Chapter Forty-Six
Forty-Six
Camelot was beautiful in the spring. Blossoms on the apple trees, ducklings bobbing about in the moat, and when the sun and the wind conspired just right, the flowers in the gardens smelled so strong and sweet it was like frolicking in the meadows of Avalon.
Sort of. Not really, based on experience. Bridget kept telling herself she needed to weed the word “Avalon” from her vocabulary.
It was an unseasonably hot day in April, and Neil had complained the entire time he’d strapped her into her armor, as if he were the one being clad in steel and sent out into the sun for hours.
He’d been having a romance with a guard, a quiet boy who always looked like he’d been recently hit over the head whenever Bridget saw him.
She felt for him. He was a bit furtive and embarrassed about the whole affair, which obviously annoyed her squire.
He just didn’t seem ready yet, as was his right; Neil thought this was silly, in a castle where the king had openly danced half the dances with a man at a feast only just last week, although he kept his grumbling for Bridget rather than his paramour.
Bridget stopped in on Elaine in the kitchens on her way out, and was treated to a miniature rhubarb tart that she tried to refuse three times before it was practically shoved into her mouth. It was good. Tasted like summer was on the way. Today, Bridget really could believe it.
She’d had to go to the others to ask for an exception to their sworn oath of secrecy about what they’d seen on the way home from questing.
Elaine was the only one she’d told about the island and the old king resting there, and she had responded only with a satisfied smile and a nod of her head—a lifetime of faith confirmed, even if Bridget thought the whole thing raised more questions than it answered—and then asked Bridget if she wanted to go and gather medicinal herbs together in the kitchen garden.
Down in the training yard, everyone was already assembled, even though Bridget was at least five minutes early.
She was surprised to see Gwen standing there, dressed in her traveling clothes, leaning against the wall talking to a bright-eyed young blond girl called Merrin, who was much the same sort of stubborn overachiever as the princess.
“Morning,” Bridget said when she reached them, walking past to get to the storage shed where they kept the dummies and targets. “Thought you’d already be gone.”
Gwen grimaced. “Art and Gabe are still … packing. I think. They’re either arguing or kissing violently, and I didn’t want to find out.”
“Mmm,” Bridget said, nodding, then bending down to grab a dummy by the waist and heave.
“Oh, let me help you, Sir Bridget,” said Merrin, as upsettingly enthusiastic as usual. “In fact, let the rest of us do this, and you can finish your … conversation.”
Bridget rolled her eyes, but she let her students take over, brushed her hands off, and walked Gwen to the gate.
“You won’t tarry too long,” Gwen prompted. “Will you? I’ve been looking forward to this for months.”
“Just until the end of the week,” Bridget promised. “Then Adah’s back, and I can join you. I actually reckon they prefer her. Apparently she’s very nice to them.”
“You’re nice,” Gwen protested. “In your own way.”
It was Adah and Bridget’s policy to take on apprenticing squires who had no noble ties, no family money to speak of, and who would certainly never have been fostered elsewhere, regardless of their aptitude.
Despite Adah’s pronouncement that they should only train girls, they only made up two-thirds of the current cohort, which she’d grumblingly accepted in the end as a reasonable ratio.
Some days Bridget looked at them and wondered what she was getting them into; whether they’d have been safer at home, with ordinary roles and lives, and nobody to put a sword in their hands and teach them how to swing it properly.
But then, based on the tenacity of this lot, they’d probably have swung the swords anyway, in the end. At least now they knew where to plant their feet.
Bridget was learning where she wanted to plant hers.
She’d been living at Camelot; not in the castle proper, but in one of the little cottages among the outbuildings, in a quiet corner by the orchard.
When her parents came to visit, they pretended her house was nice, but asked five times if she hadn’t considered taking permanent lodgings in the keep.
She’d been trying to talk more about the battle, too, when she could.
To Gwen, Bowen, even the Wizard. Maybe one day it would start to help.
She’d only planned to return to the tourneys to support Leonard and Bowen, who were going on somewhat of a victory tour over the summer—knights of the round table in action—but she’d received a letter from one Lady Joan Baker, the only lady knight currently on the circuit, who’d heard she was teaching and had asked if she might consider coming out to give her some pointers.
Bridget had said yes, and then spent a week agonizing about it.
“I’ve got nothing to teach her,” she’d told Gwen again and again, until Gwen forbade her from saying those words, and when she wouldn’t shut up, drew her under the covers and kissed her until she forgot what she’d been worrying about in the first place.
Now Gwen glanced over at Bridget’s students, who were all still busy bickering over the proper arrangement of the practice targets, and then leaned over to give her a quick, hard kiss, the kind that left Bridget staggering a little in its wake.
“See you in a week,” she said, smiling, sunlight in her hair. “And go easy on them, all right? They think you’re their god.”
Bridget smiled at her, properly, letting her eyes crinkle at the corners and everything. “I’ll try.”