Chapter 102
Lancelot didn’t sleep. He lay in the dark of his room turning the shape of the thing over and over, the golden light unraveling off a dying woman’s body and pouring into a man who hadn’t even bothered to hurry, and somewhere around the third hour of failing to stop thinking about it he stopped trying and got up instead, because there was exactly one person in this palace old enough and close enough to his mother’s memory to have possibly known something, and if Garran had spent years watching Lancelot make himself small and invisible without ever once mentioning that the entire premise of that survival strategy was built on a lie, Lancelot intended to know why before the sun came up.
He found the old retainer awake already, sitting outside his small quarters near the stables with a cup of something that had long since gone cold, staring at nothing in particular the way men his age sometimes did in the hours when sleep wouldn’t come.
"You’re up early," Lancelot said, "or very late. I can never tell with you."
"Depends on the night." Garran didn’t look surprised to see him, which was itself a small data point, filed away without comment. "You look like a man who’s seen something he can’t put back where he found it."
"That’s an oddly specific thing to guess."
"I’ve known you a long time. You don’t come find me at this hour unless something’s cracked open that you can’t close again on your own." Garran gestured at the low bench across from him, and Lancelot sat, and for a moment neither of them said anything, the silence stretching in the particular way it did between two people who both knew a real conversation was coming and neither wanted to be the one to start it.
"I saw someone die tonight," Lancelot said finally. "Not one of the seven. A cousin. Distant blood, some minor house nobody important enough to remember the name of, and the man who killed her didn’t hurry, didn’t seem frightened, didn’t seem anything except tired, and when she died the power went into him. I watched it happen. Light, or something like light, crossing the space between them and disappearing into his chest, and when he stood up afterward he stood up like a man who’d just put on a heavier coat and found it fit."
Garran’s face didn’t change, not in any way a stranger would have caught, but Lancelot had spent his entire life learning to read the smallest tells on faces that had decided not to give anything away, and he saw it, the almost imperceptible stillness of a man being asked a question he’d hoped never to answer.
"You knew."
"I suspected." Garran’s voice had gone low, careful, each word chosen with the particular weight of a man setting down something fragile. "Suspected isn’t the same as knew. I served your mother’s household before you were born, boy. I heard things, over the years, whispers that never went anywhere solid enough to repeat, about what the succession actually costs, about why the Bloodguard exists and what they’re actually guarding. Nobody ever said it to my face. Nobody says things like that to a retainer’s face. But I put enough of it together to have a shape of a suspicion, and I never once had proof, and a suspicion without proof isn’t something you hand to a nine-year-old boy who’s already got six siblings who’d kill him for less."
"You could have told me when I was older."
"Told you what? That the seven of you might be expected to murder each other for the throne, based on nothing but old servants’ talk and things half-remembered from before you were born? What would you have done with that, Lancelot? Gone looking for proof the way you did tonight, ten years earlier, with even less sense than you’ve got now?" Garran’s voice sharpened, not with anger exactly, something closer to old, worn-down fear finally given permission to speak. "I kept you alive by teaching you to be nobody. That worked. It’s still working. You want to throw that away chasing down a truth that might get you killed learning it properly instead of secondhand from a corridor?"
"It’s not secondhand anymore." Lancelot’s voice had gone very quiet, very level, the tone he used when the joking had genuinely run out and there was nothing underneath it but the cold, clear thing he actually was. "I watched it with my own eyes tonight, Garran. That’s not a suspicion. That’s a fact I now have to live inside of, whether either of us likes it."
Garran was silent for a long moment, turning the cold cup in his hands without drinking from it. "What are you going to do with it."
"I don’t know yet." That was, mostly, a lie, or at least not the complete truth, because some part of Lancelot’s mind had already begun assembling the shape of an answer even as he sat there, cold and precise, the way it always did once a problem had enough pieces on the table to start sorting. "But I know what I’m not going to do. I’m not going to keep pretending I’m furniture and hope none of my brothers or sisters ever decide furniture is worth burning for the warmth. If this is real, if the rule that just killed a woman in a slum applies to the seven of us the same way it apparently applies to every distant cousin with a drop of the same blood, then someone in that palace has already worked that out. Someone’s already decided which of us is worth killing and in what order. I’d put good money on my own name sitting somewhere near the top of that list, not because I’m dangerous, but because I’m easy."
"That’s not proof of anything either."
"No. But it’s the only theory I’ve got that actually explains why nobody’s ever bothered to properly kill me, despite two separate attempts when I was a child that both felt less like real efforts and more like someone checking a box." Lancelot leaned forward, elbows on his knees, and for the first time that night something almost like his usual humor crept back into his voice, dark and sharp and entirely without warmth. "Nobody plans carefully around a threat they’ve already decided doesn’t exist, Garran. I’ve built my entire life around that principle. It never once occurred to me that the reverse might also be true. That nobody bothers planning carefully around killing something they’re fairly sure is already going to die on its own."
Garran set the cold cup down on the bench beside him, the small clink of it loud in the quiet. "So what. You go to war with six people who’ve had their whole lives to prepare for exactly this, starting from nothing, with no faction, no army, no magic worth naming."
"I go to war the only way someone starting from nothing ever wins one." Lancelot’s eyes had taken on something Garran hadn’t seen in them before, not quite the boy he’d raised, not quite anything Garran had a name for yet. "Not with strength. I don’t have any, and pretending otherwise gets people killed faster than admitting it does. I go to war the way I’ve survived every single day at that court so far. By being the thing nobody’s watching closely enough to see coming. They’ve spent their whole lives sharpening themselves against each other, Garran. Aldrik against Roderic. Isolde locked away with her books. Draven letting the fear do half his work for him. None of them have spent a single hour of their lives worrying about the weakest heir, because worrying about me has never once been worth their time."
"And you think that changes because you decide it should."
"I think it changes because I’m done waiting to find out whether they eventually decide I’m worth the effort." Lancelot stood, and something in the movement had a finality to it that made Garran look up sharply. "If they want the throne badly enough to kill for it, they’ve already decided, somewhere in the backs of their minds, that I’m acceptable collateral on the way there. I’d rather find out I was wrong about that after they’re all dead than find out I was right about it after I am."
"You’re talking about killing your own family."
"I’m talking about killing six people who were never actually my family in any sense that matters, who share blood with me and nothing else, who’ve spent their entire lives making very sure I understood exactly how little that blood was worth to them." Lancelot’s voice had gone almost gentle, which was somehow worse than if it had stayed cold. "I’m not going to pretend this is going to be clean, or easy, or something I’ll feel good about when it’s done. But I watched a man kill his own cousin tonight without hurrying, Garran, because he’d already worked out there wasn’t another way, and the worst part, the part I can’t stop turning over, is that I believed him. There isn’t another way. Not for people like us. He just had the nerve to admit it out loud before I did."
He was at the door before Garran found his voice again, low and rough behind him. "Where does this start."
Lancelot paused, hand on the frame, and looked back at the old man who’d spent twenty years keeping him alive on the theory that staying small was the only strategy that worked, and felt something that wasn’t quite guilt and wasn’t quite gratitude and was mostly, underneath everything else, a kind of tired affection he didn’t have time to examine properly tonight.
"It starts," he said, "with finding out which of the six of them is actually the weakest. Because everyone in that palace has spent years telling me who they think that is, and I’ve learned the hard way that whatever this court agrees on without evidence is usually worth checking twice before you believe it."