I knew what that meant. Healing.
“No.” He didn’t leave, and I found myself looking at the ceiling again. “I don’t want you to take it... from me.”
“Lance...”
“I don’t want—”
“—for fuck’s sake,” Corvin piped up then. “Let him heal you. If not for you, then do it for me so I don’t have to keep hearing you groaning every time you fucking move.”
I frowned over at him, and he just shook his head as he looked over his shoulder at me.
“Fine,” I said to Percival, who nodded and approached me.
“Thank the fucking gods,” Corvin finished.
Percival’s hands were warm; that was the first thing I noticed. They were warm in a way that had nothing to do with body heat and something to do with his own healing power. It was a power that came up through his palms and moved into me like water finding its level.
He started at my ribs.
I felt it before I understood it. It was almost like a kind of loosening of the pain, the kind that happens when you’ve been clenching a muscle for so long you’ve forgotten you were clenching it, and then suddenly it releases, and you realize the whole shape of your body has changed. The grinding pressure in my side began to ease degree by degree. The pain wasn’t quite gone, but it was retreating.
Then I saw Percival’s face. The change was subtle; he didn’t gasp or flinch, but something moved behind his eyes, something swift and involuntary, the way a man’s expression shifts in the half-second before he gains control of it. His jaw tightened, and his breath came out slowly through his nose, and that was when I realized my pain was becoming his.
“Stop.” I put my hand over his.
He looked at me. “I’m not finished.”
“The ribs are enough.”
“Lance—”
“—my lip’s fine, or it will be, and the same goes for my eye.” I pulled his hand away from my side. He let me, but he didn’t look happy about it. “I mean it. Stop there; it’s more than enough.”
He sat back on his heels, and I watched him breathe through whatever I’d just handed him. Three broken ribs, maybe four. I’d felt them go when I’d hit the ground, and the sound had been bad enough that I’d been grateful for the roaring in my ears that had followed. Now that same damage lived somewhere in Percival’s body, invisible, a phantom, but real enough that his color had gone slightly gray.
“Thank you,” I managed.
I sat up slowly because my ribs were still tender, but that was nothing compared to the pain they’d been in. Now that pain had been reduced to a dull ache that sat at the corners of my awareness rather than at the center of it. Breathing was adifferent thing entirely now. I pulled in a full lungful of air for the first time in hours and let it out again.
Percival nodded once. He was still pale, and he’d tucked his hands into his lap. I could see the faint tremor in his fingers that he was pretending wasn’t there.
“You can tell Arthur you healed me all the way,” I offered.
“Oh,” Percival started, breathing in deeply. “The king doesn’t know I’m here.”
And that meant Arthur hadn’t sent him, which meant Arthur hadn’t wanted me healed, which meant Arthur’s anger was a real and lasting thing. I’d immediately assumed, as soon as I’d seen Percival, that Arthur didn’t want me rotting away in pain down here, but apparently, he did.
I looked at Percival and nodded, and by his sorrowful expression, I was fairly certain he knew exactly what I’d been thinking. “You shouldn’t remain down here much longer. I don’t want you to get punished for tending to me.”
Percival nodded at that. “For what it’s worth, I don’t think he will keep you here for much longer.”
Clearly, he didn’t know Arthur like I did. “I’m most likely a dead man,” I said with an apologetic smile, because by the flinch on Percival’s face, he hadn’t liked that statement. “A king doesn’t forget something like… what I’ve done.”
Percival didn’t answer immediately. He had the honesty not to argue the point, but soon he stood up, and then he was moving out of my cell and away from me and up the corridor, and then it was the sound of the door opening that met my ears. After he’d left, I just sat there in the dark and breathed.
Corvin hadn’t said another word, which was just as well because I wasn’t in the mood to explain myself. The candle burned lower. Even though my ribs no longer ached like they had, my face felt like something that had been pummeled then glued back together again. As I lay in the cell that was reservedfor traitors and enemies of the crown, I tried to remember when I’d stopped being certain which of those I was.
-ARTHUR-
