I stepped into the small basin.
“Sit.”
I did as I was told, and every muscle in my body contracted at once. My lungs emptied as I gripped the basin’s edge and forced air back into them the way Merlin had taught me to breathe through pain. Of course, he’d meant a different kind of pain altogether. Regardless, the cold of the water was aggressive. It pressed against every inch of me, but I stood in it and breathed until the worst of the seizing passed.
Galahad knelt beside the basin with the rough cloth, the same one he’d used the first time he’d subjected me to this. He began the Solvaine prayer. “Water finds the truth of every landscape. It cannot be deceived.”
His voice didn’t falter. Yet his hands, as they washed my body with the freezing cold water, moved more slowly than they had the first time.
I pushed that little kernel of information into the storage of my mind. That’s what I did: turned my mind into a ledger where I wrote everything down. It was how I’d held my cover as Lioran for weeks among men who would have killed me for what I was. It was also how I’d survived the stripping before the court and the look in Lance’s eyes when he’d told me I was dead to him.
The ledger didn’t feel things. The ledger only recorded, and I loved it for that.
Galahad’s hands moved across my shoulders, my collarbones. He lifted each arm and examined beneath it, as though he was looking for something. Each time was the same: he was clinical and purposeful. When he reached my ribcage, his thumb grazed the side of my breast.
He paused.
One breath held. Two.
Then he moved on.
He told me to stand.
I stood but couldn’t stop my body from shaking with cold. Galahad didn’t seem to notice, or if he did, he didn’t care. Instead, he walked around me the way a merchant circles a horse at auction, assessing its weight, conformation, and soundness. His lips moved in the Drenath penitential. I recognized it by now; I’d had days of these texts recited at me.
“Strip from me what is unworthy.”
Soon, he began his prayer to Kaelthar. “Open my eyes to what is hidden. Let no falsehood pass unchallenged before my sight. I will not look away. I will not close my eyes against corruption. To witness is to serve. To see is to stand guard.”
His hand touched the small of my back. He was no longer sponging me down. In fact, I wasn’t sure where the rag hadgone. His fingers moved down my spine slowly. He was counting vertebrae, it seemed.
“Wha-what are you doing?” I asked with a shiver.
“The Book of Abominations holds that the corruption mark manifests along the sacral line in magic-bearing women, in witches.”
This was the first time he’d checked me for the witch’s mark. Or, at least, the first time he’d mentioned it.
“I’m not a witch.”
“The witch’s mark will say otherwise.”
His voice was perfectly steady; his breathing wasn’t so steady.
I could hear it change. The inhalations became faster and the exhalations shallower. It was the specific rhythm of a man who was losing a war he’d decided to call by a different name.
His hand stopped just above the curve of my lower back. His breathing sped up.
Behind Mordred’s binding, my magic screamed. I felt it the way you feel a shout through a stone wall: the vibration without the sound. The water in the basin was right there. I could sense it, sluggish and cold, but I couldn’t touch it, couldn’t move it, couldn’t do anything with it except stand in it, shake, and keep breathing.
He turned me to face him.
His eyes were glassy as he examined my stomach, my navel, the line of my hip bones, pressing his fingers into the bone as if testing my structure. He refused to look at my quim, and when his eyes dropped too low, he cleared his throat and immediately looked up at my face.
“Raise your arms.”
I raised them, and my breasts moved as I did. He tried not to notice them, keeping his eyes trained on mine. His voice stayed even when he spoke.
“The mark often manifests near the heart for corruption enters closest to thevitalseat.”