I dreamed of her, which was no surprise because on the nights I did dream, she was usually featured. This time, she wasin a cold room, sitting at a small table with bread in front of her. I was sitting just out of reach, and I could see the body of a skeleton beneath her gown. She reached for the bread, but as soon as she touched it, it turned to ash in her fingers. She looked at it with no expression as I sat at my table and watched.
She looked up. Looked directly at me, but she said nothing.
The ash sifted through her fingers onto the table.
I woke before the bell, and then I just lay there in the dark with my hands against my ribs, my heart beating too fast, and I told myself it was nothing. I told myself she was a prisoner of the crown and she didn’t deserve to even still be living.
But my hands were still shaking.
I told myself that too was nothing, but I knew better.
-MORGAN-
The approach to Percival’s mind was like walking into a room where someone had left all the windows open. Most minds had walls. Lance’s had been a fortress of iron doors and deliberate dark, everything locked behind a soldier’s discipline. Entering it had felt like picking a lock in the cold. I’d had to shove, had to drag what I wanted into the light by force.
Percival’s mind opened before I even touched it.
I stood at the threshold and simply waited, the way you wait at a stranger’s hearth before announcing yourself. His sleeping consciousness settled around me like warm water. No defenses. No sharpened edges. Just that extraordinary, aching openness: a mind built to receive, to absorb, to hold the weight of other people’s pain without ever setting it down.
It was the most exhausting kind of mind to inhabit. I didn’t stay long in the feeling of it. Instead, I went looking.
The impressions were already all there, every one of them. He hadn’t discarded a single detail; that was the thing about Percival. He never discarded anything. He just buried it under the habit of not wanting to see what seeing would cost him.
The first one surfaced easily.
The way she’d flinched.
It was inside a corridor a week or so ago, maybe more. Percival had been walking behind her and Galahad, and she’d stumbled on a loose stone: just a minor stumble, and Galahad’s hand had shot out to steady her in a standard reflex, nothing alarming. Except she hadn’t been grateful. She’d gone still. The kind of still that isn’t relief. The kind that’s a held breath. The kind that has fear in it.
Percival had noticed it, filed it, and then moved on. I pulled it back into focus.
The next one was harder to find. He’d pressed it deeper.Deliberately,I thought. Not out of cruelty, because Percival wasn’t capable of being cruel, but out of the specific kindness of a man who didn’t want to see something he couldn’t fix.
Her wrists.
They hadn’t been bound; of course, it was nothing so obvious as that. But it was in the way she’d held them, those first days under Galahad’s supervision. She’d kept her wrists close to her body and angled down in the posture of someone mapping their own pain. Percival had seen it before: in men dragged off a battlefield, in women who’d survived things no one asked them directly about. He recognized the body language the way he recognized a poorly set bone.
He’d told himself it was from her time in the dungeon and the cold. I opened it fully so I could show him it wasn’t the dungeon or the cold. It was Galahad.
Then the meal.
This one sat closest to the surface for Percival and hurt the most to look at. He’d been there, of course, and he’d watched her eat. He’d watched the way she’d gone at that food like it was the last meal before a sentence was carried out, her shoulders curved inward, her head down. He’d watched her chew fast and swallow even faster with something behind her eyes that wasn’t hunger. Or not just hunger, but with an awareness that she knew the food could be taken away.
Percival had watched and he’d felt something move through his chest: that deep, involuntary resonance his gift made when it registered suffering. He’d pressed it down. He’d told himself she was thin because prisoners weren’t treated to multiple-course meals. He’d told himself Galahad was severe but not cruel. He’d told himself a great many things.
I stopped telling him those things. Instead, I laid it all out in sequence: the flinch. The wrists. The meal. The way she stood in Galahad’s presence: slightly turned, one shoulder forward, which wasn’t deference, but was shielding. I pointed out the hollows under her eyes, the new economy of her movement, the realization of someone who’d learned that taking up space had a cost.
I didn’t invent a single thing. I just made him finish reading what his own body had been writing on the walls for weeks. Then I stepped back and let the dream do what dreams did.
The image that rose up next wasn’t mine. It came from him, from the deep stratum of Percival’s consciousness. It came up rough and unpolished, the way true things do.
A girl in a cold room. The candles burning low. And the certainty, the terrible, animal certainty, that no one was coming.
His healing gift moved through his sleeping body like a current with nowhere to go. I felt it. Even standing outside thecore of the dream, I felt it: that particular quality of pain that belongs to healers who can’t heal the thing in front of them. It was like watching someone drowning and finding your hands tied.
It was unbearable. For him, at least.
I’d made my peace with unbearable a long time ago.
