It was all I had. But he nodded like it was enough for now and went back to his bowl. That was when I became aware, gradually, of being watched. I glanced up only slightly, and my eyes immediately landed on the high table at the far end of the room.
Galahad sat three seats down from Arthur, and he was facing me. I was fairly sure his eyes hadn’t moved from us since Percival had sat down. The expression on his face was composed: his jaw was set, and his brow was still, but something underneath it moved like weather behind glass. His gaze traveled from Percival’s shoulder to my face and back again, as if he were measuring something or calculating the distance of a trespass.
I looked away from him, and my eyes immediately found Lance. He was sitting at the far end of the table, deep in conversation with Gareth, a tankard in his hand and his posture easy. He was working at it, though: the angle of his head was too deliberate, and the attention he was paying Gareth was too fixed and thorough. It was almost as if he was refusing to look in our direction.
Arthur, on the other hand,wasn’trefusing to look. He sat at the head of the table as he always did, presiding over the hall with the particular stillness he wore when he was thinking. Isolde sat beside him, but his eyes were on me. Not on Percival, not on the table, but on me. He had the look of a man watching something arrive that he’d been waiting for without knowing he was waiting, and he wasn’t yet sure what to make of it. Even though Isolde was telling him a story about something, I could tell his attention wasn’t following her. Yes, he would nod at her and a polite smile lit his lips every now and again, but his eyesremained on me. I didn’t know what to make of it, so I looked back at my plate.
The bench moved again, but from the right this time. There was a longer settling of weight, and then the particular smell of sea salt and something faintly spiced. Tristan folded himself onto the bench beside me with the casual ease of a man who had decided the geography of the hall was simply of no interest to him.
He picked up his tankard and took a drink, then he glanced from me to Percival.
“Good evening,” he said, in that accent that softened his vowels.
Percival looked at him with a nod. “Evening,” he said.
Tristan nodded, apparently satisfied with this, and then applied himself to his food once it was placed in front of him by a passing servant.
The three of us sat together at the empty end of the long table in the smoky light of the hall, and nobody spoke for a while. Somehow that was the most companionable silence I’d known in weeks.
I didn’t look at Galahad again, but I also didn’t need to. I could feel his eyes on me, and I could also feel the ice in them.
-GUIN-
I’d just taken a bite of my food when all the candles in the room went out.
All of them snuffed out as if by an invisible hand and all at once. This wasn’t a gutter, not a stagger either, but one moment the hall was lit and the next it wasn’t, and the darkness thatdropped over us was total. Everyone sat in it, and not one of them made a sound for at least a few seconds.
That was the wrong part: the silence.
There were a good hundred people in the room: one hundred people who should have gasped, should have knocked over wine cups, called for servants, and made the ordinary noises of disrupted comfort. Instead, the hall held its breath, and I understood why.
Because the darkness had weight. It pressed against my skin with a denseness that said it was occupied by more than just the one hundred people in the room. It was as if at the exact moment that the light guttered and we were suddenly ensconced in darkness, the hundred or so people in the room had doubled, even tripled. The space was suddenly full in a way it hadn’t been only a second or so ago.
I sat very still. To my left, somewhere near the middle tables, a woman started crying, and I was fairly sure it wasn’t Isolde. No, I didn’t imagine she would cry at a time like this, and I couldn’t say why that fact bothered me, but it did. Regardless, the crying wasn’t loud. It was the soft, effortful kind, the kind that comes from tryingnotto cry.
I turned toward the sound and found myself staring at a woman who was standing between two benches, her hands pressed flat against her chest, her face turned away from me. She wavered in the darkness, and that was when I realized there was no way I should have been able to see her in the pure black. But she had a strange glow about her that made her shine like a beacon. If the eerie greenish glow didn’t alert me to the fact that something was off about her, the gown she was wearing certainly did. It was all wrong: the cut of the sleeves, the color of the wool. It wasn’t something you would see anyone wearing in Camelot. At least, no one from this time period. And that had to mean she was a spirit.
“Do you see what I’m seeing?” I whispered to Tristan, who was right beside me.
“Yes,” he answered.
And then a thought occurred to me. “Is this... your own power?”
“No.” A pause. “I have nothing to do with it.”
I gulped as the woman floating before us simply disappeared back into the darkness as if she’d never been there at all. I turned away from her, only to see a man standing on my other side. He too was glowing with a strange greenish brightness, and he was wearing armor I didn’t recognize. It was older, heavier at the shoulders, the style of it belonging to a war that had to have taken place decades or even centuries ago. His face was turned toward the dais, toward Arthur’s empty chair, and then it fell on Arthur himself, who was standing there with an expression of shock plastered across his face. The ghost of the soldier had the fixed and patient attention of someone who had been waiting a long time and had made peace with that waiting.
I could hear Percival whispering a prayer beside me as I counted seven glowing entities before I stopped counting. All the while, the bound magic sat in my chest like a stone in my fist, compressed and aching, but it stirred anyway. It didn’t break through because it couldn’t; Mordred had seen to that, but it was responding all the same. Responding and reaching the way a plant reaches toward light through a crack in stone.
Another dead woman near the middle tables turned her head to face me, and I immediately looked down at the table. That was when another glow caught my attention, this one the yellow brightness of a lit taper that appeared at the far end of the hall. I glanced over to see a flesh-and-blood, live servant who was moving quickly, lighting sconces from a flame that was cupped in his palm.
As he worked, the light in the room began to travel in a slow arc toward us, and the dead receded ahead of it. It didn’t feel as if they were gone, just as if they were pressed back, the way mist retreats from heat without disappearing. The weeping woman suddenly appeared again at the edge of the light. Then she blipped back out of existence.
Once the light had returned, the hall erupted.
“Drafts,” someone said.“Terrible drafts this autumn.”
Someone else argued.
