I’d known he wanted me sexually, even though he’d never admit as much to himself. But proof was in every bath, every inspection for the witch’s mark, and every press of his fingers that lingered past the point of scripture’s requirement. But there had always been the theology between us that had kept me more or less safe: Kaelthar’s Vigil, Solvaine’s purification, Drenath’s refinement. The framework was the distance; every violation came wrapped in it, handed to me labeled as something other than what it was, and I’d accepted the labeling because it gave us both a fiction to operate inside. The fiction kept the worst of it at some remove.
But now there was nothing.
Just a man with his hand on himself, his eyes on my body, and the look on his face wasn’t one of devotion. It was hunger, and it was desperate.
He finished.
The sound he made wasn’t one of pleasure. It was something wrung out of him against his will: desire and self-disgust arriving at the same moment, folding into each other, collapsing into a single broken exhale. His body shuddered. His hand stilled.
I watched his face.
Three heartbeats. Four. The horror moving through him was real. But as soon as he’d ejaculated all over the floor, the reconstruction began. His features cycled from horror, shame, and a revulsion so acute it passed through his whole body like a current, only to harden. It was like watching mortar dry in fast motion. By the time his eyes opened fully and found mine, Galahad was back. The mask was on. The zealot had returned from wherever he’d gone.
And his eyes had found someone to blame.
“Clean it.” His voice was flat. Empty. He gestured at the floor where he’d come all over the stone. “Clean it, witch.”
I stood in the water, looked at him, but said nothing.
This wasn’t defiance. I had no words for what this was that I was feeling. What language existed for this feeling? What response did this moment require? Every word in every language I possessed was inadequate.
“You did this.” His voice gained texture, the building cadence I recognized. “The Book warns:corruption breathes outward from the vessel.” He took a great, heaving breath. “Your body is a weapon. Your flesh projects—” He stopped. Started again, rougher this time. “—youmademe—”
He couldn’t finish. His jaw worked as he stood there, and his hands were shaking. He recited instead: “Drenath teaches that corruption must be met where it lives.The flesh that projects the corruption must be disciplined.Not my flesh.Yours.The source must be scourged, not the victim.”
He crossed to the door. Reached for the leather strap that hung beside it, but not the scourge. This was the simpler one. Wide leather, dark from use. He took it down and wound it around his fist, and something in the deliberateness of that one action made my stomach drop.
Previous beatings had been reactive. Hot. This was something else.
“Kneel.” It was the Verath command voice, the one that didn’t wait for a response.
I knelt.
Not in obedience. More of an assessment of my current state; I was naked, wet, bound, without my magic. Fighting would read as the demon’s strength asserting itself. Resistance extended it. I’d learned this the way I’d learned everything here in this room, through repetition, through pain, through the clinical logging of what worked and what made it worse.
The first blow landed across my upper back. It was a line of fire, immediate and total, and the breath left me in a sharp exhale I couldn’t suppress.
“Strip from me what is unworthy.” The Drenath Litany came from his lips, spoken between blows in a voice that was steadying with each word. “Let the fire find the weakness.”
The second blow crossed the first. There was a third one, followed by a fourth. His voice was steadier now. The rhythm of prayer and impact had taken on the quality of something liturgical, the words and pain alternating in a pattern that had its own internal logic, and with each cycle, I could hear the man on his knees receding. The theology was rebuilding. Brick by brick, blow by blow, until by the tenth stroke, his voice had regained its full composure, and his hand was entirely steady.
He’d beaten himself back into belief.
He set the strap down.
Then he knelt beside me, close enough that I felt his body heat, the warmth from his exertion, and he recited the Solvaine closing prayer: “Water finds the truth of every landscape. What is false has been washed away.”
His voice was almost tender.
He placed one hand on the crown of my head. A benediction. “You may dress,” he said, in the tone of someone releasing acongregant after service. “And then you will clean the mess you forced upon me.”
I dressed with my back to him. The tunic touched my back, and the pain was a bright white thing that narrowed my vision for a moment. I breathed through it. I pulled the tunic straight. Then I cleaned his mess with a wadded-up piece of cloth he handed me.
And I hated him more than I’d ever hated him before. I hated him more than I’d ever hated Arthur, hated him more than I hated the words Lance had told me when he’d discounted everything we’d built together.
Behind me, I heard Galahad preparing for Illara’s nightfall prayer: the candles, the soft percussion of the prayer beads, the closed-eye sigil traced in the air above his face.
He prayed for my soul.
