And there it was.
The thing I’d been waiting for since the night I’d pressed myself into the corridors of his sleeping mind and shown him what Galahad’s chambers looked like after dark. I hadn’t invented anything. I hadn’t fabricated a single image. I’d simply held open the door he’d already been standing in front of and let him look through it.
He’d woken with his hands in fists. I’d felt it when I pulled back, that snap of a mind jerking itself out of sleep, the particular flavor of a man who’d seen something true and was deciding whether to call it a dream.
He’d called it a dream.
For weeks, he’d just dismissed it as a dream. Now he knew better.
Lance moved. Fast and decisive, the way he always moved when thought finally surrendered to instinct. He turned toward where Galahad stood at the yard’s edge, and every watching body in that yard went still because there was a quality to the way Lance Du Lac moved when something inside him had finally broken that even the most oblivious man could read.
I let out a slow breath through my actual mouth, in the actual chair, in Dunhaven.
The raven ruffled its wings.
I hadn’t touched Galahad. I hadn’t whispered in Arthur’s ear or drafted a letter or arranged an incident. I’d walked into one man’s sleeping mind and shown him what was already happening. That was all.
Below, in the yard, Lance had closed the distance.
I watched Galahad’s face change: that serene, carved-marble composure cracking in a way that was almost interesting to see. He’d never believed anyone would come for her. He’d constructed his whole theology around the premise that what he did in private was between himself and his gods, that the suffering of this woman was nothing more than a purifying act, that his desire and his discipline were sacred private warfare no earthly authority could reach.
Lance’s fist made a different argument.
The raven flinched at the sound. My jaw tightened, there in the chair at Dunhaven.
I didn’t feel satisfaction, exactly. Satisfaction was clean, and this wasn’t clean. She was still inside those walls. Corvin was still in that dungeon. Galahad would still wake up tomorrow in a body that wanted what it wanted, and no amount of Lance’s outrage was going to change what lived inside that man.
But.
The threshold had moved. That was what mattered. Not the blows, but the threshold. Something that had been permissibleinside Camelot’s careful silences was now, suddenly, visible and public. And it was no longer permissible. Lance had named it with his body since he wouldn’t name it with his mouth. He’d stood in that yard in front of every watching eye and said “this is notacceptable”.
The raven shifted on the gatehouse lip. Below, the yard was in controlled chaos: knights pulling Lance back, Galahad on one knee in the dirt, Guinevere standing very still in the middle of it all with an expression I wished I could see more clearly.
I withdrew.
The pull back was always abrupt: the raven’s cold, sharp world collapsing inward and then the weight of my own body reasserting itself, the chair under my thighs, the dull ache behind my eyes that came from sustained distance. I pressed two fingers to my temple and held them there.
Vaelen was across the room, watching me over the rim of his cup.
“Well?” he said.
“Lance hit Galahad.” I dropped my hand. “In the training yard. In front of witnesses.”
Vaelen was quiet for a moment. “Because of Guinevere.”
“Because he finally looked at her.” I reached for my own cup. The wine had gone tepid.
I drank it anyway and looked out the window at the gray afternoon and thought about a man waking from a dream with his hands already made into weapons, spending weeks arguing himself back to sleep.
He’d stopped arguing.
-KAY-
The council chamber held the residual tension from the training yard. Arthur sat at the head of the table with Mordred at his left and Lance at his right, as was customary.
I’d taken my position early, as such was a Seneschal’s privilege. I could see everyone from where I sat.
The question of Galahad came up fourth, after the border dispatch and a tedious argument about grain provisioning that I let run longer than necessary because tired men are less careful. Arthur raised the conversation himself, which was what I’d expected: he’d been waiting for a clean moment to formalize the boundaries of whatever Galahad now was.
