The knock came just after the evening bells, and I crossed to the door and opened it. I was surprised to find Percival standing in the corridor. He was holding a small loaf of bread and a wedge of hard cheese wrapped in cloth. His straw-colored curls were damp at the temples, and he looked like he’d walked fast to get here.
“I thought you might not have eaten,” he offered, holding the food out to me.
I stepped back to let him in and closed the door behind him, not bothering to even notice the two guards posted on either side of my door. I didn’t recognize either of them.
Percival set the food on the table and looked around the room as if he were searching for something more to say.
“Your accommodations are far better than before,” he said.
“Yes.”
“The mattress?”
“Functional.”
He nodded like that satisfied him. Then he pulled the chair out from the table, turned it backward, and sat with his arms folded across the top rail, chin resting on his wrists. His blue eyes found mine and stayed there.
“How are you faring?”
“I’m okay.”
The silence between us stretched as outside, somewhere across the courtyard, metal rang against metal in a single clumsy note; then there was nothing.
“Percival.”
“Mm.”
“You didn’t walk across Camelot in the dark to look at my new quarters.”
He lifted his head from his wrists and nodded, giving me a look that had gone quieter and thinner, the way a candle flame goes when there’s not enough air to keep it alive.
“Stay in your bedchamber tomorrow if you can help it,” he said. “Don’t go to court in the morning.”
I looked at him. “You know I have little say in where I go or what I do.”
He nodded as if he’d expected that response. “Feign illness if you can.”
“Why?”
“Don’t go to the training yard either,” he added. “Just... stay here. Read something. Sleep. Whatever you like.”
“What’s happening tomorrow?”
He shook his head. “I don’t know.”
“Percival.”
“I genuinely don’t know,” he insisted, and the particular flatness in his voice told me that not only was it true, but it bothered him considerably. “I’ve been dreaming of things that make little sense to my rational mind,” he explained, shaking his head. “But in those dreams, there is always the feeling that you should be in hiding. I can’t explain it more than that,” he continued, knowing I would ask more than he could tell me. “But that isn’t all. I have heard... conversation that stopped when I walked into a room. Two of the younger guards from Galahad’s former retinue left chapel three nights ago looking...” He paused and chose the next word carefully. “Illuminated.”
“I don’t understand your meaning.”
He unfolded himself from the chair and stood. “When people come out of things looking illuminated, it means someone has told them they are instruments of something larger than themselves. And that is almost always the beginning of someone else getting hurt, and I worry that someone else is you.”
I crossed to the window and noticed not for the first time that the glass was old and slightly warped and the courtyard below appeared wavy and buckled, but I could see it enough. Percival came to stand beside me, not close enough to crowd me, but simply looked out at the courtyard.
“When Galahad is angry,” he said quietly, “he breaks things, as you know. Controlled breaks that are precise, like a surgeon’s scalpel. You can predict it, work around it, wait for it to pass.” He paused. “When Galahad is quiet—”
“—then he’s planning.”