Chapter 6: A Rumor Takes Root

Guinevere heard the whisper three separate times before noon, each telling wearing a slightly different shape than the last, the way rumors always did by the time they’d passed through enough mouths to lose any resemblance to whatever thin truth had first set them moving. Lady Elaine and the foreign knight, walking the garden alone again. Lady Elaine and the foreign knight, seen laughing together near the stables, heads bent close enough that a passing groom had felt compelled to look away. Lady Elaine, some said — and this was the version that lodged itself somewhere under Guinevere’s ribs and would not be dislodged by any amount of telling herself it did not matter — growing genuinely, unmistakably fond of a man the whole court had watched arrive from the sea only weeks before.

She told herself, working the needle through her embroidery with more force than the delicate work strictly required, that it was nothing to her. Elaine was unmarried, and free to be courted by whichever man had earned her family’s blessing, and Arthur’s own blessing besides, if the rumors of the assassin’s aftermath were to be believed. It was not Guinevere’s place to feel anything at all about who occupied the attention of a woman she had known and genuinely liked since before either of them had fully understood what the rest of their lives might ask of them.

She felt it anyway. She had felt it, if she was entirely honest with the private, unguarded corner of herself she rarely let anyone else near, since the morning of the tournament, watching a stranger disarm Lancelot with an ease that had made the whole yard forget to breathe — and she had spent every day since trying, with only partial success, to talk herself back out of a feeling that had no business existing in a woman married to a king.

Lancelot found her in that state, needle abandoned, staring at nothing in particular out the solar’s tall window, and read the whole of it in her face before she had said a single word.

“You’ve heard the talk of the garden,” he said, settling into the chair across from her with the easy familiarity of a man who had once shared far more with her than conversation, and had never quite managed to fully unlearn the habit of reading her moods as though he still had the right to.

“I’ve heard several talks of several gardens,” she said, more sharply than she’d intended. “None of them are any business of mine.”

“No,” Lancelot agreed, in a tone that suggested he did not believe that any more than she did. He had grown quieter since the tournament — quieter, and stranger, in the way of a man carrying a guilt he had not yet found anywhere safe to set down. Whatever guilt lived behind his eyes when he looked at her now, Guinevere had long since stopped trying to name it plainly, for fear of what naming it might force them both to finally address. “But I’ve watched you long enough to know when something sits wrong in you, whatever business it is or isn’t.”

It was not kindness, precisely, that made him say what he said next. Guinevere would turn the moment over many times in the weeks that followed and never fully settle on what it had truly been — jealousy of his own, perhaps, watching another man win so easily what Lancelot himself had once nearly destroyed everything to have; or some clumsier, more selfish instinct toward mischief, the kind a man reaches for when he cannot bear to sit in his own discomfort a moment longer without doing something, anything, to disturb the stillness of the room around him.

“They say he means to ask for her hand outright,” Lancelot said. “Openly, before the whole court. I imagine that’s rather harder to watch than a garden walk, if a person had any real stake in how quickly a foreign knight’s affections settled.”

He was watching her face as he said it, and Guinevere understood, a half-second too late to stop her own expression from betraying her, that he had wanted exactly this reaction and had gotten it in full — the small, involuntary flinch of a woman who had told herself for weeks that none of this mattered to her, undone in a single sentence by a man who knew her well enough to aim precisely where it would land hardest.