Chapter 18
The clash of steel rang across the inner bailey and sent a pair of robins fluttering from the stable roof.
Richard caught Seola’s blow on his crossguard.
The princess’s blade was a brutish thing—broader and heavier than his own sword—and the impact shuddered through his wrists.
Pivoting on his back foot, Richard turned the parry into a sidestep and cut low at her exposed flank.
She swept her blade down in a lazy arc and drove his point into the packed dirt.
“Hah!” Sweat darkened the collar of Seola’s tunic. “You have gotten slow, old friend.”
They were in the inner bailey, where fewer tended to gather, and the smell of horses hung thick in the morning air. Beyond the sparring circle, a column of cavalrymen trotted their mounts through figure-eights.
Richard wrenched his sword free and circled left. He’d removed his shirt a while ago, and bruises already littered his arms where the flat side of Seola’s sword had thudded. The tattoo—he’d kept it covered under a bandage.
Their blades met again and again. A few of the cavalrymen had begun to glance over.
With a battle cry that seemed entirely too overwrought, Seola lunged with a looping overhead that forced Richard to raise his blade in a two-handed block.
The crash jarred his teeth. She bore down, their hilts locked.
“Will you stop attempting to remove my head?” Richard asked wearily. “My twenties are behind me.”
“So are mine,” Seola scoffed. “But I do not give excuses like you.”
They broke apart. Seola rolled her shoulder and squinted at him. “Speaking of growth, that knight certainly has.”
“Kaelen?”
“A short thing he was when I was last here, tripping over his own boots.” She swiped her sword, and Richard parried on instinct. “Now look at him. All broad shoulders and pretty eyes.”
“He trains hard,” Richard said, circling. “As any knight ought.”
“Hah, well, he surely trained at something last night.” Seola’s grin sharpened. “I saw him leaving the Naradeshi dancer’s bedchamber this morn.”
Richard’s parry came a beat too late. Seola’s blade cracked against his and tore the sword from his grip. It spun through the air and crashed into a water trough.
The watching soldiers winced and hurriedly turned their backs.
Richard’s chest heaved. He stalked to the water trough and bent to retrieve his sword. “Kaelen’s nightly affairs are his own.”
“Oh, yes. The fun must have been considerable. I used to adore bedding dancers. The positions they bend in—”
“Seola.” Richard willed the boil of something red and hot trapped in his ribcage to simmer. “How goes your marriage with your general?”
The deflection worked. Seola’s grin fled.
“Fine. Well enough. Poorly. Both, I suppose.” She huffed.
“We argue most times. She is often busy and cold, my Ha-eun.” Seola squinted at the sun.
“Or rather, she is not cold in truth. Only quiet when I wish her loud, and hard when I wish her soft. And she thinks before she speaks, which is a dreadful flaw.”
Richard smiled. It was clear. “You love her.”
“But, of course. That is what it means, no?” Seola scratched her back with her sword, ignoring Richard’s startled protest. “To be in love. It is not like your bard songs of happy ever after. It is snarling and yelling and sulking and then—” She fiddled with her double rings.
“Coming back. Choosing each other again over breakfast, though you are angry about the mead bottle she threw off the table. Making time to worship her in bed, even when the world demands you. Finding a way to fit without cutting each other with your jagged edges.”
Richard rubbed his nape awkwardly. This was a conversation he had no reply to.
Seola noticed. “Not once, old friend? In all these years?”
“No.” Richard dragged a hand through his damp hair. “Regardless, there are more pressing concerns at present.”
“We have a saying in Frostheim. You do not anchor the longship only when the sea is calm. If you are waiting for the right time to give away your heart, I will tell you now, there is no such thing.” Seola pointed her sword at him with a frown.
“And if you want that knight—as I think you do, given the numerous times you ogled him last night—you ought to give chase before another catches him first.” She jutted her chin towards the castle.
“I am sure that dancer has quick hands.”
Richard blinked. “I do not want Kaelen. Not—not in that manner!”
“No?”
“No.” Heat rushed to Richard’s face. “He is the Deputy Captain of my Crownsguard. The sworn brother of my brother. Why would I—he and I are not—I do not think of him in that—”
Seola’s eyebrows climbed higher with each stuttered denial. Richard bit his lip.
“I would just...” He dropped his voice to a mutter. “I have come to know him better in these few months. And—” He coughed. “And I should merely prefer that he be…closer.”
“Closer.” Seola waggled her brows.
“No.” Richard recoiled. “Not—not like that. In any form.”
Seola looked confused. “Then as a friend?”
Richard gave his head an irritated shake.
As a friend? But Seola was a friend, and he did not feel such ugliness welling in him at the thought of her abed with her wife.
And Orric was a friend, who stirred none of the same…
possessiveness? Richard stared down at where his hand curled against his heart.
A lover?
But no. He did not want Kaelen in his bed. He wanted none of what Seola’s waggling eyebrows hinted at.
“I do not know,” Richard said quietly. “I know only that I should like him to smile at me more. And perhaps—” He hesitated, baffled by the words that came to his tongue. “To smile at others less.”
Seola gawked, almost cross-eyed, and Richard groaned, moving to grab his shirt from the fence.
“Forget it.”
“No!” Seola exclaimed. “All these years, and I have never seen you so flustered!”
“I am not flustered!” Richard hissed back. He was relieved when Seola’s reply was cut by Dain’s bellow across the bailey.
“YOUR MAJESTY!”
The man strode towards Richard, one hand dragging a sobbing Briony—her curls tangled with straw, her right eye swelling shut—and the other yanking along a similarly aged squire.
Isolde, Richard recognised. Her braid was loose, her collar torn, and her left cheek puffed red.
Behind them came a straggle of sheepish squires and a few knights.
The soldiers around stopped their training to watch, and servants peered over the balcony railings. It wasn’t every day, Richard supposed, that they saw a princess bested in a fight.
Dain deposited both girls before Richard and stepped back with a harrumph.
“Caught these two, Your Majesty, rolling in the dirt in the inner courtyard like a pair of feral cats.”
Richard pulled on his shirt. “Tell me, Briony.”
The girl’s face crumpled, and words poured from her in a teary torrent. “She p-punched me! Right in the eye! I wasn’t even—I didn’t do anything horrible, and she just—just hit me, Brother! She is a treasonous snake, she is, and I am blinded—”
“That is a lie!” Isolde stood tall and jabbed a finger in Briony’s direction. “She slapped me first!”
“Because you were laughing at me!” Briony shrieked and stomped her foot. “You and your silly friends were giggling and whispering, and I told you to stop, and you said I was more revolting than the backside of a wicked troll—”
Seola, who leaned against the fence with her arms folded, guffawed. “Oho, this is magnificent. Better than any duel.”
Richard glowered at Isolde. “Is it right, Squire, for you to hit a girl you outmatch in every bodily regard?”
Isolde’s face coloured. “Your Majesty, I was defending—”
“And is it right,” Richard continued, “for a squire, who aspires to knighthood and is taught in the virtues of honour, to mock others behind their backs? To giggle and whisper where the subject can hear and use demeaning insults?”
Isolde flinched and stubbed her boot against the ground. “She—She shouldn’t have tried asking Squire Godwyn to the ball. Godwyn is my—he’s courting me, and she knew, and she went and asked him anyway—”
“He smiled at me, and I only asked if he had thought of changing his mind!” Briony yelled.
“You had no right!” Isolde yelled back. “Being the king’s sister does not mean you may—”
Richard held up a hand. Truly, he should have this Godwyn executed for causing such strife. “Who is this squire’s master?”
A lady knight stepped forward—heavily freckled, with long ginger hair “Your Majesty.”
Richard faced her. “Lady Rowe, you have not taught your squire well.”
The knight went down on her knee, fist to chest. “The fault is mine.”
“One hundred laps of the main training yard. Yours to run, Lady Rowe. Today.”
Isolde’s eyes bulged. “That isn’t—my master didn’t do anything! It isn’t fair to punish her for—”
“Be silent, Isolde, when the king speaks,” Lady Rowe snapped.
Isolde’s lips pressed shut.
Richard turned to Briony, who had been watching with clear smugness.
“And you, Briony.” Richard fought back a smile as alarm crossed the girl’s features.
“Is it right for a princess to strike a squire? To strike a girl who wakes before dawn and trains until her hands bleed so that one day she might protect you? Is it right for a princess to slap her own people, sworn to her service, and brawl with them?”
Briony spluttered, flushing hard. “Well, I—I—” She quailed at Richard’s glare, and her lower lip trembled. “No.”
“No,” Richard agreed. “Now, you are the princess, and Dain, as our Lord Commander, functions as your master. So being, he shall also run a hundred laps alongside Lady Rowe.”
Dain winked and clasped his hands behind his back. “Yes, Your Majesty.”
Briony gasped. “But Dain has a bad knee! Brother, you know his knee is bad! You cannot make him—why, he shall be limping for days!”
“Then I offer an alternative. Princess Briony and Squire Isolde, you may take your masters’ punishments if you so wish.”
“Yes!” Isolde’s back went rigid. “I shall bear the laps! Never shall I allow my master to take my punishments!”
She would make a good knight, Richard noted absently, and the wry smile Lady Rowe wore suggested the same.
Briony went onto her tiptoes and used her shoulder to jostle Isolde aside. “And I shall bear Dain’s laps! For my honour as a princess stretches higher than any squire!”
“Very well,” Richard said. “You two shall also be bound together at the wrist throughout.”
The girls’ jaws dropped in unison. “Together?”
“Quite. You will learn to match your pace, communicate, and cooperate until the end.”
The girls sneered at each other with mutual loathing.
“Fine,” Isolde ground out.
“Fine,” Briony spat.
Richard nodded at Dain. “See it done, Lord Commander.”
“With pleasure.”
Briony’s one good eye widened. “You take pleasure in my suffering, Dain?”
“In discipline, lassie.” Dain ruffled her curls. “A rare and beautiful thing.”
He steered them away, with the procession of squires and knights trailing after.
Seola swatted Richard’s shoulder as he watched them go. “You are good at that.”
“I have had near a lifetime of juggling my siblings’ arguments.”
Seola lifted her sword. “Well then, old friend. Shall we return to our own quarrel?”
“Yes.” Richard slid into a ready stance. “But this time, you will refrain from discussing my knight.”
“Aha.” Seola winked. “Your knight, is he?”
Richard lunged before she could say another word.