He prayed with what sounded like genuine grief, and he prayed to ease the corruption inside me that had forced him to act the way he had. He prayed that the boundary between the righteous and the fallen would increase in distance. He asked Illara to give him strength to continue his sacred charge.
Later, I lay with my face pressed into the thin pallet, and I made myself a promise: that when the reckoning came, I wouldn’t hold back. I’d destroy him quickly, and I wouldn’t hesitate.
From behind me, his voice finished the Illara Litany.“What passes through the veil does not return. Honor the boundary.”
I stared at the wall.
There are boundaries,I thought,that no prayer will undo.
-LANCE-
The first time I found myself standing before Arthur’s door, my hand was raised to knock, and it remained raised until my shoulder started to hurt, yet I didn’t knock. Instead, I thought about Kay and, by extension, his suspicions against me regarding Guinevere’s maidenhood. I told myself, just as I’d told Kay to his face:you have no proof.I’d said the words firmly, assuredly. I’d said them the way I said things before a fight, always knowing the echo of my magic would show me what was coming next.
I lowered my hand.
The problem wasn’t Kay. The problem was the conversation I’d have to have in this room with the last man on earth I wanted to have it with. I’d made the mistake of rehearsing said conversation in my mind, imagining myself standing here in the corridor, trying to find the best way to broach a subject that rankled me more than any other subject ever had. I ran it through my head the way I ran through a fight sequence, anticipating my opponent’s moves and reading the space between them. And, unfortunately, in this instance, my opponent was my oldest friend.
Arthur, there’s something I should have told you.
And then Arthur would look at me with that particular expression on his face. Not immediately. First, he’d be still in the way he got still when he was deciding something. Then there would be the way his attention narrowed, and then I’d have to explainwhyit happened, why I’d given in to the temptation in the first place. I’d have to explain how I’d wanted someone I wasn’t supposed to want in a situation where I knew, and had always known, that he didn’t just desire her, but that he was obsessed with her. I’d have to explain why I’d kept the truth to myself, the weeks of silence, why I’d pretended not to know anything about the man who had taken her virginity. I’d have tooutline the exact shape of my lies and why I’d chosen to protect those lies every morning since.
Every version of that conversation ended the same way: with Arthur’s face doing that thing it did when the king and the man inside him were fighting for the same ground. I’d seen it happen a few times in the years I’d known him, and it wasn’t pretty. I knew what this truth would cost him and wondered if it would perhaps cost him more than it would cost me. What was more, I knew which side of him was always the victor when the stakes were high enough, and it wasn’t the human side of him. I also knew just what the king did to those who betrayed him.
I dropped my hand and walked away.
The next time I found myself outside Arthur’s room, I didn’t lift my hand at all. Instead, I remained in front of the door while a page appeared from around the corner holding piles of neatly folded linens. He stopped when he noticed me just standing there and looked at me in confusion. After he left, I kept standing there, kept not knocking.
I’d served Arthur since we were young men. Since before Camelot was what it now was, before the dragon, before Excalibur, before a white-haired woman had bewitched us both. I knew Arthur’s trust the way you know a piece of equipment you’ve used in the field: not abstractly, not as sentiment, but by its actual dimensions. I knew what angle of pressure his trust could bear and what angle would find the seam and split it right open.
What I was carrying with me was the wrong angle. What was more, the second he opened that door, the second the words came out of my mouth, everything would change.
The door was in front of me, and on one side of it was the man I’d been for twenty years. On the other side was the man I’d be after this conversation, whichever way it ended. Icould feel the distance between both of those men like a drop in temperature, like the air before a storm front came in.
I thought:if I walk away now, the walking away is the choice.
Then I thought:if I tell him the truth,there’s no unchoosing that choice afterward.
So, I walked away. Again.
I told myself it wasn’t betrayal. I told myself it was triage: that the damage was already done and the only question now was containment. I told myself that confessing the truth would serve my conscience at the direct expense of something larger and more important than my conscience deserved. I told myself Kay’s evidence was only circumstantial. I told myself that I owed Arthur honesty but not self-immolation. I told myself a great many things on the walk back to my own chambers. Each reason I gave myself as to why I’d avoided telling Arthur the truth was technically defensible.
Yet not one of my excuses made the feeling of dread within me go away.
That night I lay on my back, looked at the ceiling, and couldn’t sleep. Instead, the small yellow light of the candle flame grabbed my attention as it fought with the encroaching darkness. The candle had burned down to a nub, and there was no fire in the grate. The room had long since gone cold, but when the serving girl had come to attend to it, I’d told her to leave. She’d looked relieved.
I thought about Guinevere. Truly, she was never far from my thoughts. And I thought about the dream with Morgan in it: the dream of Guinevere’s back riddled with wounds. Every time I thought about it, a rage would begin to brew inside me, until I reminded myself there was no truth to the dream. It was just simply that: a dream. Yet, it haunted me, all the same.
I thought about Guinevere’s magic being bound and how she was surrounded by people who would destroy her, about how she had no allies here. Well, aside from Corvin, I supposed. But he wasn’t doing much for her, rotting away in his cell as he was. Mostly I thought about the fact that she’d built herself a trap and now she lived inside it. And I wasn’t sure how I felt about that fact or how Ishouldhave felt about it. As it was, it just existed within me as a large and yawning void.
Then I thought about how I’d done the exact same thing to myself: built myself a trap from which I couldn’t escape. The parallel wasn’t comfortable. I turned onto my side, which still didn’t help me fall asleep.
She would recognize the story, I thought. If I described it to her without names and specific contexts, if I just described facing Arthur’s door, the rehearsed conversation, the walking away, the rationalizations that were each just barely sufficient... she would know exactly what I was describing. She’d recognize the shape of it, the specific way a person can stand at the threshold of the worst version of themselves and choose that version not out of weakness but out of cold, clear-eyed calculation that felt, in the moment, almost like wisdom.
She’d say nothing, I was fairly sure. Just like she’d continued to say nothing all along. That was the part I kept returning to. She wouldn’t name me or condemn me, even when she had the power to do just that. And I couldn’t fucking understand why. Why was she protecting me? Why wouldn’t she just tell Arthur the damned truth every time he ordered it from her?
I thought about the last thing I’d said to her.
You’re dead to me.