Chapter Six
Six
Harlestone was a day’s ride if you were in a hurry, two if you were feeling leisurely. Bridget and Neil had plenty of time until the next tourney began. They made the trip in seven hours anyway.
Neil didn’t say anything, but he made sure to be as visibly harried as possible, wiping his brow with his handkerchief to dispatch imaginary sweat, tutting up a storm whenever Bridget insisted they mount up with haste after stopping to relieve themselves and the horses.
He didn’t ask what the rush was, because he knew just as well as Bridget did that there wasn’t any.
They had spent four days feasting among friends and watching the tourney at Dunstable—Bridget’s hands twitching for the reins each time a knight moved left when she would have shifted right—before saying their farewells.
The Camelot contingent had departed, the tourney had drawn to a close, Lady Joan Baker a very respectable twenty-sixth in the rankings.
The festivities at Harlestone would not truly begin for another week.
Bridget and Neil rode into the courtyard of the White Hart at Holtropp very late, the stables already near full and the torches threatening to sputter out in the fine mist of rain.
“I’ll order some dinner,” Bridget said, while Neil stretched out his arm, wincing, apparently dying of horse elbow.
Inside, it was hot and loud, the air thick with smoke and the smell of grease.
As Bridget stood dripping in the doorway, the nearest man put down his pint and nudged his companion, jerking his head toward her.
An uneasy quiet spread across the room like the creep of spilled blood, and Bridget breathed in and out through her nose and then approached the bar.
“Dinner and lodgings for two,” she said to the barman. He just stared back at her through wild beard and bloodshot eyes; eventually she dropped a calfskin purse full of coins on the scarred wood between them, and it seemed to thrill him back to life.
“Oi,” said a whiskered, older gentleman to her left.
No good ever came of a man saying “oi.”
“You’re … you know. You’re that girl.”
Bridget didn’t bother to meet his eye. He’d take the invitation regardless; it would only be a waste of eye contact.
The innkeeper returned Bridget’s purse, and pushed two tankards her way. She nodded and went to sit down.
“Oi,” said the man again. He looked around fifty, his skin leathered, his clothes painstakingly mended. “Come back. We were having a chat.”
Uppercut to the chin, he’d be out easy. Or sweep his legs. Elbow to the shoulder if he tried to swing back, and the arm would dislocate with a satisfying crunch. One strike to the throat. Maybe another, for pudding. She didn’t need her sword. She was a sword.
The feeling crested inside her and then was gone. Her mother would have been proud. She’d always been a peace-first sort of woman.
“You don’t mind, do you?” the man said, unbelievably coming to sit at her table. “You’re here fighting in the tourney, I suppose. Couldn’t pay me to do it, no, waste of my time—and it’s no place for a lady. Though you’re not like any lady I’ve ever seen.”
Bridget took a sip of her drink. It was too sour for her liking. She hoped it was pie for dinner. Usually it was miscellaneous stew. It always tasted like the color beige, criminally underspiced compared to her mother’s cooking, but at least with pie you might get gravy.
“They’ve got some pretty strange ideas about people up at the castle,” the man said, his tone harder. “No wonder folks are getting all confused. You must have been there, eh? You met the king? What do you reckon—off his rocker? Must be, with all this freedom-to-love stuff. It’s not right.”
Fish pie was hit or miss, but they were miles from the coast, so it would hopefully be chicken or lamb.
He was still going. “Maybe some of those cultists don’t mind, but good, God-fearing folk won’t stand for it. It’s unnatural.”
There was a small commotion at the door, which was just how Neil liked to enter a room, and then he was sighing and pulling up a chair next to Bridget.
“Your horse pissed on my boots,” he said, taking up one of the tankards. “Also, it smells weird in here.”
“Probably the horse piss,” said Bridget.
Neil nodded at the man. “Who’s your friend?”
He seemed affronted. “Who am I? Who’re you?”
“Okaaay,” Neil said, his voice flat.
Bridget’s grip tightened slightly around her drink. Here we go.
“Piss off then, princess—I was just talking to your pal here.” At “pal,” the stranger slung an arm around Bridget’s shoulders. Neil’s eyebrows catapulted skyward. “She’s a good girl, she’ll tell you.”
“Remove your arm,” Bridget said calmly, putting down her drink.
He gave her a squeeze instead. “Don’t be shy. I bet it’s been a while since you—”
His arm popped loose like its only goal in life was to dislocate. By the time he started bellowing, Bridget and Neil were on their feet.
“I already paid,” Bridget said with some regret as they headed for the exit, and Neil shrugged.
“Doesn’t matter. It’s fish pie for dinner.” His face twisted with disgust. “Smelled someone throwing it back up by the stables.”
It was raining harder as they set off, hungry and in haste, and yet Neil was uncharacteristically silent. Bridget heard not a single complaint—not even a snarky sigh. It was very unnerving.
“Norhamptone isn’t far,” she said, raising her voice to be heard over the wind and the uneven drumming of rain. “Plenty of inns to choose from.”
“Mmm.”
It only took him another twenty minutes to break.
“What’s the point?” he shouted, pulling his horse level. “Why even enter at Harlestone? Why not take the rest of the season off? Why not go home, or … or back to Camelot?”
Rain was sluicing very dramatically down his face. His hair was in ruins; he liked to coif it into a perfect bronze helmet each morning, but now it was plastered to his forehead, spots of pink on his nose and cheeks, like he was halfway to catching a chill.
“Your heart isn’t in it,” Neil continued, gesturing at her and loosing rain in her direction. “You’ve been like this all summer, and it’s only getting worse! I don’t know what you’re trying to prove, but it’s not working. It’s actually very annoying!”
“I’m not giving up,” Bridget said, loud and even.
“Except you are bloody giving up, because you’re withdrawing and then entering the next tourney only to forfeit again.
You’re quitting but insisting you haven’t, so you don’t even get to enjoy the time off!
Instead of beating yourself up about it, why not take some actual rest?
Choose to withdraw, completely, and come back when you’re ready? ”
“Forfeiting three times—”
“Five times actually. And you might as well have withdrawn at Snowdoun, but you and I both know you only stayed because of how bloody long it took us to get there.”
At Snowdoun, Bridget had fallen badly and been blackened all up one side with bruising for the rest of the tourney. The pain hadn’t been bad, really, but after that she’d started making decisions out of fear. Flinching away instead of leaning toward.
Frustrating. She’d been spooked just like her horse, and for some reason, she hadn’t recovered.
Why couldn’t she move past this? Why had it started now, this season, when she’d ridden just fine in the lists last year, mere months after her brush with death on the battlefield? Why was it getting worse?
“I won’t withdraw again.”
“You can’t say that, because it’s not true! Except— I suppose now you have said it, you’ll force yourself through because you always keep your word, and end up with a broken neck just to prove me wrong.”
Bridget didn’t know what to say, how to explain.
How could she, when it didn’t even make sense inside her own head?
She’d tried to write it down many times, started letter after letter, struggling to find some way of putting it into words that Gwen would understand, but every attempt had just felt more pathetic.
Into the rain-spattered quiet that followed came the sound of hoofs on the road, deadened by the mud. Bridget pulled her horse out of the way to allow the rider to pass, which he did in a flash of lamplight and rich color, before disappearing into the darkness.
“We’re not going home,” Bridget said, squeezing with her heels and trotting on. She couldn’t return yet, not like this. Unfit. Unworthy. Gwen couldn’t see her until she was fixed.
“Well,” Neil said, like he was working himself up to say something really cutting. “Well. Then maybe … maybe I—”
Hoofs again. The rider was back. Perhaps he was lost.
“I beg your pardon,” he said, squinting out from underneath his large hat, “but might you be the Lady Bridget, riding hence with your squire to the tourney at Harlestone?”
“Er. Yes,” said Bridget, slightly taken aback by this astuteness. “That’s exactly who I am.”
“Excellent,” said the man. “If you’ll permit me—did you know, my lady, that thou art riding the wrong way?”
“We’re seeking alternative lodgings,” said Neil. “We don’t like fish pie.”
“Ah.” The rider nodded, not quite as if he understood, but as if he fervently wished to. “No matter—I hail from Camelot, charged to deliver this message.”
He produced a small scroll, then hesitated, reluctant to give it up to the rain.
“Maybe you could read it to us,” Neil suggested, “in the shelter of your big hat?”
The messenger looked to Bridget. “My lady?”
“Yep,” said Bridget. “Go for it.”
“What if the contents are private?”
“Then we’ll just have to become very good friends.”
He didn’t laugh. The scroll was unfurled, and the man leaned toward his failing lamp so that he could read aloud.
“The Lady Bridget Leclair of House Leclair is hereby invited by His Majesty King Gabriel to swear an oath of chivalry and take up a seat at his round table, to serve Camelot and the kingdom with fealty and honor. And then—and then there is a note written after, signed with the seal of the king, but I am not sure—”
“Go on,” said Bridget. She had moved closer to both man and scroll as he read from it, as if she were being drawn in by the gravity of this moment.
Even with mud under her fingernails and rain running down the back of her neck, there was something akin to magic in the air.
Neil could feel it too. He’d stopped scowling, at any rate.
The man cleared his throat, looking pained.
“It says, in I believe His Majesty’s hand, Only if you’re interested, Bridget, but honestly, no worries if not.”