Did that mean I wanted Tristan? I didn’t even know. I was simply existing and had been since I’d found myself imprisoned in Arthur’s dungeon. There had been little else in my mind than pure survival.
So why was I having sexual dreams about Tristan?
His name sat in my chest more steadily as I sounded it out in my mind. He had no investment in Camelot’s outcome, by his own admission. He’d come from somewhere with blue harbors and salt-warm stone, and he’d ended up here by the usual mix of skill, accident, and probably a decision made in youth that couldn’t be unmade. He’d looked at me like a foreigner looks at things they haven’t learned to dismiss yet.
And he’d told me the truth about Arthur: that Arthur had noticed Tristan noticing me and that Arthur had told him to essentially spy on me. And of course Tristan had agreed because he’d had to agree. But he’d also told me the truth about their arrangement, and that was worth something.
Did that mean that Tristan could become an ally to me? Or was that the whole point: that I’d drop my walls around him just as Arthur wanted me to? Was this all part and parcel of the king’s plan? I didn’t know. But I wanted to find out because my natural inclination was to want to trust Tristan, and I didn’t know why. I didn’t know if it was just a weakness on my part because I so wanted a friend, or if it was something else.
The inconvenient truth was that I wanted him to be genuine in his attentions to me. I wanted to find a friend in him. That was the problem: that I wanted him to look at me the way he had in the yard, like I mattered.
And that was a problem because wanting things was how you lost them.
Across the room, the sound Galahad was making stopped. It was followed by a long silence. Then the careful pull of linen.
I kept my breathing even. Kept my eyes aimed at the ceiling.
In. Out. Like someone sound asleep, like someone dreaming and not aware that the religious zealot was stroking himself to a woman he considered a demon.
I didn’t decide anything where Tristan was concerned, but the question remained open in the dark like a wound that wasn’t ready to close.
Can I trust him?
I didn’t know. But I was already asking, and that alone was more than I’d given anyone in Camelot, aside from Lance. And I already knew how that had ended.
Which meant I needed to be very, very careful.
-GUIN-
The library smelled of old paper and rain. Water ran in long silver threads down the narrow windows, and the light that managed to get through was flat and colorless, the kind of light that made everything look like it was already in the past.
A guard had brought me here without explanation. I’d stood in the center of the room for several minutes before Arthur arrived, long enough to understand that I was meant to feel the waiting.
He came in without ceremony, as he always did. No announcement, no pause in the doorway. He simply entered the room as if it had been waiting for him specifically.
He didn’t look at me right away. Instead, he moved to the shelves along the far wall and ran one finger across the spines of several books, unhurried, as if he’d come here for the books and I was incidental. I watched him do it and said nothing. I’dlearned by now that Arthur’s silences were never empty, and if you could read them, you could learn something.
“Lance mentioned something at the last council,” he said finally, still facing the shelves. His voice was even, almost conversational. “He said you looked... emaciated.”
I said nothing, even though I was surprised to hear that Lance would have mentioned my physical appearance in a council meeting. Actually, I was surprised that Lance would mention me at all.
He turned then and looked at me properly for the first time. His gaze moved over me in brief assessment, not the way a man looks at a woman, or notonlythat. It was more the way a commander looks at something that belongs to him and wants to know its condition.
“Is Galahad not feeding you adequately?”
“I eat what I’m given.”
“That’s not what I asked.”
I held his gaze but said nothing further. He let the silence sit for a moment, then he moved away from the shelves and toward one of the chairs near the cold fireplace, but he didn’t sit. He stood with one hand resting on the back of it, watching me.
“It concerns me,” he started.
“Why would my state of physical being concern you?”
He gave me a look. “If you would have allowed me to finish, you would have learned that your physical state isn’t what concerns me. What does concern me is that a knight of my Round Table is directing his concern toward a prisoner’s welfare during a council meeting.” He tilted his head slightly as I glared at him and fumed at myself for making such a stupid mistake. Why would I have ever thought that Arthur would be concerned about me personally? It was stupid. “It concerns me more that Lance felt it necessary to say it aloud.”
“Perhaps he simply noticed.”