I took it. The wool was soft, the kind that held warmth without scratching the skin. When I pressed it against my face, it smelled of horses and something sweet, apples or meadow grass, the smell of a life lived largely outdoors.
“Arthur won’t like that you did this,” I said.
She smiled as she nodded. “I know.”
Then she started for the door, and at the threshold, she stopped to turn and face me. She didn’t say anything, and neither did I. We both just smiled at one another, which was sort of a strange thing to do, I thought. And then she opened the door and disappeared through it, and my visit with Isolde was over for the time being.
I sat with the gown clutched against my chest and the bread still warm in my stomach, and I tried to assemble what had just happened into something that made some sort of sense. But I couldn’t reconcile it. Isolde of Corbenic had walked into my room and given me food and her own gown. But it was everything she hadn’t said that still rang through me:I know what was done to you. I know you didn’t deserve it.And then she’d left.
I put on the gown. It was slightly loose, but the fit was close enough. The sleeves fell to my knuckles. In the water basin, Icaught a reflection that looked, for the first time in weeks, like a person rather than a project.
I sat on the bed once more as I thought about her: the practical boots, the loosening braid. The way she’d slid the tray toward me without comment. The way she’d looked at the fire that wasn’t really a fire at all, but cinders. I was supposed to resent her, I supposed. She was obviously Arthur’s intended. Of that, I was fairly certain. What other reason would she have for being here? What was more, every feast she sat at his right hand, and she made him smile. She touched his arm, and he didn’t pull away. And he’d told me he was courting her.
Because I hated him, I was meant to hate her too, wasn’t I? Especially if she would soon be queen and I’d remain exactly what I was: a prisoner.
I tried to hold onto that mantle of hate, but I found I couldn’t really wear it because the woman who occupied that chair beside him, who laughed at his side, who cut meat from his plate and touched his arm with casual intimacy… that same woman had walked into a prisoner’s room with breakfast and her own clothing, and she’d given me the grace of not being watched while I ate.
Isolde of Corbenic deserved the place she occupied beside the king, even if I believed she was too good for him. Regardless, she deserved his attention, deserved the life she was building in the spaces between diplomatic visits and easy laughter.
The recognition sat in my chest, heavy and immovable: under different circumstances, in a different life, in the one where I hadn’t been sent to betray a king and hadn’t ended up in a cell and hadn’t passed through Galahad’s room like cloth through a mangle... under those circumstances, Isolde was the kind of woman I would have wanted as a friend.
CHAPTER FIFTY
-GALAHAD-
The blood dripping from my lips had started up again long before I made it to the chapel.
It hadn’t healed in the days since Lance had beaten me. Regardless, I hadn’t wiped the blood away, for there was no reason for me to wipe it clean. After all, blood shed in service to the divine was not a wound; it was a signature. It was the body’s way of recording what the soul already knew.
The oratory was empty at this hour, which was how I preferred it. It was just me and three rows of narrow pews that had been carved from pale ash wood; an altar of unpolished granite that was rough the way truth was rough; and two iron stands holding eight candles each. The candles burned low and gold in the stillness as I knelt.
The cold of the stone reached through my robes, and I felt it as if I had just waded into ice water. I had no cushion for my prayers and had never owned one. Cushions were for men who prayed for comfort rather than clarity.
My ribs ached where Lancelot’s boot had found them; they had broken upon impact, but my own divine power had healed them. Even so, they were still sore. Not only that, but my jaw was still swollen on the left side, which made the simple actof breathing feel like a question I had to answer over and over again. I tried not to notice it because pain was information, and I received it without complaint.
To witness is to serve. To endure is to be refined.
I pressed my palms flat against my thighs, looked at the altar, and allowed the silence to settle over me. I asked nothing of it in return. Almost immediately, an image came to me: that of Lancelot’s expression when his anger had overcome him and he had chosen to take it out on my physical body. His face had been contorted, ugly with his anger. And, let it be known, this was not righteous anger, nor was it even principled fury. It was just want: the naked, animal want of a man who had stopped pretending he was anything more than what he was.
He had attacked me in front of many witnesses, including the King’s Guard, many of the knights, two pages, a groom who happened to be crossing the yard, and, of course, the king. Lancelot had hit me in a rather interesting way; he had been territorial, possessive. His anger had been that of a lover, not a soldier. Thus, it was not a surprise that he had attacked me not for the king, nor for the kingdom.
He had attacked me forher.For the witch. For the woman who harbored the demon.
And Arthur had stood there and watched it happen. Yes, eventually he had intervened, but long seconds had passed before he did. I did not imagine that his inaction was owing to the fact that he wanted to watch me beaten. No, the king was very protective of his men. I believed it was more the shock of watching his First Knight attack another knight of the realm over a prisoner.
I turned this over in my mind carefully, the way I turned every piece of evidence until it began to paint a picture of truth. Arthur had stood there with his arms crossed and his face arranged into the expression he used when he was decidingsomething. He had watched Lancelot drag me up by my collar and repeatedly put his fist into my face, and then later, the king had reprimanded me in front of the other knights.
What no one seemed to understand was that I had been trying to purge the witch of the foul demon within her. They seemed not to understand that a demon did not respect words but only action, nor that a demon would not be wooed from the flesh by pretty words, but by pain; hence the bruises and welts that had appeared on the witch’s body. What was more, I had been given custody of the witch to do with as I saw fit. Truly, I believed she was even more than a witch. She was a woman with ice in her veins and violet eyes that changed color with her mood, which was itself an aberration: the body making visible what the soul harbored. I had fulfilled my charge: I had tested her, I had looked for the mark of the unclean and impure, I had applied the purifications prescribed by the Brotherhood of the Boundless for three generations, the same purifications that had cleared a man in Dunmore of a water-spirit infestation and saved a village in the western hills from a possession that would have taken them all.
I had done my duty. Or, I had attempted to do it. And by sacrificing my own sanctity, my own purity, in order to sheath myself inside her and force the demon to the surface so I could vanquish it… such was yet another example of the ultimate self-sacrifice. And yet... yet, it hadn’t been regarded in such a way, which was rather perplexing. Instead, Lancelot had put his fist in my face and his boot into my ribs, and Arthur had publicly humiliated me, and the witch still breathed.
The witch still breathed.
The candle nearest me shivered as if it were just as offended by the thought as I was. I watched as the flame stretched sideways, toward the far wall, and held there. Then the other candles followed, not in sequence, not in a draft’snatural progression from one end of the room to the other, but all at once as if something invisible were commanding them. All sixteen flames bent outward simultaneously, pointing away from the center of the room like fingers indicating something, and holding there for one breath, two, three.
The air did not move, for there was no open window that could move it; the door behind me was shut and had been. I remained still.
I will not look away. I will not close my eyes against what is shown to me.