“You mean you’re the only one still holding the knife.”
“I mean I’m the only one who is holding a knife but not using it.” I let that sit.
He was quiet for a long moment. Down the corridor, somewhere in the deeper dark, something dripped. Waterfinding stone, slow, patient, and completely indifferent to the lonely souls within this dour place.
“What do you want from me?” Lance said again, and this time there was something underneath it. Not defeat. Lance didn’t do defeat. But something tired.
“Right now?” I released the bar and straightened my cuffs. “Nothing. You’re not in a position to give me anything useful. When you are, I’ll come back.” I glanced at him once more, the whole picture of him: the set of his shoulders, the healed ribs, the stripped rank, and the intact spine. “Rest. Eat what they bring you. Let Arthur work himself around to the decision he’s already made. I will make certain of it.”
I turned to go.
“Kay.”
I stopped.
“Why aren’t you gloating?”
I considered that. Not the question itself, but whether to answer honestly.
“Because gloating requires surprise,” I said. “I’ve known how this ended since before you did.”
I left him standing there in his cell with the narrow window, which let in actual light, and walked back up through the dark toward the part of the castle where things still moved, changed, and mattered.
CHAPTER FIFTY-FIVE
-ARTHUR-
I sat in the Great Hall with my crown on my head and my back straight, watching three hundred people pretending not to watch me.
What a waste of time.
That was the first thing I thought when I’d been informed of the size of the gathering that had assembled. A Trial of Purity was, by law, a public proceeding. The nobility had the right to witness justice rendered; it was one of those ancient customs that had survived every king who’d tried to quietly bury it, and I was no exception.
When a trial was formally invoked before six witnesses and entered into the court record, the announcement went out, and the court came. All of it. The fifteen noble houses of Logres were required to send representatives or face the implication that they had something to hide. The knights of the Round Table were expected to attend as a body, because Galahad was one of their number and the accused had been held in his care. The only exception was Lance, but at the moment I’d stripped him of his title and his seat so he wasn’t technically a knight of the RoundTable any longer. The herald had to be present to maintain the official record along with the guards, the Archmage Mordred, and the courtiers who lived and breathed on the social oxygen of moments like this one.
And the servants. Because servants always found a way in.
Three hundred people were now crammed into the Great Hall, all of them here because Galahad had been clever enough, or fanatical enough, to invoke the trial before six witnesses in a corridor where anyone might overhear, which meant by the time I’d been informed it had happened, it was already in the record books and already beyond my reach to suppress. That was the part that stuck in my throat like a bone: I, the fucking king, had had no fucking choice in the matter.
So, now there were courtiers, knights, ladies of the court, and servants, pressed into wall niches, all of them trying to get a better view. Fires burned in every hearth, torches flamed in every torch holder until there was nothing left but gold and lies.
Mordred stood at my right, where he’d positioned himself two paces back. His eyes moved across the room in slow, methodical arcs, taking in everything and everyone around him.
They hadn’t come for justice. That much was plain. They’d come because a Trial of Purity was rare: the kind of proceeding that happened perhaps once in a generation. Not only that, but they all wanted to bear witness to the spectacle because the accused was Merlin’s daughter and because the accuser was Galahad, whose reputation for holy conviction made him either a saint or a lunatic, depending on which side of the political divide you stood on. They’d come to watch her condemned or they’d come to watch Galahad humiliated. They hadn’t come expecting anything in between, and they certainly hadn’t come expecting anything that would require them to think.
I had, at least, gotten ahead of that much. I’d told Mordred privately to administer the testing and to find her clean. Theforms would be observed, of course, but the verdict was already written. Galahad would get his little theater, but he’d walk away with nothing, I’d keep my prisoner, and the whole tedious business would be over before noon.
That was the plan at any rate.
“The prisoner, Sire,” Mordred murmured.
The doors at the far end of the hall opened, and she was escorted in by the guards. She wore a blue gown I hadn’t provided for her, and I found myself wondering who had. The fit was slightly off, no doubt owing to the fact that she had lost so much weight while in Galahad’s “care.” Her silver-white hair was unbound, which I found irritating in a way I couldn’t fully account for, perhaps because she looked like an offering.
Her eyes moved across the hall, and I could read the confusion in them from forty feet away. She hadn’t been told of what would go on this morning. I’d made sure of that. I’d let her walk in without armor and without preparation: not to humiliate her, but because I wanted to see what she did with it. She scanned the room, clocked the size of the audience, clocked the arrangement of the guards, and then went very still.
When she found me on my throne on the dais, she held my gaze for exactly three seconds before she looked away. Her jaw remained level, and her hands didn’t shake.
Good.