truths. What’s more, you have no proof. Thus, this would be nothing more than your word against mine.” My voice came out level. I was proud of that.
Kay looked at me, and I looked back at him, at those deadpan eyes that could pick out vulnerability in everything.
“No,” he said slowly. “I don’t.”
He let that sit.
“But proof and knowledge aren’t the same thing, Lance. Proof is for the courts and accusation. Knowledge...” He took another sip from his cup. “Knowledge is for discussions such as these. Private armories in the morning, when no one can overhear what’s being discussed and neither has cause to repeat it.”
There was still a bite of frost to the air in spite of the shut door. My fingers were numb. The blister on my right hand must have burst at some point while I was sparring because there was dampness from it soaking through.
I gave him a look and shook my head as I turned for the door. “Why don’t you find something better to do with your time than trying to invent stories that aren’t true?”
I didn’t wait to hear his response.
-KAY-
The corridor was filled with the smell of burning torches. Lance’s retreating steps had long since faded from hearing. Iremained where he’d left me, pressed up against the cool stone wall.
He was right.
And it annoyed me that he was right. Proof. Yes, I needed proof. This realization weighed on me like a rock in my stomach. The bastard had stared into my eyes and told me straight out to prove it. And the damn thing was, I couldn’t.
Because I had nothing.
I’d seen the way he’d looked at her, stealing glances every chance he had. I’d seen the way something had passed between them after the Hunt Trial. I’d seen the flush at the back of her neck whenever his name was mentioned and the particular way she went rigid whenever he entered a room. I’d seen a hundred small things, the kind of things that only added up to meaning when you knew what you were looking at. My ability didn’t lie. It never had. It found the crack in the wall, the rust beneath the polish, the rot in the beam that still looked sound. It had found something between those two that didn’t belong there.
