Chapter 14: Guinevere's Lesson — What Arthur Refuses to Repeat

The ship ran quiet through hyperspace.

Arthur had learned, in the days since his first transit through that particular howling nothing, that the sound hyperspace made was not silence but something that functioned like it — a constant pressure against the ears that the mind eventually chose to stop registering. He had come to find it useful. It was the closest approximation this galaxy offered to the stillness before a battle, when the army had stopped moving and the orders had been given and there was nothing remaining to do but think.

He sat in the narrow common area between the crew quarters and the forward hold, in the chair nearest the viewport, Excalibur sheathed across his back and his cloak drawn around him against the ship's deliberate cold. The others had retired hours ago. Obi-Wan first, with the disciplined promptness of a man who treated rest as an obligation to his effectiveness. Captain Panaka shortly after, with the squared-shoulder reluctance of a soldier who did not like being far from his queen. Anakin last — the boy had held out with the dogged determination of someone who understood, at some level, that sleep was a form of surrender to the helplessness of transit, and it had been another quarter-hour before the sound of his breathing through the open doorway changed its character and steadied.