Chapter Fifteen #2
“Close enough. Open your eyes. You can channel your anger. Channel your sorrow. Channel your fear. There will be moments when you are near death. Sometimes all it takes is one last push. Even if you die, you’ll know, in your final gasps, that you gave everything.
Keep holding the tension tight and get back on your horse. ”
The pink was flaring through me now, taking on darker hues. I put on my helmet and mounted my horse, fingers clutching the reins. At Bagotta’s instruction Galehaut jumped on his horse too, and we eyed each other across the tilt.
“Now!” called Bagotta.
A yell escaped my throat but I did not hear it.
The redness pinpricked my vision, sharpening my world to the slat of my helmet.
As we charged forward, I was no longer a body atop a horse.
I was the living embodiment of my own tension, and Blake and I were fingers of the same clenched fist. A few seconds later, I looked back to see Galehaut’s vacant horse trotting around without him.
He was on the ground. I had unseated him.
“Gale!” I jumped off Blake and ran to his side. He rolled over, moaning. I extended my arm to help him up, but he did not take it. He was clenching his stomach where my blunted lance had jabbed him. Slowly, he lifted his visor.
“Bagotta,” he shouted from the ground. “Whatever you said to him, it worked.”
I held tight to Bagotta’s technique, using it in all our practices.
As Galehaut improved in swordcraft, I began to activate the tension when we sparred.
Bagotta showed me how to visualize other emotions, how to channel anger, longing.
My skills improved to the point where Bagotta herself joined in, the two of them sparring against me.
More often than not, I’d disarm them both.
Yet as I improved on land, I now struggled at sea. Lirius’s challenges, it seemed, were designed to break us, if not kill us outright. He had every reason, I learned, to distrust us humans.
“Years ago, a Saxon ship killed his father,” Viviana had explained. “Pierced him with a harpoon.”
We swam through high swells, confronted sharks and whales, got tugged down to the ocean floor, where the pressure clanged against our ears.
We learned to tread in high storms, hunt fish in shallow pools and endure the lash of jellyfish.
But it felt, at times, like we were the repository of the merking’s rage-filled grief.
One afternoon, Lirius yanked me down so deep that I blacked out.
When I came to, having been tossed on the rocks, I was scolded for my weak lungs.
“Don’t let him get to you,” Galehaut urged. But the same redness that had coursed through me on horseback was burning my veins, igniting the back of my eyes. I slammed my hand against the rocks, drawing blood.
As the days unspooled, Elinor improved. She began to recover her words and some of the motion in her face.
She managed to stand up on her own, though she still needed help walking.
The sisterhood tended to her needs—bathing her, administering medicine, whispering spells and prayers as she rested.
When Galehaut or I offered to help, we were quickly dismissed.
Elinor’s care, it was made clear, was their purview.
We could sit with her for a few minutes here and there, but not longer, lest we glean too much of their ancient ways.
It panged me that I couldn’t spend time with her like I’d used to.
A table game. A shake of bone dice. A good roll.
Two weeks passed. Without Viviana to teach us, Galehaut and I were left to our own devices in both the forest and the library.
I asked if the island felt off to him. Did the mountain feel inverted, like a valley? He looked at me like I was losing my mind.
“It’s something with the magic,” I said. “When she leaves, the island withers.”
The library window was open and Galehaut filled his lungs with lush air. Outside, the forest was dewy and flowering. The trees thronged with the sound of birds and insects.
“It’s not the island, Lance.” He had gone back and forth, weighing the merits of a nickname: Lance or Lot. Lance had thankfully won out.
“Then what is it?”
“Simple,” he said. “You miss her.”
This was the longest we had been apart, and soon I would strike out on my own, forced to marry and produce an heir. The thought left me desiccated, terrified. Galehaut would return to Giant’s Island, and I would likely never see him again.
“What do you think Joyous Guard is like?” he asked me.
“I do not know.”
“But it will be yours. Your land. A place to return after your many quests. Maybe it has lots of grand rooms with views of converging rivers.”
“Maybe. Though I might not find out for a long while. I don’t know where the sisterhood will send me.”
“Perhaps they will send you to Giant’s Island and you can spend your days with us. My sister, Delice, would be thrilled to have a fiddler in our midst.”
The brightness of the suggestion, the way he could float an impossible idea so playfully. It struck like a spike.
“What of Cymidei?” I countered.
His expression hardened. “What of her?”
“Would she like me?”
He looked away, a square of light sharp against his jawline. “I suppose.”
“Do you not know her well?”
“Of course I know her well,” he snapped. “I have known her all my life.”
“And you have always loved her?”
“Why would you ask that?”
“I am just wondering. I have never loved someone that way.”
He stood abruptly, his chair barking against the floor.
“I suppose you haven’t.”
My heart sunk. Just when I thought I’d mapped him, a new peak or trench would emerge, calling into question my most basic social faculties. At the threshold he turned back.
“The answer is yes, Lancelot. Yes, I have always loved her. A marriage with Cymidei will be a happy one. You should spend less time thinking about her and more time thinking about how you’ll find a wife yourself. Elinor needs a great-granddaughter.”
I slumped over the table and shut my eyes, trying to wish away the words I had goaded out of him. Why had I pushed him on Cymidei? Why did the thought of marriage—both his and mine—knot my stomach?
I prepared a pottage for us that evening and he accepted it with cold gratitude. We hardly spoke that night or the following day. I was at arm’s length again. No more jokes or games, no more whispered secrets, all because of what? Our training would be done before we knew it.
“You two have been quiet as mice,” Bagotta said over dinner later that week. “Lirius has worn you out.”
I kept my eyes trained on my bread. I would not look either of them in the eye, lest I see my own pathetic self reflected back.