“You are wrong,” I said.
This was the Rite. And the Rite required physical dominance, because such was the only way to enforce the corruption to flee. Brother Eamon had said so. The Book had said so. Thus, I knew it was so.
(Trigger Warning: skip the rest of this scene if you aren’t comfortable reading on)
My weight came down over hers, and she immediately pushed against my chest with the palms of her hands, but her physical strength was no match for mine. I easily subdued her as my mouth found the curve of her neck. The prayer came without thought, spoken in the old words, the words I’d copied seventeen times in a scriptorium that smelled of beeswax and cold stone. Strangely, the words meant nothing: they were sounds my mouth was making while my body did something the words had no jurisdiction over.
Her pulse beat against my lips.
I could feel the corruption inside her. I’d told myself I would feel it, that it would present itself as heat, resistance, or the specific wrongness the Book described as a thickening of the moral air. I felt none of those things.
Her hair smelled of the soap I made her use, and her wrists were too thin. I reached to untie her tunic so I could touch her breasts.
She’d stopped going still and started going somewhereelse entirely: it was the place she went sometimes during the ice baths, a place that existed behind her eyes, somewhere I couldn’t reach with hands, words, or theology. She went there and left her body behind like an empty house, and I pressed my mouth harder against her neck as though I could call her back from it, and the prayers kept coming out of me.
I felt her breasts underneath my hands, and they were warm. I undid my braies and released my erection, which strained against her. I could not remember it ever being this hard, and I realized goodness was on my side. This was what the gods intended for me to do to her: force my entry and pull the demon out of her.
She was glaring at me, the palms of her hands against my chest. I reached for her legs and spread them, nestling myself between them, and when the tip of my erection touched the flesh between her legs, the demon asserted itself.
-GUIN-
I fought. That was the first thing: my body’s absolute refusal. I clawed at his forearms and felt his skin give under my nails. When that failed, I twisted hard, using the motion Lance had taught me in the training yard months ago. I was able to free my knee enough that I could drive it into him, and he grunted, but his grip didn’t break. If anything, it tightened.
“Be still,” he said, as though I were a horse that needed gentling.
I bit the hand that covered my mouth, and I tasted blood. He made a sound of anger mixed with surprise and pressed me harder into the pallet. With nothing left, I reached for my magic with the desperation of someone reaching for a rope over a cliff.
Nothing.
The binding sat where my power should have been, thick and impenetrable as packed earth. Weeks of it. Weeks of that suffocation, and now, when it mattered most, the cage still held.
His breathing changed then, becoming ragged, uneven. It was half-scripture and half-something worse. And that was when the realization, in all its bitter ugliness, hit me:I couldn’t stop this.
The thought arrived with a certain kind of clear certainty. It was simply an arithmetic problem: I had no magic, and he was physically much stronger than I was. That, and he still possessed his own magic. There was no version of this where I was capable enough to...
I cannot stop this.
And then something older than thought answered back. I felt something dislodge within me, something falling away and a door opening. And in response, I could suddenly feel all the water in the room again. And I felt the water in the basin at the far end of the room the most.
The binding shattered like a struck bell.
Not gradually. Not the slow fraying I’d been half-hoping for in my lowest moments. One instant it existed: that strangling compression Mordred had threaded through me weeks ago, and the next it simply didn’t.
I looked at the basin and as I focused on it, the water within it rocketed upward with a sound like a cannon shot, hitting the ceiling and exploding outward in every direction simultaneously. The cold arrived a half-second behind it, not a chill but the absolute annihilation of warmth. It came so fast and so complete that the moisture in the stone walls crystallized where it stood. Frost raced across the ceiling in branching patterns, beautiful and violent, like lightning cast in ice.
Galahad’s breath turned white mid-prayer. His cock was still perched at my opening, but he hadn’t penetrated me. And nowhe was too overcome with the understanding that my power had just released itself to think about much more.
Ice formed in the air, daggers of it spinning in the currents of whatever had broken open inside me, and they hit outward with the indiscriminate fury of something that had no target, only radius. One opened his cheek, and another buried itself in the wall beside his head with a crack that shook dust from the mortar.
He was thrown off me with the concussive force of the water that was pulling from the old stone walls and creating a rampart between the two of us. It simply removed him from my body and then threw him against the far wall. I heard him hit it, heard the smash of the back of his head against the stone.
I was on my feet in another instant, even as I didn’t remember standing.
The magic was everywhere, surrounding me. It wasn’t directed, wasn’t shaped, just was present and expanding, pulling everything toward me. Water streamed from the walls, from between the stones, from the air, converging in spiraling currents that lifted my hair and snapped it around me like a flag in a gale. My tunic billowed around me as the temperature continued to drop. The floor cracked beneath my feet, making a sound like a whip, and I watched the fracture line run outward toward the door without fully understanding that I’d caused it.
Because I was here and yet I wasn’t here. It was as if my body were somehow disconnected from my brain, and it was moving of its own accord. Furthermore, I could feel something moving through me that was part of me and yet wasn’t. It wore my skin, breathed through my lungs, and it didn’t negotiate. It had one instruction. One simple, absolute imperative.
Destroy what threatened us.
