I thought of Lioran. Of the particular way she’d laughed when she’d played the part of a man. She’d seemed too surprised, like laughter caught her off guard and she hadn’t decided yet whether to allow it. I also thought of the way she’d held herself during sparring practice, that economy of movement I’d thought was training but now understood was something else entirely. I thought of the morning she’d sat beside me at the long table and eaten an entire bowl of porridge while reading a treatise on siege fortifications upside down because she clearly wasn’t paying any attention to it. At the time, I’d thought it merely strange, but now I understood: her mind had been anywhere but on siege fortifications.
She’d lied about her name, about her mission, about who her father was, which was, objectively, a significant omission. But she hadn’t lied about the laughter, or the discomfort at the feasts, or the way she’d talked about the hills of Logres, how there had been a slight softening in her voice, the kind that happened involuntarily when someone was speaking about a place they’d loved and lost.
My ability didn’t work at a distance. I couldn’t reach across a castle and read someone’s emotional truth like a letter. But I’d spent weeks beside her, close enough to register the thousand small signals the body sends when it’s remembering. Close enough to know the difference between a performed self and a real one.
She’d performed being a knight. She hadn’t performed being the person she truly was.
Since finding out she was actually a woman, not a knight, I’d asked myself if I’d ever been attracted to Lioran the way I was certain some of the knights had been, without even realizingwhy. But I’d reached the conclusion that I hadn’t been. I’d only ever regarded Lioran as a good friend to me, nothing more. And now that I’d seen Lioran unmasked? Seen the beautiful woman who was her true face? Even seen her naked when Arthur had attempted to humiliate her in front of all of us? Even then, I couldn’t say I felt anything... sexual towards her. Perhaps that was a relief. Truth be told, I hadn’t felt such feelings towards anyone, whether male or female, and I’d accepted the fact that perhaps I was just built differently. Perhaps I wasn’t meant to feel the yearnings other people did.
The sky outside had gone from gray to the pale gold that precedes sunrise. Somewhere below me, the stable boys would begin their morning rounds. The castle was waking up around me, the way it always did, indifferent to the fact that I’d just watched the world end twice before dawn.
I needed to do something with these visions.
The problem was that doing something meant talking to someone, and talking to someone meant explaining how long I’d been sitting on this information, and explaining that meant an uncomfortable conversation about why a knight of the Round Table had watched three weeks’ worth of apparent prophecy unspool behind his eyes and decided the appropriate response was to say absolutely nothing.
The answer was that the visions had started the same week Lioran became Guinevere, and everything I’d thought was solid revealed itself to be a stage set. And I’d been raw enough from that particular revelation that I hadn’t trusted my own interpretation of anything.
That was the truth of it.
I sat back down on the edge of the bed. The stone floor was still cold.
She hadn’t lied about who she was. That was what I kept returning to. Strip away the name, the disguise, themission that had brought her here, and what remained was someone who’d been exactly what they appeared to be in every way that mattered between two people in a room. Curious. Wary. Occasionally funny in ways she didn’t intend. Carrying something heavy without any intention of putting it down.
That was Guinevere. It had always been Guinevere, whether she called herself Lioran or she didn’t.
The hand from the darkness. The trust she’d carried toward it like a lamp.
I pressed my knuckles against my mouth and sat with the weight of that image and wondered if it was already too late to matter, or if visions were warnings specifically because they still described a future that hadn’t happened yet.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
-GUIN-
Today’s bread was just like yesterday’s, and like the one before that.
It was just a half of a crust that was starting to turn gray. In the cup next to the bread was water that had been left standing long enough that it picked up some of the stone cup’s taste. It was stale, cold, and slightly metallic, like licking a riverbed.
I looked down at the crust and then felt the bones of my rib cage beneath my tunic. I didn’t do so intentionally; my hand moved toward my ribs almost on instinct. The bones under the linen were more prominent than they’d been a week before. That was for sure.
Outside the narrow window, Camelot was waking up, and it was a sound I savored but one I also deeply resented because they were the sounds of freedom and I was stuck in Galahad’s bedchamber, confined.
I could hear the clank of practice blades from the training yard as someone called out a formation, and all I could think about was how each of the men had eaten a full breakfast before they’d started practicing their thrusts and parries.
Soon, the smell of wood smoke and roasting meat from the kitchens drifted under the door and turned my stomach inside out.
Galahad was in the middle of his pre-dawn prayer, and I was alongside him. Although I too should have been in the middle of my prayer, my mind was anywhere but.
He’d woken me at midnight, and at the second watch, and at the fourth.Canonical hours, he called them, and then he continued on about therhythm of devotion, as if it were some mystical god that was in the room with us. The rhythm of devotion left me three, maybe four hours of broken sleep stitched together across a night, and my thoughts moved through it now like fingers through thick mud.
The crust sat there. I picked it up, studied it, and then put it back down again.
Starve the beast within her.That’s what he’d said this was when he’d prayed to his slew of gods. He’d said as much with his hands folded, his eyes level, and his voice carrying all the calm certainty of a man who’d never gone hungry. Well, unless going hungry was on purpose, like his fasting days.
The beast.As if what lived in me was separate from me, as though you could hollow out a person of whatever evil you believed was inside them and still leave the person intact.
I’d been trained by Merlin in Annwyn for three years. I’d infiltrated Camelot under a false name and a false face. I’d stood stripped in front of Arthur’s court, and I hadn’t begged. I’d made it through the Shadow Trials, and I hadn’t broken.
I wasn’t going to eat the bread.
