Chapter 4 Hal
HAL
Perrin’s hand hovered near his elbow, and Hal shook it off with a violence that made the squire flinch.
“Go back,” he said. “Tend to the gear.” His voice came out thin and weak, lacking the command he’d meant to project. Perrin opened his mouth to argue, saw something in Hal’s face, and closed it again.
Good. At least one person today still knew when to back down.
The young man retreated across the churned field, glancing back twice before the crowd swallowed him. Hal watched until he was certain Perrin wouldn’t return, then turned toward the far end of the grounds, where the Nameless Knight’s modest tent stood apart from the rest.
His body catalogued its injuries with each step.
Shoulder screaming where the lance had caught him.
Hip throbbing from the impact with the ground.
A dozen smaller hurts that would purple by nightfall.
None of the physical aches touched the thing writhing in his chest; this hot, sick fury that had nowhere to go.
Eighteen months. Eighteen fucking months of building something from nothing, of proving every sneering nobleman wrong, and it was gone.
Shattered, and not just by anyone, but by some lordling playing at poverty.
Because that’s what he was. Perrin was right, but in a way, Hal had known it the moment their eyes met across the field, had felt the truth of it in his bones the way he felt the balance of a lance or the tension in a horse’s neck.
The Nameless Knight carried himself with the unconscious arrogance of the nobility.
He was snide, his accent educated, and not a lick of sportsmanship had been on his face when he’d peered down at Hal in the dirt.
He’d put Hal, a once-commoner, back in his place.
Maybe your luck’s finally run out.
The loss itself he could survive. But the way the bastard had said that, as if every win under Hal’s belt had been chance. . .! As if skill and discipline and endless, grinding work meant nothing next to the poise and grace of a noble’s lifelong training.
Fuck. That.
When he reached the tent, the flap was closed, and no one tended to anything outside.
The quality mare dozed at her picket, coat gleaming despite the morning’s exertion.
Hal stared at her, wondering how much she cost. More than all his wins combined?
More than himself? She was better bred than him for sure.
Hal breathed heavily and then did something rather stupid: he shoved through the tent flap without announcing himself and stepped inside.
The Nameless Knight stood at the tent’s centre, half-stripped of his armour.
His chest was bare beneath the gambeson he was peeling away, the linen shirt beneath it soaked with sweat.
His dark hair hung loose around his face, freed from whatever tie had held it during the joust. In the dim light filtering through canvas, his skin gleamed with exertion, and Hal’s eyes traced the lean muscle of his shoulders before he could stop himself.
He turned to look at Hal and didn’t startle. The same calm he’d had on the field embraced him now, and he fixed Hal with a slightly raised brow. Hal, still in his hulking armour, felt suddenly very stupid. The Nameless Knight was acting like furious men burst into his tent every day.
Perhaps they did. Perhaps this was just another game to him.
“Ser Halden,” the knight said. His voice was measured, cultured, precisely designed to piss Hal right off. “Can I help you?”
“What the fuck was that?”
The question came out rough with anger. Hal stepped forward, letting the tent flap fall closed behind him. The space was modest but well-appointed—a proper cot rather than a straw pallet, leather saddlebags.
The knight’s smile froze. It was still polite, but taut, now, with anger. Hal guessed no one ever spoke to him this way. “Excuse me?”
“Who are you? Huh?”
“I told you,” the knight said, turning back to his armour. His hands moved over the fastenings with familiar ease. “No one.”
“Bullshit.”
Hal crossed the remaining distance between them in three strides.
His hand closed on the knight’s bare shoulder and spun him around.
The contact sent something jolting through his palm—heat, solidity, the shocking intimacy of skin against skin.
The knight’s eyes widened for just a moment, silver-grey and startled, before that infuriating calm reasserted itself.
“You bought your way onto the lists,” Hal said, not releasing his grip. “Paid that clerk to slot you against me specifically. I know you did.”
“And if I did?”
“Then you’re pathetic.” The word tasted good, felt good, a small reclamation of power. “Some lord’s son slumming it for thrills. Playing at being an unsponsored knight because your real-life bores you. You have no idea what it actually means to earn something, so you had to take it from me.”
The knight’s jaw tightened, the smile slipped, and oh, finally!
Hal had broken through that hardened exterior.
Yeah, there was a man in that cold shell like any other.
Hal felt a surge of vicious satisfaction and pressed his advantage, stepping closer until their bodies were nearly touching, until he could smell the sweat and leather and something else beneath, something clean and expensive that had no business existing in a tournament tent.
Hal’s voice dropped low. “One victory means nothing.”
The knight relaxed. “Is that so? Then why are you having a tantrum in my tent?”
Hal’s hand tightened on his shoulder. The knight’s skin was warm beneath his palm, damp with cooling sweat. Hal was close enough to see the pulse beating at the base of that aristocratic throat, to count the individual lashes framing those maddening eyes.
Words got to him too easily. It was a flaw of his, his father had always said so, and Hal had proved that flaw over and over again.
Not this time. His body thrummed with the urge for violence, but he made himself speak the anger aloud.
“You think you can throw around enough coin to buy a shortcut, and suddenly you’re a champion?
You’re nothing. You’re worse than nothing—you’re a fraud. ”
The knight’s brow furrowed. “Are you sure about that?” He looked Hal up and down, stare withering. “What exactly bothers you the most? That I paid for the opportunity to challenge you, or that I beat you? Quite easily, I might add.”
Hal bit down on his tongue. He was gripping the knight so firmly; he was sure his nails were digging into the man’s pale skin.
“You got lucky,” Hal snarled.
A dazzling, pitying smile. “We both know that’s not true.”
The words hit him harder than his fall from the destrier.
Hal felt them settle in his chest, heavy and unwelcome, because he knew—before pride rushed in to protest—that they were true.
There had been nothing lucky about that last pass.
He could see it now, replay it in the space behind his eyes, the clean line and the perfect timing, and he knew: only skill could have landed that shot.
But the recognition still twisted in him.
That kind of precision didn’t come from stolen hours or hard-won bruises.
It was forged the way noble skills always were: slowly, a masterwork weapon started in childhood, shaped under the guidance of proper tutors, refined with good gear and endless time, until instinct became second nature.
It wasn’t something an upstart could ever compete with.
Hal knew he should leave the tent and let Perrin massage out all the anger, but he just couldn’t let it go.
Turning around now felt like another, worse defeat.
Hal had lost his streak today, but this lying, cowering noble’s son could lose something too. If Hal could just push him hard enough.
“Tell me who you are,” Hal demanded. His voice had gone hoarse. “Tell me what fucking house spawned you, what title you’re hiding from. I want to know whose son just ended my streak.”
“Does it matter?” The knight studied him, and Hal had the uncomfortable sensation of being read like a book.
After he made some assessment, the Nameless Knight tilted his head and brought his strong arms to cross under his chest. His arms formed a kind of shelf for his firm pectorals, but Hal wasn’t looking at that.
“You want to know who I am to save what’s left of your pride.
If I outrank you sufficiently, you can tell yourself you never stood a chance.
That the game was rigged from the start. ”
Hal bristled. “It is rigged.”
“Yes.” The admittance surprised Hal. Something softened in the knight’s expression, but it was a look that skirted too close to pity for Hal to like it.
“But I’m not rigging it against you, Ser Hal. I came here to test myself, nothing more.”
“Against me specifically.”
“Against the best. By every measure, that was you.”
It should have been a compliment; it was probably intended as a compliment.
Instead, it twisted in Hal’s gut, and he couldn’t—wouldn’t—allow himself to accept it.
Eighteen months had to mean something. He was still gripping the knight’s shoulder, still standing close enough to feel the heat radiating from that lean body. His own breathing had gone shallow.
“You think flattery will make me forget you humiliated me in front of the entire fucking circuit?”
“No,” the Nameless Knight said, voice softening to a silken drawl.
The knight’s lips curved, but his eyes hardened.
“I think you’ve been jousting against washed-up has-beens and green noble boys playing at knighthood.
Your undefeated streak?” He gave a dismissive flick of his fingers.
“A commoner beating the dregs no real knight bothers with. Today was simply... a correction.”
Something snapped in Hal’s chest. He raised his fist without deciding to, muscle memory taking over, the same instinct that had carried him through countless brawls before he ever touched a lance.
He was going to hit this smug, beautiful, insufferable bastard.
He was going to wipe that knowing smile off his face and make him bleed, make him hurt, make him feel even a fraction of the humiliation burning in Hal’s gut—
The knight’s hand closed around his wrist.
The grip was firm but not painful, the fingers long and surprisingly strong. Hal’s fist hovered between them, arrested mid-swing, and he found he couldn’t pull free.
Perhaps it was only shock keeping him there. The knight’s eyes held his, silver-grey and suddenly very close, and Hal realised with a lurch of something like panic that their faces were inches apart.
He could see the texture of the knight’s lips. Slightly parted. Slightly dry. Hal had the insane urge to wet them with his own.
The knight smiled.
This smile was worse than the knight’s cruel words.
It seemed to gloat with understanding. It saw something in Hal he wanted no one to see.
It reached into Hal’s chest and found all the tangled, contradictory impulses he’d been ignoring—the anger that wasn’t just anger, the way his body had responded to this proximity.
“Interesting,” the knight murmured. His breath ghosted across Hal’s lips.
That broke the spell. Hal wrenched his arm free with a violence that sent him stumbling backward, his heel catching on the edge of the knight’s cot.
His body betrayed him—pulse thundering in his throat, stomach twisting, skin prickling with heat that started at his neck and blazed upward.
His hands wanted to shake. His lungs couldn’t get enough air.
The knight was watching him calmly, so relaxed that Hal knew the Nameless Knight would let him approach him, let him. . .
Every instinct screamed to either flee or surge forward, and he couldn’t tell which urge terrified him more.
“Stay away from me,” he snarled. This was a trick, something to get in his head. And by the Gods, was it working.
The knight remained where Hal had left him, hand still extended as if holding a phantom fist. That smile lingered at the corners of his mouth, infuriating and knowing and entirely too pleased with itself.
“We’re both on the tournament circuit, Ser Hal. Our paths will cross again.”
There were only two days left to this tournament, but the knight had all but confirmed he’d be at the next, two months from now.
“Then I’ll beat you next time. Properly. On the field.”
“I look forward to it.”
Hal didn’t answer. But as he turned, the knight offered something of a peace offering.
“Alaric,” he said.
Hal turned back to stare at him. “What?”
The man shrugged. “A not so Nameless Knight now.”
Hal’s nostrils flared; why had that made him more furious? He turned and shoved through the tent flap, emerging into late morning light that nearly blinded him after the dim interior.
The tournament grounds sprawled before him, unchanged by his world’s quiet collapse.
Squires ran errands. Horses were being exercised.
The next competitors were taking their positions at the lists, their drama unfolding independent of his.
No one looked at him. No one knew what had just happened in that tent—the almost-punch, the almost-kiss. He ground his teeth.
He was Ser Halden the Upstart, a year and a half undefeated until this morning, a knight who had clawed his way up from nothing through discipline and determination.
He didn’t have room for complications. Didn’t have room for silver-grey eyes and knowing smiles and whatever the hell had just happened.
The crowd swirled around him, oblivious to his turmoil, and he walked aimlessly until he was at the edge of the grounds where the merchant stalls gave way to open field.
A wooden fence marked the boundary, weather-beaten and listing slightly.
Hal gripped the top rail with both hands and stared out at nothing in particular.
His knuckles were white. His breathing was ragged.
He thought about the knight’s hand on his wrist. The precise pressure of those fingers. His lips.
Alaric’s lips.
No. The Nameless Knight—he needed to stay the Nameless Knight—was a distraction at best. An enemy in truth. He’d taken Hal’s streak, his pride, and would doubtless come for more if given the chance. He was not beautiful. He was not intriguing. He was not worth thinking about at all.
He was worth beating, though, and that was the task to which Hal would dedicate himself.
He’d reclaim his pride with his next bout the following morning.
He would win his final on the tournament’s last day, and by the time they met again in two months, Hal’s singular fall from grace would be long forgotten.
Behind him, somewhere in that modest tent, the Nameless Knight was probably still smiling.