Something flickered in his expression, but he said nothing, so I continued.
“I hate you,” I said. “I’ve hated you since before I knew you, and every day I’ve spent inside these walls has given me more reasons, not fewer.”
His jaw tightened almost imperceptibly.
“And no matter what you tell yourself,” I continued, holding his gaze even as my fingers were still trembling slightly at my sides. “No matter how many times you convince yourself that what just happened means something different than what it was.” I exhaled slowly. “It won’t change the truth in my feelings toward you.”
Silence.
The flash of lightning through the window caught the edge of his cheekbone. He looked like something carved out of stone that was pretending to be a man.
“Now,” I said. “Return me to Galahad.”
He didn’t move immediately. Instead, he looked at me for a long moment, the way he looked at things he intendedto understand eventually: with patience and certainty, like a problem he hadn’t solved yet but had every confidence he would.
That was the part that frightened me most. Not his anger. Not his power. Not the dungeon or the binding or Galahad’s cold hands checking my skin for the mark of the witch.
Just that quiet certainty. The way he looked at me like time was on his side.
He stepped back and moved to the door, then he pulled it open and called for the guard without turning around to look at me again. I stood very still and kept my face neutral and my hands flat against my thighs. My lips were still warm, and I could still taste him on them. I hated him for that most of all.
-GUIN-
The floor was cold through the thin blanket. That was the first thing I noticed every morning: the cold working up through the stone and through my thin wool blanket and into my hip bones like a slow accusation.
I lay still and listened to Galahad breathe. Even in sleep he was controlled. No restless turning, no mumbling. Just that measured rhythm, like even his unconscious self had taken a vow.
I waited until I was sure, then reached.
Not with my hands, but with the part of me Mordred had wrapped in iron and silence the night he’d pressed his palm flat against my chest and bound the magic within me.
Even though it was useless, I reached anyway because it was now just habit. And yet... when I reached this time... I was fairly sure that something was different.
It was so small as to be almost imperceptible, just a hairline fracture in the binding where last week I’d reached a solid wall. I pushed against the binding harder and felt a thread of give, barely wider than a thought. Like a door that had swollen shut in summer and was now, just fractionally, beginning to dry.
I pulled my hand back and then I lay perfectly still, keeping my breathing even. I wasn’t sure why but I thought about the skull moths. And when I thought about them, I remembered how Galahad had looked at them before looking at me. I remembered how he’d blamed me for them being here in this room. I hadn’t seen them since and for some strange reason, that fact depressed me.
Galahad shifted.
I watched the ceiling but I didn’t move.
When his breathing settled back into its rhythm, I let myself think about it. Carefully. Quietly. The way you think about something dangerous in the presence of someone who is also dangerous.
The binding hadn’t broken. Not even close. But it had loosened, even if only a fraction, barely a degree. I shouldn’t even have been able to feel it, but I’d spent the last three weeks cataloging every sensation behind my sternum the way a prisoner counts stones in a wall. I knew the feel of the binding, the way I knew the exact pitch of the hinges on Galahad’s door, and the third flagstone that clicked when you stepped on it wrong.
I didn’t know why, but I remembered something I’d overheard two days ago, in the training yard, when I’d been waiting for Arthur. He hadn’t arrived yet, which meant I was standing in the cold with nothing to look at but my own feet and the frost on the fence posts, which meant I’d had nothing to do but listen.
Gawain and Gareth had been near the west wall, sparring with one another and their voices hadn’t been soft when they discussed the garrison at Aldenmere and how the rebellion had hit it. Gareth had said something about the road being impassable now, and then Gawain had mentioned how Mordred was missing half his warding kit and that he was in a foul mood about it.
I’d kept my eyes on the frost. Kept my face arranged into nothing, but now I wondered if this conversation was an explanation for the faint crack I’d felt in the binding of my own magic.
I lay on Galahad’s cold floor and thought about that. The binding Mordred had placed on me wasn’t a simple lock. It was a maintained system. I’d understood that even while he was building it, even through my panic and the way my magic had screamed when he’d pressed it flat. The point was that systems required maintenance and upkeep. If Mordred was missing the tools to sustain the wards on Camelot’s walls, it wasn’t a stretch to think the wards on me might be feeling the same strain.
They weren’t broken by any stretch, but they were breathing.
Above me, one of the skull moths seemed to appear from nowhere as if I’d called it just in bringing it to mind. It landed on the ceiling beam. Just one. It opened and closed its wings in the dark like a slow pulse, the skull pattern on its back catching the faint light from the window.
I looked at it for a long time and was happy to see it. Happy mostly because I knew Galahad would be the opposite.
