Chapter Twelve #2
His attendant, who’d been eating with Neil and the other squires and guardsmen, jumped to attention. Gabriel sighed, but said nothing as the boy ran ahead to the landlady, presumably to ensure that the king’s lodgings were all arranged. Bridget took his vacant seat, cup in hand.
“Is he…?” Bridget nodded after Gabriel, and Gwen sighed.
“I don’t know. He said something about the sun being too bright, but I couldn’t get much else out of him. Sometimes I think…” She shook her head and took a sip of ale.
“Sometimes you think what?” Bridget pressed.
Gwen glanced at the next table, then over at the door. “Let’s check on the horses.”
The horses did not need checking, and if they did, the Princess of England would not be the one charged with putting on a cloak and wading through the manure to see how they were doing.
Nonetheless, Bridget found herself in the stables, breathing in the sweet smell of freshly trampled straw, the air chilled and slightly damp.
“I just … I wish everybody dealt with things the way I do,” Gwen was saying, as she went from stall to stall, checking that there were no lingering stable boys dropping eaves.
“I hate that other people’s feelings are such a mystery.
I know how to deal with my own grief. But I don’t know how to deal with his.
” She kicked open the door of the last stall, which was empty of all potential company, human and equine. “It’s stupid.”
“It’s not,” said Bridget. She hesitated. Talk. “How do you deal with it?”
“Letting things be awful, in the hope that soon they won’t be. Staying busy. Not to say it doesn’t flatten me too, sometimes. I can be having a perfectly good day, and even thinking to myself, Wow, aren’t I great at grief, and then something small happens and the day flips and that’s it.”
Bridget had been following her. Now they came to a standstill, and Gwen leaned back against the roughly hewn stone wall and sighed. “I was feeling better, until the anniversary, and then … I don’t know. It all came flooding back.”
“I’m sorry I wasn’t here.” Bridget had been keenly aware of that day too, and had tried very hard to pretend she wasn’t. She’d thought about Gwen, and Camelot, and told herself it was too far to travel, too inconveniently timed. She’d been a coward.
“Well. Unfortunately, there will be plenty more.” She knocked a piece of straw off her dress, then said, “I’m starting to think this trip might have been a terrible idea.”
Bridget was just wondering if this was her moment to try for an embrace—in the truest sense of the word, a bracing, an offer to hold Gwen up in even the smallest moment of doubt—when there was a flurry of noise from the other end of the stables as Arthur entered.
“Starting to think? You should have ended the sentence there. Very believable that you’ve only just started to think.”
“Arthur,” Gwen said, as he came into view practically scuffing his feet like a sulking schoolchild. “We’re having a private conversation.”
“I’m miserable, and I’m surrounded by various stiff alcohols and only permitted to sip the wateriest of ales, and you can’t even get a gentle buzz from those, no matter how much you drink. It starts coming out the other end before it’s managed to get a foothold.”
“Go and bother Sidney.”
“Sidney is busy being a man of the people.”
“Sir Leonard then. You seem to like him.”
“I told you I’m miserable,” Arthur scoffed. “You can’t let on how sad you are in front of someone you’re trying to befriend! You have to be extremely amusing and without flaws for three to six months, and only then can you let on that you sometimes have bad days.”
“That’s not how I recall my early acquaintance with you.”
“Well,” Arthur said, crossing his arms and leaning against the wall next to Bridget, “I didn’t care if you liked me. Leclair, on the other hand, has only recently been permitted to see me gazing sadly out of a window, and only about once a year. I’m easing her in gently.”
“Thanks,” said Bridget. It wasn’t true of course. He was prone to clownery and always the quickest wit in the room, but Arthur’s was the kind of sadness that bled through.
“I need to do something,” Arthur said desperately. “Need my head rattled. I can hardly go for a big walk, it’s bloody raining. I’ll die of wet.”
As he said it, Bridget rolled her shoulders back in their sockets to feel the familiar click-click of grinding bone, and realized how tense she was too. Clenched fists, tight jaw, head full of bees.
“Let’s fight,” she said. Arthur and Gwen both looked at her like her face had fallen off.
“Oh good, she wants to kill me,” said Arthur. “I knew it was too early to let her see the sadness window.”
“I’ll go easy on you. One-time offer, yes or no.”
“Don’t be ridiculous,” said Gwen. “You’re not really going to—”
Arthur launched himself at Bridget with no technique and great enthusiasm, and Bridget took his momentum, turned him and pinned him to the wall with her elbow.
He kneed her in the groin, and she released him just enough to let him get his arms around her.
Now they were in a clinch, and Bridget grinned into it as he pushed against her, letting him gain ground until she gave him a shove, weaved around him, and locked his head under her arm.
He scrabbled at her forearm for a moment, then started flailing his nearest leg sideways, trying to kick at her.
He wasn’t particularly strong, but he had a sort of frenetic energy to him and an unwillingness to quit that proved diverting.
“For God’s sake,” Gwen muttered, entirely unamused until Bridget shook her hair out of her face, caught Gwen’s eye, and smiled, at which point she smiled tentatively back.
“I’m going to bite you,” Arthur said, sounding giddy with daring, and then he did it. Through her clothes, it only hurt a little.
“I’m going back inside to dine with the grown-ups,” Gwen said, and Arthur laughed with a touch of hysteria as she walked away, still twisting in Bridget’s grip.
“Good! Run! Or I’ll fight you! I’ll fight all of you!”
It wasn’t particularly convincing while he was wriggling like a landlocked tadpole.
They scuffled for a few more moments, and then Bridget released him, and they leaned side by side against the wall as he caught his breath.
“That was great,” said Arthur. “I really needed that. It might actually have completely fixed me.”
“Doubt it,” said Bridget, straightening her tunic. “If it wears off and you need someone to punch you in the face, you know where I am.”