When he looked back up at me, something in him stopped being a man and started being the other thing.
The heat came first, a wave of it, dry and absolute, the way desert stones feel in midsummer. When he breathed, there was smoke on his breath. Soon, scales flickered under his skinalong his forearm, just briefly, just enough to see them. His eyes eclipsed, once glowing red and now the black of a reptile.
When he hit me this time, I hit the ground with all of me. I heard shouting then. Multiple voices, Percival’s was loudest among them, something which surprised me. Then there was the sound of boots in the mud, several pairs of them: the sounds of organized scrambling of men trying to get between me and something they were afraid of.
Someone pulled Arthur back, and I heard the effort it cost them.
Regardless, the scorching heat from him began to recede slowly, like watching a tide go out. I couldn’t move. I just lay there on my back and looked at the clouded sky through my good eye and breathed carefully around my ribs as I listened to the yard reorganize itself around what had just happened.
After a moment, I turned my head.
Guinevere stood where I’d left her. Her cheek was already reddening from the moment he’d hit her, but she didn’t seem to notice it. Instead, she watched me with an expression I couldn’t read. It definitely wasn’t gratitude, but maybe it was surprise? I wasn’t sure what it was. All I knew was that I couldn’t allow him to hurt her again.
“Go,” I managed.
She shook her head, and almost at the same time, Tristan was at her side. He’d appeared from somewhere during the chaos, which was the kind of thing Tristan did. His hand was at the small of her back in a protective sort of way. Usually, it would have bothered me, but at the moment I felt nothing.
Until I noticed how she allowed his hand to remain there. I turned my face back to the sky as something moved through me that felt like jealousy but much more complicated. Whatever it was, it was something worse, something that had everything to do with the fact that she was standing there and Tristan knewexactly where to put his hand. While I was lying in the mud bleeding from... well, from everywhere, and none of that was anyone’s fault but mine.
I’d confessed because I was tired of the lie. And I’d stepped in front of her because I couldn’tnotstep in front of her. Both of those things were true simultaneously, but neither of them made any fucking sense. And the fact that I still couldn’t stop looking at her was something I was going to have to carry for a very long time.
I sat up, or I attempted to. Nobody helped me.
That was also right.
CHAPTER FIFTY-TWO
-LANCE-
The dungeon cell smelled like wet stone and old blood. Some of it was mine.
I lay on my back on the narrow cot and stared at the ceiling and breathed through my teeth because breathing through my nose wasn’t an option any longer. Something in my face had shifted when Arthur hit me. Something broken? Maybe. Or maybe something adjacent to broken, close enough that the difference didn’t matter.
My ribs were the real problem. Every inhale was a negotiation. Breathe in too deeply and the pain spiked white behind my eyes. Breathe too shallowly and my vision grayed at the edges. I’d found a middle distance, and I was holding to it the way a man holds to a rope above water.
Corvin hadn’t said a fucking word to me. And I hadn’t said anything to him.
He was in the cell next to mine, and his back was to me, facing the wall. I could tell by the quality of his stillness, though, that he wasn’t asleep. Corvin of Blackhollow didn’t sleep like that: rigid, deliberate, like a man choosing unconsciousness and failing at it. Besides, I didn’t imagine he could sleep with all the light that was flooding his cell, purposeful light that was meantto keep him from accessing his shadow magic. Yes, he was definitely awake, but he was choosing silence, and I wasn’t going to be the one to break it.
I didn’t have anything to say anyway.
Instead, I watched the candle on the ledge burn low. I had nothing else to do except replay that moment in the training yard, and I’d already done that enough times that the details had worn smooth, like a stone turned over too many times.
The look in Arthur’s eyes. Then the crack of his fist against my jaw. The way the ground came up to meet me with a kind of inevitability and the heavy thudding sound of my body hitting the dirt.
I tasted blood again and ran my tongue along the split in my lip, feeling the dried crust crack open at the pressure. But my busted lip, my swollen shut eye, and my cracked ribs were the least of it. What kept replaying in my mind was the fact that she’d sat in Galahad’s custody while I’d held that wall I’d put between us.
I’d held the stupid fucking thing through feasts, training yards, and a dozen moments where the decent thing would have been to simply...
I stopped.
There was no use in the accounting. The ledger was what it was. And I would be the one to suffer because I’d put my pride above what I’d known was right and true: that Guinevere wasn’t the enemy I’d pretended she was.
I don’t know if I slept or just lost track of time. But I was vaguely aware that the dark of night was now upon me, and I’d had a fever dream about the sword. Excalibur.
In my dream or whatever it was, I’d seen it, the sword. It had been jutting from the stone in the middle of the lake, and I’d watched her approach it. I’d told myself there was no way she’d be able to pull it, and I’d been so certain. She was awoman playing at war, a spy playing at virtue, and the sword would know the difference the way the sword always knew. I’d awakened before the dream version of Guinevere had a chance to pull it.
But I didn’t need the dream to know the truth. I’d watched her pull the sword, watched it with my own eyes. It hadn’t mattered that she was Merlin’s daughter or that she was a spy. The sword knew she was the right one because it always knew. And it knew whowasn’tright.
