Chapter Forty-One
Forty-One
Bridget had always believed that it didn’t matter if a crowd was with or against you. At least, that had always been the case in the lists.
Now though, facing this particular crowd, it did seem to matter quite a lot that they all so obviously hated her.
She could see it in their sneers and stares, the ugly set of their mouths.
She felt like a trapped animal, a fox cornered by hounds—and instead of bringing everything into sharp focus, it was obliterating the last of her very frayed nerves.
Her vision was blurry, her breath too thin in her lungs; she should have been fighting, doing something, anything, and all she could do was follow her captors to the shitty stage they’d erected, wondering if this mob was going to tear her apart.
She strained against the rope, but she was tired, and all it did was earn her a hard shove as she was pushed up onto the crates.
The older man who’d delivered Bridget a private sermon was the one who spoke, quieting the crowd with a raised hand.
“Now I know this might make you angry,” he said, gesturing to Bridget like she was a broken heirloom or a questionable work of art, “but this is what happens when we contravene the natural laws of God. Men must be allowed to be men, and women to be women. When we fight our nature, we become angry, confused—and worse, when those who should know better claim that it is not a sin for genders to be confused, for a man to lie with a man, or a woman with a woman…”
The crowd reacted very loudly to this, as Bridget had suspected they would.
She wished she could find it in herself to be furious again.
All she could do was breathe, try to ignore the smell of churned mud and woodsmoke, and feel a faint twinge of regret that she was probably about to be murdered by somebody so very stupid.
She thought of the news reaching her mother and father. Her mother, at least, believed wholeheartedly in samsara. Rebirth. That might offer some small comfort. Bridget wasn’t entirely sure what she believed, except that she deserved a better end than this.
“We must make a statement,” the man continued, “to tell those who live in the city, who have been corrupted by all things unnatural, and those who worship false cults of magic, that we honest folk of this country will not stand for it. But first, we will give her a chance to renounce this behavior, and return to maidenhood, as is proper.”
The crowd jeered. Bridget looked the man who’d spoken in the eyes, breathing raggedly, and said nothing.
“Fine then. If she wants to be a man,” called one of the captors restraining her. “Then let us see how she wears it!”
He took the knife from his belt, and Bridget did move then, trying to duck away; he grabbed her by the hair, and she braced for steel at her throat, but instead when the blade moved he was left with a handful of her shorn hair.
He held it up for the crowd to see, evidently very pleased with himself—and then there was an odd noise, and his face went rigid and pale.
Bridget watched, confused, as he bent at the waist—and then realized that there was now a knife protruding from his stomach, satisfyingly central, like hitting the bull’s-eye on a training target. She knew that knife. It belonged to Neil. She’d been the one who’d given it to him.
There wasn’t time to think. The other boy holding her dropped his rope in fright and ran, and she was able to bend down and scrabble behind herself, undignified, for the knife still protruding from the fallen man’s belly.
Pulling a weapon from flesh was never advised on the battlefield due to risk of bleeding out—it felt strange to do it so carelessly, but the man on the ground was beyond saving.
The preacher recovered from the initial shock, realized what she’d done, and went to take the knife from her; she let him get close and then swung sharply in his direction, unable to judge the angle properly with her hands still tied behind her back.
She’d struck true; he jolted away, spattering a wide arc of blood across her side.
There was a disturbance in the crowd. As Bridget watched, a man wearing a cloak drew his sword and threw off his hood, revealing himself to be Sir Leonard, furious and deadly. It turned out that Bowen was not far away—those nearest to him tried to fall back, scrambling as he raised his blade.
Sir Hurst. Neil. Adah. As each was revealed, Bridget felt fire returning to her chest, a humorless smile on her lips.
The crowd was scattering, panicked, as it became clear just how many knights of the realm were in their midst; some of them drew their swords and knives, ready to fight, but these weren’t trained soldiers.
They were ordinary men, angry and scared, and while they would have held up very well in a brawl at a bar, the reality of the sudden appearance of the order of the round table was a different thing entirely.
Bridget was sure that any one of them would have professed his ability to beat Adah in a fight—so why, then, was she watching them back away from her, the only ones foolish enough to get within sword range finding themselves disarmed or wounded in short order?
The preacher jumped down from the crate, holding his arm, which was bleeding heavily. He looked terrified and slightly baffled, as if he hadn’t expected to face any actual violence aimed in his direction.
The real difference between them, Bridget thought, was that the most these men were willing to do for their cause was to kill for it. A knight of the round table would die for theirs.
Bridget could see Sir Bowen locked in combat with a man who had at least six inches on him in stature; Sir Leonard, showboating as always, was fighting two men at once with a blade in each hand.
She needed to be down there, fighting with them.
She tried to turn the knife in her hand at an angle to get some purchase against the rope, feeling a jolt of fear when the handle slipped, and then it was too late; one of the men on the ground had spotted her struggling and decided to take his shot at glory.
He pushed through the remaining crowd with purpose, lifting his knife as he took one step up onto the stage, Bridget backing away from him and wondering if she’d need to take the coward’s way out and run.
But then someone in a cloak was jumping up onto the stage beside her, and when the hood fell back, she realized it was Gwen: Gwen in plate armor, her bright fiery hair pulled back from her face in twin, sensible braids, her stance good, her sword raised in Bridget’s defense.
The man’s knife struck the flat of Gwen’s blade, and then she pushed him, hard, catching him off guard so that he went stumbling backward, losing his grip on his weapon in the process. It went flying off into the mud, and he glanced after it, wild-eyed, before giving up and fleeing.
Gwen waited until it became clear that no further assailants were forthcoming, and then straightened up and turned to her with a grim smile.
“Hello,” she said. “I’ve come to rescue you.”
“I…” Bridget took her in, magnificent beyond words, and felt almost speechless. “I can see that.”
Gwen cut her bindings, and Bridget shook out her wrists and then dropped down from the stage to retrieve someone else’s fallen shortsword.
She steeled herself, ready to let her mind slip away into the numb, radiant buzz of violence, knowing she’d suffer for it later, raising the blade—before she felt the flat of a sword hit her chest, stopping her in her tracks.
“No,” Gwen said. “Bridget, come on. Let’s go.”
Bridget looked at her, trying to shake off that rising heat of battle, her body unaware that there was any other way for this to go.
“Let’s go,” Gwen repeated. Bridget took a breath, and all of a sudden she was empty. Wrecked. She nodded—because she was so very tired. Maybe it was okay, this once, to walk away.
Gwen glanced up behind them, and said, “Oh, shit.”
Gabriel was mounting the stage. Bridget was always surprised to see him holding a sword; it wasn’t a natural state of existence for him, despite the many years of training that had given him a textbook fighting stance.
Someone shouted “It’s him,” and then Bridget heard the word “king” ripple through the square like a snake through a riverbed.
“If you think you can frighten us,” Gabriel called out, his voice shaky but resolute, “if you think we’ll be forced into silence, you’re wrong.
Rage all you want, as is your right, but if you expect us—me—to be meek and bow to hate, you’ll find yourselves sorely mistaken.
As my sister has just demonstrated, if you want a fight, we’ll give you one. ”
A tiny cavalry of pages and squires was racing down the hill, and the remaining fighters saw sense, and ran, limped, or staggered away.
Of the few men down, only one of them had stopped breathing; Bridget was gratified, at first, to see that it was the man who’d cut her hair, but then she saw the blood on his fingers where he’d clutched at his wound, and suddenly she was gripped by horror.
He was the assassin in the hall, scarlet pooling on the flagstones; Lord Willard on the battlefield, lying prone where she’d felled him.
She lurched forward, her legs too weak to hold her, and felt Gwen half catch her—and then there were more arms, Sidney’s, and Neil was somewhere nearby, almost hysterical, telling someone in shrill tones that they should have killed them all and burned the village to the ground.
The fight was over. The square was empty; the village as silent as the grave.
“Should we go after them, sire?” Sir Hurst said to Gabriel, already launching himself up onto a horse.
“No,” Gabriel said, shaking his head. “No, I think…” He looked at Bridget, who couldn’t advise him either way. In fact, she could no longer feel her limbs at all. “I think it’s done. I think it’s time for us to go home.”