Chapter Nineteen
Nineteen
John’s investigation of the wildcat den was slow and methodical, and Bridget and Gwen watched politely as he sorted his way through discarded bones. “You see these, here? Some of these are from rabbits and smaller creatures. But this one…” He nudged it with his foot. “Now that might be sheep.”
The bag full of kitten, which had fallen silent, let out a tragic yowl, and Bridget watched as it managed to shuffle a few inches sideways before apparently collapsing.
Through the trees, she could hear distant barking.
Trouble? A warning? John didn’t look up from the chunk of scapula he was examining.
“Give it here,” said Gwen, gesturing for Bridget to hand up the cat.
It didn’t take kindly to being handled, attempting to kill Bridget by aiming for her wrists.
Once Gwen had taken charge of it, she placed it in front of her on the saddle and bent down to speak quietly; it seemed to momentarily stop thrashing to listen.
Bridget looked back over at its deceased parent, the gigantic black paw protruding from the entrance to its den.
It felt like an ill omen. She still had her sword in hand, even though John had sheathed his knife.
The scene seemed eerie somehow, the wood too quiet, death palpable in the air, but apparently she was the only one who could feel it.
“What around here could kill a wildcat? I mean … a Beast?”
John had still been attempting amateur archaeology, but as he looked up to answer Bridget, his expression changed—and every hair on Bridget’s body stood on end, the chill that passed down her spine primal, ingrained into her nerves by a thousand years of ambushes.
“That,” whispered John.
Nose the dog came bursting through the trees, sprinting past them at full speed, and Bridget turned to see an enormous bristle-haired pig following him, its yellowed tusks black with gore, its hoofs carving dark scars in the earth as it prepared to charge.
She didn’t think. There wasn’t time. She stepped toward the pig, looked to Gwen, and shouted, “Run!”
Gwen’s horse, unfailingly sensible, didn’t need telling twice—but the boar was already charging, resolute and unstoppable, and the horse had no place to go that didn’t contain tree or monster.
The pig was screaming, such a hoarse, human shout that it struck unbridled terror into Bridget’s heart; she leaped between that scream and Gwen, her sword raised, waiting for the noise to stop and the pain to begin.
She was hit hard, the impact throwing her against hot legs and hoofs; her vision went black and her head clattered with agony, her arms buckling, boiling to the elbows. There was something on top of her, smothering her, crushing her.
The ragged scream went on and on.
“Bridget,” someone was saying. “Bridget.”
Bridget realized she’d closed her eyes. When she opened them, she found that the boar had come to a sudden stop at the end of her sword, its weight pinning her legs, the blade buried in the roof of its open mouth up to the hilt.
She was the one still screaming.
She stopped at once, her throat sore with effort. Gwen’s horse had jumped free and, miracle of miracles, hadn’t staved in Bridget’s skull in the process.
The boar grunted, shifted, and Bridget took one scarlet hand off the slippery pommel of her sword and reached toward John, who was holding his large, ugly knife just slightly out of range.
He tossed it to her, she caught it by the handle, and then with the kind of steady-handed precision she never could have manufactured outside of a life-or-death situation, she killed the boar with one true strike between the ears.
“God!” Gwen said, dismounting clumsily from her horse and rushing to Bridget’s side. “Are you hurt? Bridget? Are you all right?”
“Yep,” Bridget said, pushing backward away from the boar until her legs were free and her back was supported by a tree, dropping both knife and sword and busying herself cleaning her hands on her cloak, so that she might conceal how hard they were now shaking. She couldn’t stop looking at the boar.
This was good, wasn’t it? Proof that she was better at being a sword in the order of the round table than a tourney knight riding in the lists. She’d killed the boar. No forfeiting, no withdrawing. Of course, in this case, to forfeit would have meant certain death.
So why didn’t it feel good?
John came over, retrieved his knife, then offered Bridget a hand. “Neatly done,” he said before he hauled her up, as casual as if she’d just scored a double at darts.
Nose the dog threw himself at the boar and bravely proceeded to worry its leg, apparently determined to take some credit for its felling.
“Get away, Nose,” John said crossly, and Nose gave the leg one last nip before backing off.
Bridget inspected herself and found that, vast quantities of hog blood notwithstanding, she was mostly unblemished. A few minor cuts and scrapes to her face, and her legs would be sorely bruised, but that was all.
The scream would take longer to recover from.
She’d never heard herself make a sound like it.
Frankly, she’d never heard anyone make a sound like it.
She was ashamed, instantly and utterly. She shrugged off Gwen’s comforting hand, unthinking, as the feeling spiked in her chest—and saw the way Gwen stepped back sharply from her, and felt even worse.
“I’ll dispose of this,” John said, going to Gwen’s horse to retrieve the sack containing the kitten, which squeaked as if it had heard and understood its fate.
“No,” Gwen said quickly. “Um, thank you, John, but the king will want to see this. For … posterity, you know? And research. If it’s spawn of the Beast.”
“Right you are,” said John, throwing the bag over the back of Gwen’s saddle with a carelessness that made the princess wince, and securing it to the billet, where it immediately began to bother the horse.
Bridget wrapped her cloak around her hands, took hold of her sword, and pulled it from the boar with a long, slick heave.
The dog was beseeching them to follow him again, his tail wagging, urgency in his eyes. “I reckon Nose can hear your knights,” John said. Bridget wasn’t sure if she was imagining the newfound respect in the word “knights,” which might before have been said with a healthy measure of disdain.
They remounted, and followed Nose into the wood. The canopy above them opened up, bright harlequin patches of daylight creeping in through the gaps in the branches, and eventually they came to a stream, where they found Nose, tail wagging, with his face buried in the crotch of the King of England.
Gabriel, who was scratching behind the dog’s ears, didn’t look up at first, so it was Arthur who said, “Christ! What the hell, Leclair?”
“Boar,” said Bridget.
“Boar! Bloody boar, we had a run-in with it too. Did it get you?”
“Nope.”
“She killed it,” Gwen said, carefully alighting from her horse and untying the sack. “We think we found the Beast. She was already dead: I imagine the boar killed her. And this is her … um … baby?”
“Baby?” Gabriel gently pushed the dog away and went to her at once. Gwen made a noise of warning as he opened the bag, but as he peered inside nothing leaped at him claws-first. Bridget supposed it had exhausted itself in there. After all, it had probably had quite a difficult day.
“What is it?” said Arthur, going to look for himself. His face lit up as Gabriel carefully closed the bag. “That’s a kitten!”
“It’s a wildcat,” said Gabriel. “They like to hunt in woodlands. Full-grown, they’d be a good match for a boar, although the boar would have the advantage of weight. Especially that one.”
John was bristling again, so Gwen quickly suggested, “We think it’s not quite an ordinary cat. Perhaps the Beast mated with a local wildcat, and produced this offspring?”
“Mmm,” John said, mollified. “Yes. I reckon that’s exactly it.”
“I’m keeping it,” Arthur said happily. “A friend for Merlin Lucifer.”
“Arthur, it’s a wild animal,” Gabriel said, shaking his head. “It’ll grow to be as big as a deerhound. It’ll kill you.”
“It’s a kitten,” Arthur said, aghast. “A baby. Its mother is dead, we can’t leave it here. I’m having it.”
“Don’t be ridiculous.”
“I’m not being ridiculous. You’re being ridiculous. Some nobles keep tigers. And lions. This is only going to be about half as big as a lion. It’s a very reasonable pet, in the grand scheme of things.”
“Think of how much meat you’ll need to feed it.”
“My meat budget will stretch. And she’ll probably catch her own meat. Mice. Rats.”
“Small dogs,” added Gwen. “And perhaps children.” She was watching them argue back and forth with a half smile on her face, and with a start Bridget realized how unusual it was now to see the two of them bickering familiarly together like this.
Last Yuletide it had been commonplace; Arthur and Gabriel sharing a blanket by the fire in Gwen’s chambers, sitting knee to knee at breakfast, riding two astride as they struck out across the frosty countryside.
“Leclair,” Arthur said imperiously. “Please give me some rope.”
“I don’t have any rope.”
He looked deflated. “Well … why not?”
“I’ve got rope,” said John. He pulled it out of his bag and unspooled it. Arthur took it, and he and Gabriel went back to bickering as he laid out a plan to create a makeshift collar and lead, which seemed to involve one person gently pinning the kitten down while the other did some rapid knotting.
John joined them, so that he might put his hands on his hips and give instruction, and Bridget took the opportunity to dismount, walk to the stream, and pull off her gauntlets, squatting to splash some water on her face.
She could feel strands of hair sticking to her neck and forehead, thick with blood and sweat, and thought, not for the first time, about cutting it all off entirely.
Adah did it. Buddhist bhikshunis did it.
Why couldn’t she? The sort of people who would point and jeer at her were the ones who already thought she was a freak anyway.
“Hello,” Gwen said, sitting down on a rock, pulling her dress up slightly at the knees so it wouldn’t trail in the water. “That was quite horrible.”
“Yep.” Bridget unclipped her vambraces too, dropped them in the clear water and let the dark blood bloom. Neil would have to oil them again later, and he would not be gracious about it. “I, uh, I don’t know … where that came from. Sorry.”
“Where what came from?”
Bridget cringed—or, she let her nose wrinkle for just a moment, before her face became smooth and impassive again. It still felt like she’d given far too much away. “The … I was shouting.”
“The shouting? I didn’t even know you were shouting. I think I was screaming at a pitch that would have deafened the dog. I meant what you just had to do. When the pig almost gored you to death? Because you’d thrown yourself bodily in front of me?”
Bridget shrugged, and picked up one vambrace, letting it drip pinkly onto the muddy bank. “It’s what I’m here for, so…”
“It was incredibly brave.”
“It’s not a big deal.”
“Not a big—?”
“It’s my job. I’m a knight. Any one of this party would have done the same.” She went to pick up her other vambrace, and was baffled when Gwen snatched it from her and threw it into the stream, water arcing after it. She stared at it for a moment before saying, “Why?”
“Because you’re annoying me,” said Gwen.
“Can we just agree that you did something very dangerous and heroic? None of this ‘Oh, just another day on the job, m’lady’ bullshit?
It was terrifying. I was terrified. Can we acknowledge this, instead of just adding it to the frankly enormous pile of terrifying things that have happened to you recently and moving on? ”
Bridget got up from her squat, feeling slightly creaky, and went to fetch her vambrace. “There haven’t been that many terrifying things.”
“Oh, yes, just surprise apprehending an assassin outside my brother’s bedroom in the middle of the night.
Unfettered violence in the tourney, from all those men who hated you for daring to enter.
Fighting off the guards of a would-be usurper who was hell-bent on killing you.
Nearly dying on the battlefield. Killing said usurper.
It’s all just a regular Tuesday for Bridget Leclair. ”
“It’s—”
Gwen threw her hands up in the air with frustration. “A pig just tried to eat you!”
Bridget shook her vambrace mostly free of water, then sat down next to Gwen on the rock. Gwen moved up a little to make more room, then took the armor from Bridget’s hand and started drying it with her cloak.
“A pig tried to eat me,” Bridget repeated.
“And it was a big deal,” Gwen prompted, biting her lip in concentration as she scrubbed a stubborn smear of congealed blood from the smooth steel.
“Yeah. Guess it was.” Bridget cleared her throat. “I was scared.”
“Thank you.” She handed the vambrace to Bridget, who began strapping it back on. “You’re only human. Of course you were scared. I’m sorry I threw this in the river, and shouted at you. Even if you did deserve it.”
“You didn’t shout much.”
“I did a bit. God, you really are covered in quite a lot of blood. We should … seek the others, they must be looking for us. Regroup. Find a bath.”
Bridget closed her eyes, noted the faint nausea in the back of her throat, the almost feverish exhaustion in her limbs. The day had taken a lot out of her. It still felt shameful to admit it, even to herself. “That sounds nice.”
The peace was broken by Arthur, with a shout of “Jesus fucking Christ!” followed by Gabriel’s quiet, “Don’t shout, Arthur, she’ll only maul you harder.” It seemed the plan to contain the wildkitten was going about as well as could be expected.
Gwen sighed and rested her head against Bridget’s shoulder, and Bridget let herself lean in, her eyes still closed, seeking comfort—just for a moment, she told herself. Just until Arthur’s next shriek.