“You might manipulate my body to give you the reaction you want, but you will never manipulate my mind. Nor will you ever own any part of me.” She breathed in deeply. “And what you are doing to me now, after everything I’ve said to you, is no better than what Galahad attempted to do to me.” She paused, breathed in deeply. “You are no better than Galahad.”
The room went very still. The fire snapped once, and the sound was almost obscene in the quiet.
My fingers paused of their own accord, and soon I pulled them out of her. Even though her slick was covering them, Icould recognize the truth in her words. I had never owned any part of her, and I could recognize that I never would.
Even so, I was harder than I could ever remember being. Every pulse of blood felt like pressure on the edge of something breaking.
I didn’t move. I was standing close enough to feel the warmth off her skin, and I didn’t move because I couldn’t. The words had gone into me like cold water. Like a blade finding the exact right seam in armor.
No better than Galahad.
I heard the words again. And again. And I saw, unwillingly, almost helplessly, the bruises Lance had reacted to in the training yard. I remembered the way she’d flinched that first morning when someone moved too fast behind her.
I took a step back. Then another after that.
She watched me do it, and her expression didn’t soften. She wasn’t offering me absolution. She was just watching, the way she always watched, like she was making an internal list of what she found.
My jaw was tight. My hands were loose at my sides only because I’d made them that way.
“Get out,” I said.
“Arthur—”
“Get. Out.”
And so she left. And the sound of the door closing behind her was the loudest sound I could ever remember hearing. Once she was gone, I stood in the middle of my chambers for a long time. I stood there even after the fire had burned down to coals and the room had gone cold.
-GALAHAD-
I knelt at the altar for a long time before the others arrived. The candles were lit, all of them, every iron stand full and burning. The light moved against the walls in long, slow waves. Above the altar, the Boundless gazed down from carved marble: their eyes were serene, open-handed, eyes without pupils.
I had been called a coward once, but by a man who had never seen true evil up close. I had seen true evil, and now I was determined to rise up against it, againsther.
The door opened behind me, followed by the sounds of three sets of footsteps, measured and quiet. They knew better than to speak first or to interrupt me in my prayers. Instead, they moved as silently as they could and knelt beside me. I finished my prayer, pressed my palms flat against my thighs, and rose.
Bonney was the tallest of them. Truly, he was built like a barn door, with a broad, honest face and the kind of eyes that still held surprise in them, even now. He’d been in the King’s Guard for six years. He had a wife in the lower city and a son who was learning to walk. Bonney was not a cruel man, and that mattered.
Lionel stood beside him: shorter, darker, and balder, with his jaw set and his arms crossed over his chest. I had noticed that he crossed them when he was afraid; I had observed that in him over many weeks of watching and deciding whether he was strong enough to stand beside me. I believed he was.
Calogrenant hung back near the door. He was the youngest of the three, twenty years old, perhaps. The night her magic had overcome me had hit him the hardest, for he had been the one standing closest to the corridor when the stones cracked and the ice overtook them. His hands still trembled sometimes when he thought no one was watching.
I watched everything.
“Kneel,” I said.
They knelt.
I moved to stand before them, my back to the altar. The candlelight too was behind me. I did not arrange it that way deliberately: sometimes these things simply happened when the Boundless were present in a space.
“You saw what the witch did,” I said.
No one spoke, and that was answer enough.
“The corridor. The stones. The water climbing the walls against gravity and freezing in place.” I let a pause settle. “These are not the works of a frightened woman. They are also not the reflexive outburst of untrained power. What we witnessed was revelation; her mask slipped. It was a rare window into the demon inside her because it showed its face, and it showed its face because it felt safe enough to do so.” I looked at each of them in turn. “Ask yourself why it felt safe.”
Bonney’s throat moved.
“The king,” Lionel said quietly.
