She means nothing to you. She’s your enemy. She used you, and she lied to you repeatedly.
And that was when I made my decision, even though I was sure I was going to regret it.
-LANCE-
The cloak was already in my hand before I’d finished thinking. That was how I knew I was in trouble. A man in control of himself decides first. He gathers his reasons, weighs them against each other, and then arrives at a conclusion with something approaching dignity. He doesn’t find himself standing at his chamber door with his hand on the latch, inventing justifications after the fact like a drunk reconstructing the night before.
I told myself it was a test. Just a test. That was the word I used:test.I needed to know if the problem with my cock was a mechanical one: if whatever had gone wrong with me these past weeks was a general malfunction or something specific. Something abouther.
I was, I told myself,simply gathering information.
The lie was almost convincing.
I didn’t remember walking the long corridor between my room and Galahad’s, but suddenly I was outside his door and knocking. Galahad answered with that particular brand of serene attention that made you feel you’d interrupted something holy, which I no doubt had. His chambers smelled of something faintly astringent.
“Sir Lancelot.” The words weren’t a question, just an acknowledgment of the fact that I was standing outside his door at an ungodly hour.
“The... king wishes... to see her, the prisoner.” I said the words with the flat certainty of a man delivering the weather. “In his solar.”
Then I paused, and it was the type of pause where another man might have asked why, or pushed back, or at a minimum looked uncertain. Galahad just nodded, although his jaw was tight.
“Of course.”
He stepped aside. She was already standing, and I assumed she must have heard my voice. When my eyes found hers, my stomach dropped, though I didn’t know why. She looked at me without expression, which was its own kind of expression. She was thinner than I ever remembered seeing her, I was convinced, even though it made little sense because I’d seen her at dinner. But noticing as much did something unpleasant to the inside of my chest that I immediately set aside.
“Come,” I said.
She came. Because she had no choice.
I didn’t look at her while we walked, which was intentional though it worked poorly because I was aware of the distance between us the way you’re aware of a fire in a room: not by looking at it directly, but by feeling the heat of it. I could hear herfootsteps on the stone, and they were so much lighter than mine, softer than mine.
I took the long route. I told myself it was because the longer corridor was quieter at this hour, with less foot traffic, and more sensible for an escort of a prisoner. I had reasons; I always had reasons. But the reasons I fed myself weren’t the real reasons I did what I was doing.
She knew something was amiss; I was almost certain she knew. But she didn’t say anything about it. Instead, she just walked beside me through the wrong corridor, past the wrong staircase, in the entirely wrong direction of Arthur’s solar, and kept her silence like she’d decided to see where this ended.
Her silence had edges. In truth, I’d had friendlier silences with men I was about to murder.
The courtyard with the rosebushes was empty. It was the same courtyard where we’d stolen a private moment when she was Lioran and I was Lance. It had been a time that was both more complicated and yet so much simpler than where we found ourselves now.
As I walked across the cracked flagstone in the northeast corner, I noticed the iron torch bracket that had never been properly repaired and tilted slightly left. I knew this courtyard. She knew this courtyard. We both knew what it was, but neither of us said so.
I stopped, and she stopped beside me. Then we just stood there, and nothing happened because I’d gotten this far on momentum, and now the momentum was gone. Now I had nothing left but the actual situation: that I’d dragged a prisoner through the wrong half of the castle in the middle of the night to stand in a courtyard I associated with the specific memory of her being Lioran.
She turned and looked out at the same view we’d shared only weeks earlier. The silence was worse than if she’d asked what thehell we were doing here and why I’d lied to Galahad. Instead, she just waited, with her arms loose at her sides, and I could feel her patience like something with weight.
“I...” I started, but lost my nerve.
She looked up at me, and her eyes were the same color I’d seen every time I closed mine: that pure amethyst that no other living person possessed. I knew because I’d had three weeks of checking them against every woman’s eyes I’d been able to put between myself and the memory of Guinevere.
Diagnostic, I told myself.This is just about a test, remember? You are diagnosing a problem.
The problem was standing in front of me in the dark, looking at me like she already knew every cowardly thing I was about to do.
My mind said:think this through first.
But my body was already acting on instinct as I reached forward and gripped her around the upper arms, pulling her into me. I couldn’t stop myself. Even if I’d tried, which I didn’t.
I didn’t grab her gently either. There was no version of this in which I was capable of doing it gently, not after all this wanting, needing, and not receiving. Before she could respond, I dropped my head and snared her mouth with mine. Once I could taste her lips, I stopped thinking about the theory of the thing entirely.
