What a fucking lie. I’d known it was a lie when I’d said it, but I’d said it anyway because it was something a man says when he wants to wound someone badly enough to stop wanting her. Yet, all the words had accomplished was making her expressionblanch. She hadn’t said anything hateful to me in response to me. She hadn’t cried, or begged, or argued.
She’d just looked at me with those huge violet eyes that looked as if they were breaking on the inside.
I stared at the ceiling until the candle guttered out. The dark came in, and I lay in it and thought about how I’d spent the majority of my life being the man who could be trusted above all others. Then I thought about how that was the thing I was most afraid of losing, and how I’d lost it anyway. The worst part was that I’d done it so quietly.
With no witnesses. And no echo of precognition to warn me.
And now all that remained was just Arthur’s door, the walk away from that door, and the weight of what I was carrying now that I hadn’t been carrying before.
CHAPTER THIRTY-ONE
-GUIN-
“You will attend the evening meal in the Great Hall. By the king’s command,” Galahad said during Verath’s morning prayer.
He didn’t pause the recitation. He just inserted the information between “let no falsehood pass unchallenged” and “to witness is to serve,” as though Arthur’s summons were another canonical obligation, another line in the litany of my days.
I kept my eyes lowered, and my hands folded in the Boundless posture Galahad had drilled into me: palms up, thumbs touching, a gesture of receptivity I’d learned to perform with my mind completely elsewhere.
My first thoughts weren’t of Arthur.
It was on the words “evening meal.”
My mouth began to salivate as I remembered the table heaped with all sorts of foods. But the one that wouldn’t leave my mind was the roasted meat, specifically. The kind that comes off a bone with a sound, the kind that leaves grease on your fingers. I’d been on Galahad’s Drenath regimen in which he tried to starve the demon out of me for too long now: two portions of bread per day, water, and two full fasting days where even the bread disappeared. On those days, the hunger stopped beinga sensation and became something load-bearing, something the rest of me was built around.
My stomach made a noise during the morning prayer. It had started doing that most recently. It had its own opinions, its own voice and schedule, and it expressed them loudly when the silence was most complete and Galahad’s jaw tightened most visibly.
The king’s command.Real food, then. Or the possibility of it.
I would kneel before every god in Galahad’s entire fucking pantheon for a piece of roasted fowl. I’d recite the Verath invocations from memory. I’d hold the Kaelthar gaze. I knew this about myself now: that this deliberate starvation had reduced my defiance to something animal and immediate, and the animal saidfeed mein a voice that drowned out every more dignified concern.
I didn’t dwell on my hunger, though. Instead, I tried to focus on survival first and my pride second. Because dignity was a luxury for the fed.
The servant Arthur sent up brought with her a gray gown. Apparently, I wasn’t to be seen by the court in my Lioran tunic and braies. I was to be seen in the nondescript clothing of a no-one, a non-entity. I didn’t even care. All I cared about was roasted venison, duck, or mutton.
Galahad said nothing as the servant dutifully entered, then placed the ‘gown’ on the floor before me. I noticed it was free of any other adornments: no belt, no pin, no head covering, no scrap of anything else. When the servant left, Galahad told me to dress. So I did. The amorphous thing fit well enough that I assumed someone had measured my Lioran clothing to find my size, even if I was considerably thinner now. The fabric was fine, better than prison linen. Deliberately less than court standard,of course, and by exactly the margin needed to mark me as ‘other’ without making Arthur look overly cruel.
Someone had thought about this, and I could imagine just who. The gap between cruelty and theater was always precisely calculated where Arthur was concerned.
Galahad inspected me when I was dressed, starting at my feet and working upward. His eyes moved over the gray gown, the plain neckline, my unbound white hair, and there he paused. A decision had been made about the hair by someone. Uncovered and loose, it marked me as different because no one had hair the color of mine. And that meant it announced me; it saidmagicbefore I opened my mouth.
His gaze reached the gown’s opening where my collarbones were displayed, and he immediately looked away. His lips moved in something brief and murmured, words too quiet to catch. I imagined they were along the lines of whatever the Boundless said to themselves when they were overcome with feelings they had no business feeling.
“Acceptable,” he said, then he led me into the hall.
The corridors were the real punishment. I’d walked them as Lioran for months, and as such, I’d come to know them. I knew which stones were uneven, which torches burned short, which turns echoed, and which swallowed sound. The castle knew me, and I knew it, yet now it didn’t seem to recognize me at all, or it did, and the recognition was worse.
Servants flattened against walls. Not out of deference, but out of avoidance: the specific body language of people making themselves smaller so something dangerous doesn’t notice them. A laundress I’d passed numerous times as Lioran and shared greetings with now looked through me as though I were a ghost. A page who’d once asked Lioran to show him a knife trick crossed the corridor and found business on the far wall. They were all avoiding me like the witch I’d been painted out to be.
The transformation was complete, then. I was no longer a person they’d known. I was the category they’d always feared: the demoness revealed. Whatever warmth or kinship I’d accumulated as Lioran had been reclassified in their minds as evidence of how well I’d fooled them, every moment of connection rewritten as manipulation.
I walked through my own former life like a stranger at a grave.
Galahad walked two steps behind me. Not beside me, never beside me. Slightly back and to my left, the position of a guard managing a threat. His footsteps were measured against the flagstones, each step calculated, as though he were counting them. He probably was.
The Great Hall hit me with the sounds of mirth before it hit me with its light. There were hundreds of voices. It was the bright cacophony of a court at full dinner: clinking plates, chairs scraping, the high laugh of someone at a far table, a dog barking somewhere near the hearth along with the smell of wood smoke, roasting fat, wine, and warm bodies packed close. All of it came through the door like a wave, and something in my chest responded to it involuntarily, the way a body responds to warmth after so long in the cold.
As soon as I walked into the room, with Galahad behind me, the silence started. It spread outward from the doors, first the nearest tables, then the middle ones, then those at the far end. Every conversation began to die in concentric rings as heads turned, eyes found me, and mouths dropped open. By the time I’d crossed the threshold and taken ten steps into the hall, the silence was complete.
