Maybe the question was rude, but I was beyond the point of caring. Just him sitting here beside me was throwing me off entirely, and I could tell by the reaction at the high table that I wasn’t the only one.
He glanced down at his hands and then nodded. “It’s my death magic. Makes me as cold as death itself, I’m afraid.”
“Oh.” I cleared my throat. “I’m sorry if that offended you.”
He looked at me and smiled. “Do I look offended?”
“No.”
“Good, because I’m not.”
My magic, which had been sitting behind Mordred’s binding like a fist pressed against glass, did something I hadn’t expectedthen. It didn’t push like it had been ever since I’d been bound. But it also didn’t pull. It strangely... settled. The constant low-grade agitation, the way I always felt just slightly too wet, like the moisture in the air was trying to reach me, went quiet.
I sat very still because this was new and it was something worth noting even though I had no reasons as to why it was happening.
“You’re a knight of the Round Table and I’m a prisoner of the crown,” I started, figuring it was best just to get to the gist of it.
He looked at me and shrugged. “And?”
I thought about it. “And everyone at the high table is looking at the two of us like we both just sprouted second heads.”
He chuckled at that, then looked at the basket. Then back at me. He pushed it toward the center of the table, closer to my side.
“And yet it appears you only have one head?”
I smiled. “Why are you sitting here, Tristan?”
He shrugged. “Am I not allowed to sit here?”
“You know what I’m asking.”
He looked at me and gave me a face. “I’m sitting here because I’d rather sit here with you than up there with them, if of course that’s okay with you.”
“It is, but I’m afraid it won’t be okay for you later.”
“How about you worry about you, and I’ll worry about me?”
I looked at him and couldn’t understand what his angle was. Why risk the obvious disapproval from the others, including the king, to make such a point of sitting beside me? Unless Arthur had sent him? Maybe he was meant to do reconnaissance of his own?
“The stonework in this hall is extraordinary,” he said. “Have you looked at the vaulting? Someone spent an unreasonable amount of time on the corbels. If you look very closely, you’ll seelittle faces of animals carved into them. One of them, I daresay, looks exactly like Kay.”
Despite everything, something shifted in my chest. I looked up at the ceiling because it was easier than looking at him or thinking about all the questions that were taking turns perplexing me. The vaulting was extraordinary, that was true. I hadn’t noticed the corbels before. But there, at the nearest column, half-hidden in the shadow thrown by the torchlight, was a small carved fox face with an expression of profound self-satisfaction.
“The fox doesn’t look like Kay,” I said. “It’s too cute.”
“No,” Tristan agreed. “And it’s too clever. The Kay one is on the south wall. The pig. Slightly aggrieved. Perpetually irritated.”
The soup was still warm, the bread was good, and the dog under the table had fallen asleep against my ankle. Its weight was uncomplicated and real, and the quiet where my magic used to press and strain was still there, still holding, like an exhaled breath that hadn’t needed to come back in yet.
I ate, and Tristan ate, and all around us the hall continued to do what halls do.
Strangely, he didn’t ask me anything about the reasons I was now in the predicament I was. He didn’t ask me why I’d done what I had or what Arthur intended for me. Instead, he talked about the corbels, Kay’s pig face, and then about the ale and then, briefly, about a particularly bad storm he’d ridden through on his way to Camelot the first time he’d visited. That had been years ago, and apparently his horse had refused to cross a certain bridge, which later was washed away in a storm. Tristan had taken it as the horse’s psychic intelligence which had stopped it from crossing that day, perhaps saving both their lives.
He spoke as though I were a person who had thoughts about the weather, masonry work, and rebellious horses. It was sosimple it was almost intolerable because the questions wouldn’t stop swarming my mind, the lead one being:why in the world was he here, talking to me about such mundane things?
All I could manage to do was continue eating. I didn’t trust myself to be able to do anything else. Above the flickering flames, the corbel of Kay glared down at us with that irritated expression, and Tristan reached for the bread basket once more. When his fingers brushed mine again, they were just as cold as they had been.
-ARTHUR-
