Chapter 608: Not Even Him

The fox did not speak during the walk.

Anastasia had expected her to.

She had prepared for questions.

Warnings.

Perhaps the particular kind of condescension very old things sometimes used when speaking to people whose lives could fit inside one of their memories.

None came.

The fox walked ahead through trees that had never been surveyed, never mapped, never cut into parcels and assigned numbers.

The nine followed around her without fully appearing.

Their light lay across the ground in long shifting bands, like moonlight disturbed across water.

Anastasia followed.

For an hour, neither of them said a word.

Then the fox stopped.

She stood at the edge of a small clearing.

And stepped aside.

There was a fire.

Lancelot sat beside it.

He looked up when Anastasia entered the light.

No surprise.

There never was.

Lancelot had always known things before other people realized there was something to know.

She had spent four years assuming it was training.

Now she wasn’t sure where training ended.

He did not stand.

That registered immediately.

For four years, every time Anastasia entered a room, Lancelot stood.

Ballrooms.

Council chambers.

Training halls.

A half-collapsed cathedral once.

Always.

He stayed seated now.

She looked at him properly.

His left side was too rigid.

Breathing shallow.

Careful.

"Your ribs."

Lancelot glanced down.

"Two."

A pause.

"Maybe three."

"From Ormond."

"Yes."

Anastasia crossed the clearing.

She knelt in the dirt in front of him.

The motion felt strange enough that some distant part of her almost laughed.

Princesses did not kneel in dirt.

Apparently they did now.

She placed her palm against his side.

Lancelot went still.

Anastasia noticed immediately.

Not the old stillness.

Not what had risen over him in the clearing when Ormond said stand up and twenty years of conditioning tried to answer.

This was smaller.

Human.

The stillness of someone being touched somewhere he had not expected anyone to touch him.

Anastasia let white-gold mana flow.

It entered carefully.

Found the fractures.

Three.

Of course he had underestimated.

She guided the bone back together.

She had healed his face after slapping him more times than she could count.

It had become tradition.

That was what she had always called it.

A tradition.

She would strike him for saying something impossible in that flat voice, he would look at her as though nothing had happened, and then she would heal whatever damage she’d caused.

Perfectly normal.

The white-gold moved through his ribs now.

There had been no slap first.

No joke.

No excuse.

Only pain.

And Anastasia suddenly could not remember why she had ever needed the first part in order to justify the second.

The fractures sealed.

She withdrew her hand.

Lancelot was looking at her.

"Thank you."

Anastasia sat back on her heels.

She did not trust herself to answer.

"You asked what I was going to say."

She looked up.

"When I turned around."

"The fox told you."

"Yes."

Anastasia’s jaw tightened.

"Then say it."

Lancelot looked into the fire.

For a while, he said nothing.

Anastasia knew his silences.

She knew the silence that meant calculation.

The one that meant he considered a question stupid.

The one that meant there was an answer but he saw no reason to provide it.

This was new.

Lancelot was searching for words.

"I was going to tell you where I came from."

Her hands went cold in her lap.

"Before anything else."

He looked at her.

"Because you’re going back to him."

The fire shifted between them.

"And you should know what you’re going back to."

Anastasia said nothing.

So Lancelot told her.

He did not dramatize it.

Of course he didn’t.

A yard surrounded by stone.

Packed earth.

A woman with no Authority.

No concept.

No cultivation system.

Only a body trained further than anyone else in her world had ever pushed one.

His mother.

The strongest thing that world had produced.

Her hand against his chest when he was small.

Warm.

Steady.

Then the sky changing.

A man appearing inside the yard without walking through the gate.

The stone cracking beneath him merely because he stood there.

His mother stepping between them.

"She cut him."

Anastasia stopped breathing.

Lancelot continued.

"Across the face."

His tone remained flat.

"It was the only thing anyone from her world ever managed to do to him."

Anastasia knew that scar.

A faint line across her father’s left cheekbone.

So small most people would never notice it.

She had.

Because daughters stood closer than courtiers.

Because there had been mornings when she was seven and still small enough to climb onto the arm of his chair while he worked, and once she had traced the air near it and asked where it came from.

A training accident.

That was what Varian had said.

He had smiled.

Changed the subject.

Anastasia stared at the fire.

Transcendents did not scar.

Not unless they chose to.

Bodies like his corrected wounds too quickly.

Meaning—

He had kept it.

Twenty years.

Her father had carried the mark of Lancelot’s mother on his face for twenty years.

"She was on the ground after that," Lancelot said.

Anastasia’s stomach turned.

"He touched the blood."

His eyes stayed on the fire.

"He looked at his fingers."

Then:

"And he looked at me."

The fire snapped.

Lancelot’s voice did not change.

"He said, bring that."

Anastasia felt something inside her go very quiet.

She did not cry.

She had been trained too well.

There were rooms where tears became leverage.

Courts where a trembling mouth could cost negotiations.

Banquets where grief would be discussed by breakfast.

The training held.

It held like a dam with an ocean behind it.

"I didn’t know."

"I know."

Anastasia looked at him.

"I called you my sword."

Lancelot said nothing.

"In front of everyone."

Her voice was frighteningly even.

"For four years."

Ballrooms.

Assemblies.

Private meetings.

Public ceremonies.

"My sword."

Her hands curled.

"I stood beside you and told people you belonged to me."

Lancelot watched her.

"And the entire time, he—"

The sentence failed.

She tried again.

"He took you out of a dead woman’s yard."

Her throat tightened.

"And gave you to me like a birthday present."

"Yes."

The simplicity of the answer almost broke her.

"How can you sit there?"

Lancelot looked at her for a long moment.

"Before the compound."

Anastasia frowned.

"In the ring."

Memory came immediately.

Broken stone.

The dead dampening rune.

Ryuken walking away.

Her hands white around the strap of her document case because she had been furious and hadn’t known where else to put it.

"You told me something."

Anastasia remembered.

Lancelot continued.

"You told me not to allow anyone to reduce me to being useful."

Her chest tightened.

"Yes."

"You said something else."

His eyes stayed on hers.

"Not even him."

Anastasia stopped moving.

"You meant Ryuken."

"Yes."

Lancelot paused.

"I think you also meant your father."

Her breath caught.

"I think you didn’t know you meant him."

The fire shifted.

"And I think you meant yourself."

Anastasia could not speak.

Lancelot looked down at his hands.

"You were the only person who ever told me I was allowed to be something other than useful."

Anastasia’s vision blurred.

She blinked once.

Hard.

"You said it like an order."

A faint change passed through his expression.

Almost humor.

"It was the only order I’ve ever been given that I kept."

Ryuken’s words returned then.

Not when she had needed them.

Now.

When they finally had somewhere to land.

He held back for the first ninety seconds because he explicitly did not want to hurt me.

You should know what that means, coming from a creature like him.

Anastasia had thought Ryuken meant the fight.

Technique.

Restraint.

A measurable fact about Lancelot’s ability.

He hadn’t.

He had been telling her something else.

A man engineered to be a weapon had spent years making tiny decisions not to behave like one.

Ryuken.

Her.

Vane.

In the clearing, when Lancelot had possessed enough power to force Vane to follow and had simply asked instead.

No one had ordered those choices.

No one had trained them.

That was the part Ormond had never met.

Lancelot intended to tear apart the world her father had built.

Anastasia knew that now.

And somehow, sitting beside a fire beyond the boundary of everything she had been raised to call civilization, he had given her something gentle.

He had let her heal him.

Perhaps that was all.

Perhaps that was enormous.

The fire burned low.

Anastasia finally stood.

Lancelot rose too.

This time, she understood the difference.

He had not stood because she was a princess.

He stood because she was leaving.

"I have to go back."

"I know."

"He’ll ask what I saw."

"Tell him the truth."

Anastasia almost laughed.

The sound died before reaching her mouth.

"He won’t forgive me for crossing."

"No."

Lancelot’s answer came easily.

"He won’t."

She looked at him.

There were a thousand things she could have said.

Questions.

Warnings.

Arguments.

None survived long enough to become speech.

So she stepped forward.

Close.

The way she had once done in the Iron Cathedral after forty-three minutes of fighting alone.

Back then, she had reached for his sleeve.

She did not this time.

Lancelot reached first.

His hand settled against her back.

Low.

Flat.

Deliberate.

Anastasia froze.

The weight was exact.

Steady.

No pressure.

No possession.

Exactly as heavy as it needed to be.

Not one gram more.

She had felt that same hand at the gala.

In front of three hundred people.

Standing at her back while nobles whispered about the princess and her weapon.

She had thought it was a guard’s hand.

A sword’s hand.

A hand placed there because that was where the Empire had taught it to be.

It had never been that.

Anastasia’s breath broke.

"Where did you learn that?"

Lancelot’s answer came quietly.

"From her."

The fox waited at the edge of the clearing.

Anastasia walked toward her.

She did not look back.

She knew with absolute certainty that if she did, she would stay.

And someone had to return.

Someone had to cross the fissure.

Walk back through Korreth.

Return to the capital.

Stand in front of the man whose scar she had known since childhood and finally understand where it came from.

Someone had to tell the truth to the person who had started all of this.

So Anastasia kept walking.

The fox turned with her.

Behind them, the clearing grew darker.

A moment later, the fire went out.