Percival looked at me and nodded.
“I know,” I said.
Below, a figure emerged from the shadow of the Great Hall’s eastern arcade. He moved without hurry, and it was that unhurried quality that made me realize it was Galahad below us. The way he moved, as if he didn’t have a care in the world, had always been one of the things I’d hated about him.
Now he crossed the courtyard in a straight line toward the chapel, and his white-gold hair seemed to reflect the moonlight. His posture was perfect, just as it always was. You would never guess that the knight had been reprimanded, humiliated in front of the other knights and, truly, the whole court.
Almost as if he’d picked up on my thought, he stopped walking. Then, in the middle of the courtyard, twenty feet below my window, he looked up.
Our eyes met, even as I knew that was an impossibility because the warped glass didn’t allow for eyes to meet. But, regardless, Galahad still stood there, looking up at my window, where I was sure he could make out the shape of the figure standing behind the window, looking down at him.
I didn’t step back. Some stubborn thing in my chest wouldn’t allow me, so I stood there in the warped glass, and we looked at each other across the cold evening air and the space between us.
Then he turned and continued toward the chapel. I stood at the window long after the dark had swallowed him.
“Guin.” Percival’s voice was quiet. “Come away from the window.”
I didn’t move immediately. The courtyard below had settled back into its usual evening: torches burning at the gates, the fountain running, two men in cloaks talking near the stable doors. Ordinary. The picture of ordinary.
I came away from the window.
The bread was still on the table. I picked it up and tore off a piece and ate it standing up, which was the only way I knew howto eat anymore, like every meal might be interrupted, like sitting down committed you to something.
“I’ll stay in tomorrow,” I said. “As best I’m able.”
Percival nodded. He didn’t say anything more, though he also didn’t look relieved. He just nodded like a man marking something in a ledger he wished he didn’t have to keep.
“I’ll come back in the morning,” he said. “Early.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know.” A pause. “I want to.”
“You’re a good friend.”
“I’m not a friend.”
I nodded because I understood. We might have been friends, or something closest to it, when I was Lioran, but we weren’t friends any longer, not after who and what I was. Not after everything I’d done.
“Whatever you are,” I tried again. “I’m grateful for you. And to you.”
He left, and I listened to his footsteps go quiet down the corridor. All the while, the brazier crackled, and the bread sat in my hand, half eaten. Outside the warped glass, Camelot settled into its nighttime patterns: knights in pairs, torchlight, the fountain going on and on in the dark.
I finished the bread.
Then I dragged the chair across the room, wedged it under the door handle, sat on the edge of the mattress, and stared at the door as I waited for the kind of quiet that meant everyone in Camelot was finally asleep.
It took a long time.
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
-ARTHUR-
I was already in the training yard before the kitchen fires were lit, sword in hand, working through forms I’d known since boyhood.
My arms and legs were already burning before the first hour was finished. Good. The burn kept the dragon quiet; it kept everything quiet.
But it didn’t last.
