CHAPTER FORTY
-GUIN-
The training yard had left me with a split lip, a bruised hip, and the particular exhaustion that comes from being watched by too many people at once. Arthur had pulled his punches. Not obviously; he was too skilled for that, but I’d felt it in the pauses and in the half-second of restraint before each contact.
Galahad had walked me back to his chamber after the training session was over. I was exhausted, covered in sweat and dirt, and every part of my body ached.
He didn’t speak the entire way; that was the thing that caught my attention first: his oppressive silence. Most evenings, he filled the corridor with scripture or with careful, precise observations about my failures of character. Tonight, he said nothing, just clasped his hands behind his back. His jaw was set, and his eyes moved straight ahead, focusing on something that wasn’t the corridor walls.
The room was cold when we entered it because he’d left the window open, and the evening air had done its work. I went to close it, and Galahad didn’t stop me. Then I turned around, sat on my pallet, and waited for whatever punishment was in store for me.
He stood at the center of the room with his back to me for a long moment. When he eventually turned around, his expression had the careful blankness of something prepared.
“What designs do you have on Sir Tristan?”
I blinked in surprise at him. “None.”
“You spoke with him at length.”
“He spoke with me; I just responded.”
The line of his shoulders tightened. “You encouraged his conversation.”
“I answered his questions.”
“With considerable warmth.”
I kept my expression neutral as, outside, something called from the treeline: a nightjar or something that sounded like one. I counted three beats before I answered.
“I wouldn’t say there was warmth in anything I said.”
“I watched you smile and laugh at him.” He swallowed down his obvious disappointment. “I wish to know what you discussed.”
“He asked me about my sparring technique and offered his advice on how I can better use my small weight,” I lied. “That was the whole of it.”
Galahad moved to the window I’d just closed and stood looking out at the dark. His reflection floated in the glass: pale, perfect, and utterly unreadable.
“Keep your distance from him,” he said. “I don’t know what he’s after.”
Not a request.
I said, “Fine.”
He turned and looked at me. Then he moved to his side of the room, and I looked down at my hands in my lap as something occurred to me that didn’t make any sense. But I thought it, all the same:he’s jealous.
The words sat in my head all evening because this was a surprise, even though I was fairly sure it was true. I’d just never seen this side of Galahad before. Usually, it was him being righteous. Or angry. Or disappointed. Or stewing about some other thing I’d done. But jealous? Never. Yet, I’d seen the way he’d looked at Tristan when the latter was laughing beside me in the yard. Something in Galahad’s expression had reacted before he could discipline it away.
I thought about that while I ate the bread he allowed me and while I washed my face and while I changed into my tunic and lay down on the narrow pallet. I thought about what it meant that a man who had whipped me, starved me, and touched me without permission was capable of jealousy. And I thought about what that said about the shape of his interest in me.
None of it was good.
Sleep came fast, the way it did when my body had been pushed past argument. And the dream came even faster.
The Hall of Lineages had changed. Or I’d changed. One of the two.
The last time I’d walked it, the hall had been vast, still, and cold, the dead kings watching from their stone seats with eyes like carved marble. They’d been patient. Distant. The kind of presence you feel in old churches, enormous and indifferent.
Tonight they leaned forward.
