Chapter Two
Two
In that time there was a knight of great renown, Lady Bridget Leclair, who had taken up the sword Excalibur and done great deeds with it, though she protested it was but a replica.
All who rode against her in the tilt were sore afraid, and so many ladies of the country loved her passing well, on some days she could hardly move for gifts of tokens and fine flowers.
—FROM AN EARLY DRAFT OF THE QUESTS OF KING GAbrIEL AND HIS ROUND TABLE BY SIR FLORIAN ARDEN
“I could put a cloak over you,” Neil the squire said, peering out of the window with ill-disguised excitement. “Or we could find a double. Someone who looks exactly like you, to use as a distraction.”
“A double,” Bridget repeated, frowning down at her vambrace and tightening the strap until the leather creaked. “And how many six-foot-tall Tai women knights do you know, Neil?”
“You are nowhere near six feet tall,” Neil said derisively, still gazing out at the crowds. “But point taken. Stop fiddling with that, you insufferable pedant. I already fixed it.”
Fair. Neil was a fastidious squire. He was sixteen, but wise beyond his years in a way that was very wearing, as it mostly seemed to manifest itself as a lack of proper deference to seniority and a world-weary bitchiness that the other squires found very inspiring.
Still. Her vambrace had felt loose last week, and it had been very distracting, and the distraction had led somewhere …
worse. Had Neil been lax when he armored her?
Head elsewhere? He did seem to be enjoying all the attention they were getting—he’d been padding his breeches and adding extra feathers to his hats, so she often felt like she was following a well-buttocked goose out into the lists—and maybe it was impacting his duties.
An expression her mother loved to repeat, which roughly translated as To make a mess and blame the toilet hole, came to mind before she dismissed it.
“Ready?” Neil cracked open the door, and a cheer went up. It set Bridget’s nerves jangling like jester’s bells. Neil winked, and she fixed him with a withering look.
“Stop enjoying this.”
“Shan’t,” he said, and then shoved the door fully open.
There was perhaps nobody as ill-suited to minor celebrity as Lady Bridget Leclair.
She had built her life around self-improvement and routine; she didn’t compete at tourneys to bolster her ego, but because she liked to, and because there was always something to learn, so that tomorrow she would be better.
Win or lose, she put in the work. It didn’t matter when the crowds booed, and it didn’t matter when they cheered.
Many were cheering now. They wouldn’t bloody stop.
She couldn’t entirely blame them. The story that had spread the length and breadth of the country was this: When the royal tourney had been revealed as cover for a cultist coup, the kingdom’s only lady knight had valiantly thrown herself into battle to protect the king, and had managed to draw Excalibur from the stone before using it to slay Lord Willard, the pretender seeking the throne.
It sounded impressive, obviously. Bridget could see that objectively.
But it was all in the telling. It didn’t seem to matter to anyone that Bridget had been one of many to leap to the crown’s aid, nor that she’d only grabbed Excalibur (ninth edition) because it was the nearest spare blade to hand, nor that she’d spent half the battle unconscious and had barely been able to see straight when she’d put an abrupt and bloody end to the uprising.
She’d been sick in her mouth a bit, afterward.
If they added that to the retellings they’d somehow manage to make that heroic too: Lo, the chivalrous containment of puke behind tongue and teeth, so as not to sully the ground where so much royal blood was so recently spilled!
These same people had thought her a joke when she’d first hit the lists.
Some of them hated her even more, now that she was popular.
To them she was a Topic of Discussion, not a person.
The fickle nature of public opinion only made it clear how right Bridget had been to pay no attention to it in the first place.
The clamor of the crowd hit her with full force when she stepped out into the September sun, along with the smells of trampled straw and spilled ale.
Someone had had the forethought to erect a barrier, so that knights could walk from the little staging huts to the lists relatively unmolested, but people were still reaching their arms over the sides to try to touch her armor as she set her shoulders and marched grimly on.
Hard not to notice that it was mostly girls.
Women too. When it first happened, these unexpected crowds outside her tent and lining the fences, she’d accepted the favors from the little girls with starstruck, gappy smiles, even a few handkerchiefs from hopeful teens a few years her junior.
Now she avoided making eye contact; kept her focus hovering somewhere above their heads, and tried to ignore the mutterings of disappointment that followed when she entered the stands without signing a tourney poster or kissing so much as a single baby.
She could feel Neil watching her as she checked her vambrace again.
“If you’d just—”
“No, Neil,” Bridget said, and it came out somewhat softer than she expected. “Not today.”
Neil rubbed his mustache—it was a mustachlet, really, the pale promise of future facial hair—and sighed.
“Go on then. At least strike a few heroic poses, so they’ve got something nice to draw if they want to etch you.”
Sometimes Neil was like a petulant and overconfident cousin who’d decided he had more friends than you and therefore got to be in charge, and other times he was like a fussing stage mother. Neither was preferable.
Bridget pulled on her helm, mounted her horse, Fiona, and rode out into the lists.
Cheers and boos. The low grumble of every man in the stands turning to his neighbor to opine about her prowess and legacy. A baby crying somewhere, wailing up an octave to an ear-splitting crescendo.
Bridget looked at her gauntleted hand on the reins, noted a wispy grass seed stuck to one long, dark strand of her horse’s mane, and shifted her weight so that she might sit up a little straighter.
Over by the fence, the marshal was grandstanding for the crowd. Bridget took a deep breath in and out, rolled her shoulders back in their sockets, and felt the familiar, slightly concerning crunch of what she could only assume was her bones meeting discordantly.
She didn’t need to follow the tilting rail to its conclusion to size up her opponent; she’d had Neil do it already.
Sir Grant was an eager young knight in his first year of the tourney circuit, so green he made Bridget feel decrepit at nineteen.
He was strong, and he used it to his advantage.
He probably weighed a third more than Bridget, all in, but that was to her advantage.
A flock of pigeons wheeled around the top of the stands, turning to dive in perfect, graceful synchronicity—and then the sudden, strangled burst of the starting trumpet sent them panicking in ten different directions.
What was it that made them risk the chaos of the tourney anyway, when surely a quiet perch somewhere far from here was a safer bet?
Approaching hoofbeats. The swell of the crowd. And Bridget was still watching the birds. Shit. She hadn’t even had time for her usual ritual: a wai to her opponent, a bow of respect, and the signal to her body that the fight was about to begin.
Too late, she snatched the lance from Neil’s outstretched hand and urged her horse onward, her haste sending her slightly off balance.
The lance was couched too loosely under her arm.
She bit down on her lip as she struggled to adjust it.
This moment had always been an oasis of calm before, the quiet before the storm, the only noise she registered the sound of her own even breathing inside her helm. Now, everything was just so loud.
She could feel her fingers pressed uncomfortably into the joints of her gauntlet, the angle of her wrist not quite right, her seat on the horse unsteady.
There was hot sweat prickling at the nape of her neck.
Her boots were chafing, or on the verge of chafing—and now a sharp, undefinable pain somewhere in her ribs, a rhythmic stabbing, as if she were the victim of a mouse with a splinter-sized sword.
Her lance was slipping, and it meant that the coronel wasn’t set firm, her aim drifting.
She looked up at Sir Grant as he approached.
He had mud spattered up the flanks of his horse like wild sprays of blood.
It was too late; she wasn’t going to land a hit at all. She closed her eyes—coward—and had only taken half a readying breath when Sir Grant’s lance hit her so squarely in the chest it was as if her heart were a target, painted in livid scarlet on her breastplate.
It was like being struck by lightning. She was thrown clear of her horse, hitting the sand at an angle that sent pain rattling down her spine, blood on her tongue.
She lay there, breathing hard as the horses moved away, watching the pigeons pass overhead as they took another lap.
The crowd was making some sort of noise, but for the life of her, she couldn’t tell which.
She was back on the battlefield at Camelot, sprawled in the dirt, thinking of how strangely alike the screams of battle sounded to the happy roar of spectators.
As she’d lain bruised and bleeding with her back pressed against the still-warm body of a fallen soldier, her eyes impossible to open, she’d pictured the flags flying above the tourney stands and told herself that it was all still a game they were playing.
When the trumpets sounded, everybody would grumble and dust off their armor and get back up to shake hands and accept their failures and victories.
She could see the flags now. This was no battlefield. Her mind knew that; her racing heart did not.
“Leclair?” Neil said, out of breath as he leaned over her, his face pink. “Alive?”
It was just a bit of bruising. Perhaps a muscle wrenched too far. In the old days, she would have shaken it off; even smiled about it, later, when the pinch of pain reminded her that she’d ridden hard and taken her knocks.
“Leclair, are you crying?”
“No.” Bridget exhaled, gingerly heaving herself into a sitting position to see if it hurt. It did. “I’m sweating.”
“You’re sweating a lot. From your eyes. Is that usual?”
“Well,” Bridget said, wheezing slightly. “Now I feel self-conscious.”
Neil grabbed her by the pauldrons and dug his heels in to help haul her upright.
“Back on the horse?” he said hopefully. Bridget swallowed the blood in her teeth and bile in her throat, and was suddenly overtaken by a violent nausea, the black tickle of unconsciousness threatening the corners of her vision.
“No,” she said, taking off her claustrophobic helm—horrible thing, who’d invented it?—and handing it to Neil. “Withdraw.”
“Bridget—”
“Withdraw,” Bridget said again, only a slight tremor in her voice. “I forfeit.”
The tilt was already lost to her. She would not be a worthy competitor to anyone today.
Sir Grant was riding toward her, in a chivalrous and probably quite genuine display of concern, but Bridget took her horse by the reins and walked away, back toward the competitors’ barracks, hoping that from the stands nobody could see how much she was shaking.
The boos were nothing compared to the rush of blood still pounding in her ears.