It wasn’t that there was an absence of noise; Camelot could never be completely quiet. There was always the breathing of the castle, the creaking of the stones, the guards changing, and the shouts of those who kept watch atop the stone walls. But it was in these short moments that Galahad slept. And when he slept, I was free, and I was safe.
It was during that time that I’d learned to figure Galahad out the way Corvin had taught me to study an enemy.
Not with feeling,he’d said, kneeling beside me in Annwyn’s perpetual dusk while I watched two of Merlin’s soldiers spar.With your eyes. What does he do before he commits? What does his body tell you that his face tries to hide?
I pushed the thought of Corvin away before it could become anything that hurt me too much. I knew what it would become if I let it: a weight settling into my chest as I worried about him incessantly. But imagining him in a dungeon cell I couldn’t see, doing gods only knew what in conditions I had no way to assess... I couldn’t do anything with such thoughts. And without information regardinghowhe was doing, there was nothing Icould do with the thoughts except let them eat me, and I couldn’t afford to be eaten.
I pushed the feelings down and returned to Galahad. He was most dangerous at dusk.
At Drenath’s Hour. That was the time when the day’s accumulated discipline had built to a pressure that required release. On the evenings when his prayers were insufficient, when he’d spent his time in the training yard sparring and was reminded of mastery and dominion, those evenings were the ones I watched for. The jaw clench was anger, and what usually followed was blows to my upper arms, my ribs, his hands on my shoulders forcing me to my knees for unscheduled scripture. His anger was my pain, but it was legible. I could map it.
The quiet was worse.
When Galahad stopped moving, his breathing slowed, and his eyes began following me with their blank, glassy stare, then there was something else at play. Something much more terrifying than his rage. In those times, I learned to shrink myself. Not to cower, because I’d never do that. But rather to become simply smaller: to lower my eyes and pull my shoulders inward, to present less of a surface area for his gaze to settle on.
I thought of all Galahad’s triggers I’d learned thus far: my hair catching the light of the fire; the silhouette of my body through my thin tunic; and my voice, particularly when I spoke with assurance. Direct questions enraged him. Theological engagement sometimes calmed him down, and in those moments, he became something of a teacher.
Silence made him suspicious because I was fairly sure he read it as me magically plotting.
His safest hour, if the word even applied, was midnight. Orath’s Hour. Something in the silence seemed to subdue Galahad. His prayers at midnight were almost gentle, even though he’d never name Orath personally.
I’d also noticed what didn’t trigger him; that list was shorter but included scripture recitation, visible suffering, and the moments when I was clearly hungry, clearly tired, or clearly in pain. Those were the times when his aggression eased. I could only assume the reason was that the broken thing before him matched what his theology required: the witch, humbled. The vessel, cracked and draining. He was kindest to me when I was most diminished.
That realization had arrived one morning like something swallowed wrong. I’d been lying still after a night that had gone badly: my back full of welts, my ribs screaming, and he’d knelt beside me with a cloth, a bowl of water, and his voice had been softer than I’d ever heard it. Concerned even. He’d murmured something about Solvaine’s mercy for the penitent and pressed the cloth to my back with extraordinary care.
He was gentlest when I was most broken.
And my body was learning to perform that brokenness for my own safety. I could feel the performance becoming real, the shrinking. And that shrinking was the thing I was most afraid of. Not the blows. Not the freezing cold bath water. Not the scourge. Not his roaming hands which were becoming more and more frequent.
The erosion of self.
I continued to reach for my magic. I did it without thinking, the way I’d always done it, like a reflexive extension. Of course, it was never there. The binding was exactly where Mordred had placed it, sealed against me like a hand pressed flat against a door.
I could stillfeelthe water, though. That was the particular cruelty of the binding. It didn’t blind me, and the knowledge that I could have flooded this room, that I could have frozen Galahad’s lungs, that I could have pulled the moisture from hisblood and left him a dried husk, frustrated me more than I could say.
Because I could do none of it.
The gap between capacity and helplessness was its own kind of violence, and it sat in my chest like a coal, not hot enough to cauterize, but just hot enough to keep burning.
This evening, Galahad announced the bath in the tone he reserved for liturgical duties: Solvaine’s purification. Of course, I already knew what to expect: ice-cold water, rough cloth, his hands on my skin while he recited from the Kaelthar canon.The body is a wilderness. The faithful tend it back to order.
But this time, the bath was different. The water was just as cold, but his hands didn’t come. So, I waited. Water dripped from my elbows, and in the silence, the sound of it was very loud.
Still nothing.
I didn’t turn around immediately because I was nervous. New patterns were dangerous. A new pattern meant I’d failed to map something, and an unmapped behavior in a man like Galahad was a threat I couldn’t assess yet. So, I listened instead.
His breathing was wrong: too ragged, too shallow. But the rhythm was one I recognized; I’d heard it on the bad nights: the nights when the scourge fell on his own skin and then usually mine. But the scourge wasn’t falling right now, and there was no crack of leather. No impact. Just his breathing and, underneath it, a faint, rhythmic sound I couldn’t place.
I turned.
He was on his knees, but not in the prayer posture: that was straight-backed, hands folded, face arranged into devotional stillness. This was him collapsed against the wall. His head was back, and his robes were displaced. His hand was between his legs, wrapped around his cock as he worked it with a rhythm that matched the sound I hadn’t been able to name.
His eyes were open, and they were fixed on me. But not on my face.
The glassy devotional stare had shattered. What was underneath it was raw in the way a wound is raw. He watched me stand in the cold water, completely nude, and his hand moved against his cock as his eyes found the flesh between my thighs. The only sound in the room was his breathing, the dripping of the water from my body, and a faint half-formed syllable that might have been my name. Or it might have been a prayer. Maybe it was both.
I stood very still.
