31. HER CHAMPION IS A BLOODY COWARD, DEEP DOWN #2
Isobelle’s smile flickered; it was one of her Public Performance smiles, which Gwen knew well from their days leading up to the Darkhaven tournament that summer, when Isobelle had been forced to pretend all was well as her doom approached in the form of a loveless marriage and enslavement.
‘I told Olivia not to bring you anything too depressing,’ Isobelle muttered, reaching out for the scroll.
Gwen snatched it back protectively. ‘I think I can decide for myself what to read,’ she retorted, aware she sounded as sullen as a child.
‘Not if it means you greet me with talk of beheadings!’ Isobelle fired back, her brow furrowing. ‘Come on … let’s go for a walk. Just a little one, up and down the street. It’ll help you get your strength back. We can visit the smithy, and you can start designing your new sword.’
Exhaustion rose up and gripped Gwen from the inside out. ‘A new sword,’ she echoed weakly. ‘Isobelle … why in the name of … Why would I bother making another sword?’
‘You’re a knight.’ Isobelle beamed at her with all the true warmth of the distant winter sun. ‘You need a sword.’
The very thought of trying to pour herself into another sword – her third weapon in as many weeks – made Gwen want to scream.
‘I’ve no need for a sword anymore,’ she said quietly.
‘This spell that you insist I’m under – it’ll follow me, right?
Even when Olivia spirits us away? I’m no knight, not like this.
It’s just as well the sea keeps claiming my weapons – I should listen to what fate is telling me. ’
‘Now you’re being foolish.’ Isobelle’s hands clenched around a handful of the bedclothes. ‘Gwen, you can’t just rot in your bed, reading about doom and gloom—’
‘Why not?’ Gwen replied calmly. ‘Did you know that a witch’s curse is unbreakable except by the witch who cast it, or by a significantly more powerful witch? I wonder how many witches out there are more powerful than one who can control a giant sea monster with his mind …’
‘Enough!’ Isobelle snatched the text from her with an ominous crackle of ancient parchment.
‘All this doom-scrolling isn’t helping! Now, come downstairs and we’ll have a snack and go for a stroll.
We’ll visit the hot springs and have a soak, and think of something nice to do once we’re away from this place. ’
‘Something nice,’ Gwen echoed, watching Isobelle with a remote fascination. Her performance was flawless – her brow clear, her blue eyes sparkling, her lips at ease and curved into a smile of delight. ‘Something nice?’
‘A trip somewhere without a cursed town,’ Isobelle suggested. ‘Or staying with your dad for a while in Ellsdale—’
Gwen coughed, her throat seizing in horror at the idea of letting her father see her as she was now. ‘God, no.’
‘Somewhere new, then,’ Isobelle insisted.
‘Stop—’
‘We can rendezvous with the girls and travel to Europe for the spring fashions—’
‘Stop!’ Gwen’s voice snapped out of her with all the shocking force of a lightning strike. ‘Just … stop!’
Isobelle stared at her, expression cracking as though that lightning strike had split her mask straight down the middle.
‘You can’t just … believe your way out of everything,’ Gwen blurted, her voice beginning to shake and her throat so tight every word was like a knife.
‘You can’t laugh and shrug it off and distract me with something shiny.
I died, Isobelle. You told me we were over.
Everything we’ve done for the past few weeks was for nothing, we haven’t weakened the sorcerer at all.
We’re running away and leaving an innocent girl as a monster’s captive.
Your only real family is a spy sent to watch you by an ancient order of dubious morality.
And you want to go on a shopping spree to Europe? ’
The broken pieces of Isobelle’s mask, as brittle as a badly tempered sword, shattered. Her voice came in a wrenching sob. ‘I don’t know what else to do!’
The words hung in the silence that followed them, punctuated by snatches of breath and the patter of tears – hers or Isobelle’s, Gwen wasn’t sure – against the coverlet.
Outside, a gust of wind leaned against the window, making it creak.
The inn was brutally silent now, without its guests and staff and tavern full of colourful locals.
‘Well, neither do I.’ Gwen drew a shaking breath. ‘Maybe it’s okay not to know how to fix things.’
Isobelle’s eyes were lowered, her face flushed. ‘I don’t know how else to help except to make you feel better.’
‘Isobelle … you can’t make someone feel better,’ Gwen said helplessly.
‘But that’s what I do!’ Isobelle burst out. ‘I convince people, I get them to go along with my ideas, I … it’s literally all I have to offer. And it’s not enough, not with everything slipping through the cracks and falling apart …’
And without warning, Isobelle began to weep. Palms braced on the bed, head bowed, tears sliding down her chin, shoulders shaking – and as suddenly as Isobelle’s tears had come, Gwen’s icy paralysis shattered.
Gwen shoved aside her pile of scrolls and tangled bedclothes and reached out, pulling Isobelle against her.
She came willingly, one hand curling in Gwen’s shift and the other circling her neck, her forehead bowed against Gwen’s collarbone.
Gwen’s eyes began to burn in response, and she felt Isobelle’s thumb stroke her chin when a tear made its way down her face.
They were both struggling to breathe, lungs heaving in syncopation against each other, until slowly, slowly, those rhythms began to settle, to deepen, to match.
Isobelle shuddered and Gwen curled her fingers to stroke her hair.
Gwen’s face turned, and she felt the warmth of Isobelle’s temple against her lips.
‘I tried to make you stop,’ Isobelle whispered, a thread of tension still wound tightly within the circle of Gwen’s arms. ‘I tried to force you to stop fighting – but it isn’t over between us, Gwen. I don’t ever want it to be over. I didn’t mean it, what I said.’
Gwen was giddy with the sudden release of a band of tension she hadn’t noticed squeezing her harder than the others. ‘I didn’t mean what I said, either. Even if I’m no knight, even if I can’t fight … I’ll never stop fighting for you.’
Isobelle started crying all over again, but the terrible gulping, wrenching sobs were gone, and the tears subsided after a few moments.
Gwen drew a deeper breath and felt Isobelle do the same, feeling her body shift against her and taking her cue from it. Gwen drew back enough to cup Isobelle’s cheek and tip her face up.
‘This power you have,’ Gwen murmured. ‘This way you have of persuading people to follow you, to believe in your admittedly often mad ideas … it’s an unbelievable strength, to be sure, and one of the things that I … I admire most about you.’
Isobelle sniffed and started to look away, but Gwen stroked her cheek with her thumb and exerted a gentle pressure to summon her gaze back.
‘But it isn’t all you are, Isobelle,’ Gwen whispered. ‘It’s only a fraction of what you have in you.’
Isobelle stopped trying to avoid her gaze, staring at her with a strange expression, lip caught between her teeth. As if Gwen had suggested she was capable of turning invisible or sprouting wings and taking to the air – and as if she was considering those things possible for the first time.
An embarrassed cough in the doorway made both girls startle apart, wiping at their cheeks.
Henry stood there, a bundle of cloth in his arms and his face crimson. ‘Um, begging your pardons, miss, sir, my ladies, um … The shouting had stopped, so I thought … I can come back.’
He started to turn away and Gwen got herself under control. ‘No, Henry, it’s fine … what is it?’ She took a better look at him, noticing that his skin was whiter than usual, and his eyes were deeply shadowed. He looked exhausted. Like he hadn’t slept for a week. ‘Are you okay?’
Henry hugged his bundle to his chest. ‘I wanted … I wanted to say sorry.’ His gaze fixed to the floorboards in front of him as if he were an actor in a play and his lines were written there. ‘For not being braver that night.’
Gwen’s heart gave a sudden, searing stab. ‘Henry,’ she said softly. ‘You’d just watched that thing destroy your ship. I should never have asked that much of you.’
He shook his head. ‘All the same, Sir Gwen. I saw everything that happened – saw where that thing grabbed you, where you dropped your sword. I rounded up some of the lads, those with the strongest stomachs, and we’ve been dragging the bottom under the pier, and …’
Henry stepped forward and laid the bundle on the foot of the bed before retreating back to the doorway as if the bed might send out ruffled tentacles to grab him.
Isobelle scooted forward on her knees, and when Gwen didn’t move, reached out to twitch the cloth away. Beneath it was the gleam of steel, freshly polished and sharpened – her breath caught.
Into the silence that followed, Henry said, ‘You haven’t stopped trying to fight for us.’ And before he turned to flee, vanishing from the doorway, he muttered, ‘We won’t stop fighting for you.’
Gwen’s body had become so accustomed to fear and sadness that for a moment she could not understand the feeling that rose up within her like something buoyant bobbing to the surface of the sea.
She reached out and stroked the sword with her fingertips, its cool touch a reminder of all those years spent with a blade in her hand and dreams of glory in her heart.
She thought of Madame Dupont, her combat instructor in Darkhaven, and of that night before her first joust in the Tournament of Dragonslayers.
Flee or fight, the choice would be inviting something in, a weight she could not easily shed.
Dupont had said that whatever happened, she would know what choice she made.
You will remember who you are. The woman’s strong tones echoed in her ears.
This is my fight, Gwen thought, the certainty falling into place. This is the sword I made for it.
How long she stared at the sword she didn’t know, but when she lifted her head, Henry was gone, and Isobelle’s eyes were waiting for hers, carrying a strange mix of hope and fierceness. A wordless current passed between them, a knowing that neither of them had to speak aloud.
Gwen swallowed hard. ‘I’ll go with you and Olivia on the ship, if that’s what you still want.’
Isobelle exhaled shakily. ‘Don’t be ridiculous.’
Gwen’s hand curled around the sword’s hilt. ‘Olivia will never let you stay, or let either of us out of her sight. She has some reason for wanting you out of here that goes beyond being your maid and your friend.’
Isobelle’s gaze sharpened, growing distant in a way that Gwen had grown to recognise with a now familiar mix of admiration and dread. It meant that she had had … an Idea.
‘I’ve always wanted to see if I could con a con,’ Isobelle said coolly, though Gwen could see how much it cost her not to be able to trust Olivia, of all people, the one person on whom she had always depended.
‘But when we get past her, what then? I don’t know where to even start when it comes to Bingleton and the tower. ’
Gwen swung her feet down onto the wooden floor, finding herself unsteady until Isobelle joined her and offered her arm. ‘I’ve got an idea about that,’ she said quietly, her mind spinning with all the texts on witchcraft she’d been reading. ‘But you’re going to have to trust me.’
Isobelle curled her other hand over Gwen’s where it rested on her arm. ‘Always.’