Chapter Twenty-Two
Twenty-Two
Gabriel’s tent was very comfortable, as tents went. Rugs had been heaped on the ground, every surface suitable for sitting was covered in furs and fat cushions, and there was a brazier crackling away at the center, so the air was hazy and heavily seasoned with woodsmoke.
Unfortunately, it also contained a very angry wild animal.
While Gabriel had been meeting with Gwen, Sir Hurst and advisors both spiritual and religious, listening to them all talk about safety and the schedule, somebody had arranged for the cage to be carried in and set up in the corner, so that the wildcat could stare and hiss at him in close quarters between savage bites of meat.
Gabriel endured ten minutes of this, and then picked up a large blanket, approached the spitting kitten, and dropped it over the cage. The kitten seemed to calm immediately, like putting a hat on a bird.
“Sorry,” he said, giving the cage a gentle pat, which was clearly a bad idea, because disgruntled noises resumed briefly before fading away into blissful silence.
He popped his head out of the tent, nodding awkwardly to the guards, to survey the surroundings and look for allies—but he only saw Sir Bowen deep in conversation with Lady Adah, the two of them taking a slow walk through the rows of tents that had been industriously set up in what felt like no time at all.
Farther afield, the horses grazed under the trees; it was too gloomy to see them, but Gabriel could hear soft whickers and snorts, and the wet wrench of grass being pulled from the ground.
He was just about to duck back inside when Florian came into view, holding his writing things. He caught sight of Gabriel, smiled apologetically, and approached.
“I was actually coming to find you. Documenting the grand deeds of the order, you know? And I wanted to check some facts. If that’s all right with you, and with … Sir Hurst.”
Sir Hurst was nowhere to be seen, and Gabriel certainly didn’t feel like fetching him, although the captain would no doubt be furious about this later. He liked to be within stabbing range whenever Gabriel and Florian met. “All right,” he said, feeling more tired by the minute. “Come in.”
Florian followed him inside, and they sat down at right angles to each other on two different benches, Florian moving a few overstuffed cushions out of the way and then setting up his portable desk on his knees.
The cage in the corner rattled, and his eyes darted to it and then back again, like it would be rude to pry.
“It’s a wildcat,” Gabriel said. “Arthur insisted we keep it.”
“Yes, he said.”
Very stupid, actually, that just the fact that Florian already knew this and had heard it from Arthur was enough to feel like a dagger to the gullet, but it did.
“I wasn’t going to bother you with any of this tonight, but I was halfway through it with Arthur, and as he’s ill—”
“Arthur’s ill?” Anxiety lanced through him; visions of Arthur as he’d been after his father’s attack, whey-faced and damp to the touch, muttering wordlessly for days, lost in the grip of fever.
Gabriel had been too afraid to look at him, in case just being there, worrying he would die, was enough to make it come true. “What sort of ill?”
Florian glanced up from where he was fiddling with his quill and fixed Gabriel with a mildly interested look. Gabriel’s eyes slid away. “The usual, he says. A weak spell. Apparently they come on for a few days at a time and he struggles with feverishness, lethargy, frailty in his limbs.”
“Yes,” Gabriel said, annoyed again, not entirely sure why. “I know.”
“Right,” said Florian, seeming as unsure as Gabriel where this had gone wrong. “Sorry.”
“No, no—I’m sorry. I’m just tired. What did you want to ask me?”
“A couple of things, shouldn’t take too long … Let’s see … You rode out with your father during the uprising, yes?”
Gabriel nodded. He didn’t want to talk about this.
He didn’t want to talk to Florian at all.
Perfect Florian, classically handsome, polished manners, easy to get along with.
Pals with Arthur already. Gabriel had never been like that.
People didn’t warm to him at once, flock to his side, feel at ease in his company.
If Florian’s father had succeeded in his mission, he supposed Florian would have been his heir.
What sort of king would he have been? A better one, probably.
Christ. He had to stop committing treason against himself in his own head, but it was a daily occurrence at this point, and a hard habit to kick.
“And—sorry, but Arthur was apparently neck-deep in mud the entire time and the princess lost track of you until you were … found, so there are gaps in the account. I can give it the usual flourishes—rode out valiantly, cut down many a foe … but I wanted to check if there’s anything you’d like to add? ”
On the list of things Gabriel tried not to think about, this ranked very highly.
What could he possibly say? There were already falsehoods to be corrected.
Rode out valiantly? No. Rode out shaking so hard he could barely grip the reins through his gold-plated gauntlets?
Yes. They had formed a line, flanked by his father’s bannermen and finest loyal knights, and he had felt so disconnected from his own body that it couldn’t have been anything but a nightmare.
And then, something real—Arthur, whom Gabriel had been weak enough to believe had been spying for his father, riding badly toward him with the usurper’s banner held high until he’d thrown it (or, more accurately, dropped it) to the ground and crushed it deliberately into the mud.
Alone. A suicide mission. A message. The bravest thing Gabriel had ever seen anybody do.
The world had stopped as Arthur approached, and he’d realized too late what was happening, and only been able to watch, speechless with horror, as the archers had loosed.
After that, nausea and panic. Cut down many a foe?
Ha! Cut down no foes whatsoever. Clung to his horse, held his sword like it was a magic wand that might keep oncoming attackers at bay?
Sure. He’d been very lucky that he hadn’t needed to kill anyone, not ready to claim a life, and he’d been so relatively safe for the first part of the battle that the possibility of pain still felt distant and remote—not something that was certainly going to happen to him, and soon.
He’d been sheltered from such things his whole life.
He’d looked for Arthur everywhere, sure every body on the ground was his. The nightmare had worsened as he checked each face. He made himself look anyway.
Then an enormous and beautiful destrier, with sweat dripping down its neck and rolling eyes, had reared and danced sideways into Gabriel’s horse.
She had thrown him entirely by accident, a hard fall that had winded him completely.
She’d managed to get away, thank God, but Gabriel had found himself in the most dangerous place of all—flat on the ground, prime trampling territory—and then the terrified destrier’s hoofs had made contact.
A glancing blow to the head, followed by the full force of his weight coming down on Gabriel’s forearm.
No armor, however expertly made, could withstand that.
He’d fainted, then been brought cruelly back to life by the pain. Someone had fallen on top of him, pinning his crushed arm, and he’d blacked out again. He’d drifted in and out of consciousness, waiting for a miserable and inauspicious end, until Arthur found him.
Arthur like an angel, bloodied and bruised and backlit by the weak sunlight, red-eyed and crying, leaning in to press his forehead to Gabriel’s—and Gabriel had known he could die now, if he needed to, because somebody he loved was here to send him on his way.
It had really hurt, not to die. All he could remember after that was the agony trumpeting inside his head, the very embarrassing amount of vomiting, the moment he discovered that his father was dead—that he was king—but even that had to play second fiddle to his arm.
“That sounds about … right,” he said to Florian. “But I didn’t kill anyone. And there’s no need to say that I did.”
“Okay,” said Florian, inking his nib and crossing something out.
“And I fell,” Gabriel added. “You can write that. Arthur found me. Saved me. I want that recorded. And of course, you’ll have the story of what happened next. From Bridget.”
Florian was bent over the page, writing rapidly. “I don’t actually. I asked Arthur, but I think he was sparing my feelings.”
His tone was casual, but Gabriel felt like a monstrous fool.
Sometimes it was easy to forget that Lord Willard had been Florian’s father.
They were absolutely nothing alike, and Gabriel was so accustomed to talking about the usurper among people who held him in common as an obvious enemy, he wasn’t used to being sensitive about the fact of his death.
Arthur had probably been better at handling it. In fact, he had been the only one there to witness both the king’s and Florian’s father’s deaths, their bodies striking the ground for the last time no more than fifty feet apart.
It was a strange sort of bond, linking them all together.
“I … I really am sorry, about your father,” Gabriel said. “I mean—obviously … it’s … he sort of had to, but—”
“Please,” Florian said, putting down his pen. “You don’t need to—”
“No, I know, it’s just … hard. Isn’t it.”
“Yes,” Florian said, his voice heavy with relief.
“It is. My father was an incredibly difficult man to be around. I barely saw him in my teenage years, and when I did I knew I was an enormous disappointment to him. I knew him about as well as one might know a distant uncle, but he was still … my father. Part of me feels I should have tried harder to please him, or make peace. Lots of unsaid things. Lots of arguments I still have with him in my head. Horrible bastard. And yet.”
It felt suddenly very cruel of Gabriel to have brought him here, to try to coexist with people who couldn’t help but look at him as the enemy, and to rub shoulders with his father’s killer. He had weathered it all so stoically, but Christ. Not much of a holiday.
“You can go home, if you want to,” he said. “Not that we don’t want you here, but … I would understand…”
“No, thank you. I’d like to stay. You are family after all.” He smiled wanly. “And I appreciate that you let me talk to you, without a guard. Sir Hurst has made it perfectly clear … I know I must be considered a security risk.”
He very much had been, and Gabriel was still in an ongoing argument with Sir Hurst about this very subject, but Gabriel said, “Ah—no, not at all.”
Florian opened his mouth like he was about to speak, then stopped himself and looked down at what he’d been writing. “So I just wanted to get down … today’s events. The Questing Beast, I wasn’t sure how we wanted to … frame it?”
“Whether we should lie, you mean,” said Gabriel.
“I suppose it’s a matter of perspective. Was the Beast real … was it the wildcat all along, or perhaps even the boar, or both…”
Florian had grown up in a cultist household, a household of believers, even if his father had twisted everything about Arthurian history to his own ends. “What do you think?”
“I think the cat was probably a cat, and the pig a pig,” said Florian. “Perhaps the Beast is still out there. Perhaps not. People make mistakes all the time. It doesn’t negate their entire belief system. It’s not quite that black and white.”
“Hmm,” said Gabriel. “I suppose you could say we fought a monstrous boar, because we did. And that we found another large black animal, slain. And let people decide for themselves.”
“Then that’s what I’ll do.”
They sat like that for a while longer, Florian prompting with questions and Gabriel answering as best he could, punctuated by the soothing scratch of quill on parchment, until Florian was finished.
He said goodnight, and Gabriel waited until he’d been gone a while before slipping through the doorway, past the guards, to the tent that had been set up when they first made camp.
Inside, by the light of a small brazier, Bridget was asleep.
Gwen was sitting next to her, leaning back against the cot, also dead to the world, with her neck at a very uncomfortable angle.
On the bed opposite, Arthur had lost his blanket, his arms wrapped around himself as he slept, face smooth of lines except where the knotty white scar split his hairline.
Gabriel replaced the blanket, easing it over Arthur’s body and then backing away, struck by a kind of reckless horror that he had the audacity to touch him at all.