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Neal lowered his book, raising arched brows over green eyes. “I’m about to commence four years obeying the call of a bruiser on a horse,” he pointed out in his dry voice. A friend had commented once that Neal had a gift for making someone want to punch him just for saying hello. “I refuse to put down what might be the last book I see for months.”
Sometimes Neal took forever to get to the point; sometimes, even when he got to it, the thing didn’t feel like a point at all.
Once the carrier was empty, Kel nodded to Jump: he sprang neatly into the leather box. Hoshi flicked two ears back, then swung them forward again. Not even Jump could shake the mare’s calm. “Well, I’m impressed,” drawled Raoul, who had watched.
“We do try to eat,” Raoul called back to her. “I go all faint if I don’t get fed regularly. Only think of the disgrace to the King’s Own if I fell from the saddle.” “But there was that time in Fanwood,” a voice behind them said. “That wedding in Tameran,” added the blond Sergeant Osbern, riding a horse-length behind Kel. “Don’t forget when what’s-his-name, with the army, retired,” yelled a third. “Silence, insubordinate curs!” cried Raoul.
Suddenly Kel’s view of the next four years changed. She had expected hard work mixed with dread for the Ordeal of Knighthood at the end of it. Never had she guessed that other Tortallan warriors might not be as stiff and formal as Lord Wyldon. Never had she thought that she might have fun.
The standard-bearer gripped her arm. “Watch your step, squire,” he informed her. “Just because Wyldon didn’t have the brass to get rid of you doesn’t mean we won’t.” Kel flexed her bicep. He stared at her as muscle swelled under his fingers, forcing them open. With a quick jerk Kel freed herself.
Yesssss
The centaur groped at a heavy leather belt around his waist with his free hand. He yanked out a throwing-axe. My luck, thought Kel. He comes the way no one’s supposed to come, and he can use weapons in both hands.
For a moment he looked down at her, hands in his breeches pockets, shaking his head. “Young idiot,” he said, amusement in his sloe-black eyes. “You forgot the forelegs, didn’t you?” Kel smiled wryly. “Yes, sir.”
He grinned as Kel made a face. “When people say a knight’s job is all glory, I laugh, and laugh, and laugh,” he said. “Often I can stop laughing before they edge away and talk about soothing drinks.
She forced herself to stand, mount Peachblossom, and take the shield and lance from Qasim. Running away would be far more sensible, she scolded herself as she guided Peachblossom to his place and settled her lance. But whoever said I’m sensible?
She put on her best, most unreadable, Yamani Lump face and led Peachblossom to the gate. Dom held it open, shaking his head. “You’re alive. Most people who go five rounds with my lord can only babble about funeral plans.” “Their lances were padded, for Mithros’s sake,” Lerant pointed out crossly. “How much harm could they do?” “Good,” Buri said. “You get one and have a go.”
Kel looked at him, seeing unholy amusement in his face. He had to know how her body felt. Finally she said, “Begging my lord’s pardon, but you are a bad man.”
“If you want my place, you can have it,” she told Neal, straight-faced. “You’d particularly like the tilting practice we have every day when we aren’t in the field.” Neal shuddered. “Tilt with Lord Raoul? Why don’t I just lie down in front of an elephant and let him step on me? I bet it feels the same.”
Try not to spend too many hours writing poems to Yuki’s eyebrow,” she advised Neal. “Yamani poetry is very different from ours. I doubt she’d appreciate yours.” Grinning, she took her tray to the servers. Behind her she heard the squires discuss where they might find books of Yamani poetry.
“If arrogance were shoes, he’d never go bare-foot.”
Raoul shook his head. “He wasn’t this complicated when we were pages. I guess you never know how people will grow up.” “What was it like?” asked Kel. “You, Lady Alanna, the king—it’s hard to see you as pages or squires.” Raoul grinned. “Like puppies in a basket,” he said. “All paws and tails.”
He reached the middle of the tear and tied off his thread with a triumphant smile. “Amazing, the skills a fellow picks up in forty years of bachelordom, don’t you think?” he taunted Kel as he got to his feet. She grinned at him, still finishing her part of the job. “You just did that because you can,” she retorted.
“I haven’t seen Raoul about. I suppose he defied their majesties and is hiding in his rooms.” “No, he’s here,” Kel said. “Not in this room, though, or we’d have seen a big lump behind the hangings.”
“If I pretend I like you, squire, can I use the spyglass?” Lerant asked Kel. “Please don’t try,” she replied. “You’re not that good an actor. Dom, he can look when you’re done.” “Some people are cocky ever since they killed a whole centaur,” Lerant remarked to the air. “Some people are annoying,” Dom retorted, giving him the spyglass.
“I’m to attend balls and banquets without my squire?” demanded Raoul, all innocence. “I can’t handle things like requesting water to shave with, or getting my clothes pressed. I need Kel.” “You managed for twenty years,” growled the king, blue eyes flashing in anger. “This is different,” Raoul informed him.
“There is a saying in the Islands,” she told him stiffly. “Beware the women of the warrior class, for all they touch is both decorative and deadly.”
Kel was so used to the banquet routine that her mind was on other things as she carried the finger bowl and towel to Lord Raoul’s table. As she offered them to his female companion, she looked into violet eyes. Kel dropped the bowl, splattering Lady Alanna’s indigo skirts and Lord Raoul’s spruce green hose. “I’m sorry,” Raoul said wickedly as Kel mopped up the spill. “Should I have warned you?” Kneeling on the ground, Kel saw Alanna kick Raoul in the shin.
Her tent had never felt this small before. She liked mathematics, her mind babbled. It was impossible for there to be less room inside a tent with just her and Cleon there than there was when Merric, Neal, and Owen were present as well.
“Please look at me, Kel,” Cleon asked. She was ready to refuse, but he’d said “please.” It would be churlish not to look up, so she did, meeting his gray eyes with her hazel ones. He was smiling. That was a dirty trick. It was impossible to remind him she was a fellow squire, sexless, when he smiled with so much liking that her insides melted. He lowered his head just a few inches to press his mouth to hers. Oh, my, thought Kel.
“Our families are so determined to keep their bloodlines pure that they insist their daughters remain virgins before marriage, poor things. You don’t see that nonsense in the middle and lower classes. They know a woman’s body belongs to herself and the Goddess, and that’s the end of it.”
Someone had said something, she realized. Someone, or many someones. And my friends got in fights over it, but never told me. “I don’t deserve my friends,” she remarked quietly. “Sure you do, opal of happiness,” Cleon said. “We’d’ve failed mathematics to a man without you, for one thing.” That made her grin.
Kel’s mouth popped open when she read her opponent’s name. “You’d better see the coffin maker and order me a box,” she told Cleon as he threw the stick for Jump to chase. He straightened, confused, and read the name she pointed to: Wyldon of Cavall. “Gods protect me, you’re going to die a virgin,” he whispered. “What say we find a nice private haystack and take care of that?”
“I’ll need all the rest I can get before he pounds me into the mud.” “He can’t still dislike you,” Cleon said. “I don’t think he does,” Kel replied. “But that won’t stop him from pounding me into the mud.”
“I don’t know why I came over,” the herald remarked when he was within earshot. “By now you know the rules as well as I. Lord Raoul asked me to tell you that if you get yourself killed, he will never speak to you again.”
“The last fall I got from any man was from him, ten years ago.” “You’ve beaten him since?” Kel asked, thinking he might share his secret. “Mithros, no—I just don’t joust with him anymore. I have my pride,” Raoul said.
He kissed her again, then held her tight. “I love tall women. Pearl of squires, have I mentioned how lovely it is not to have to bend in two to kiss you?” “Only a hundred times,” she replied.
The door to Raoul’s chambers sprang open. Raoul was in his loincloth, holding his unsheathed sword. Buri, clad only in a blanket, stood at his elbow, a dagger in her free hand.
Ehehehe
She rode to a public garden in the city, attended by Jump, the other sparrows, and Peachblossom, and buried Crown under an olive tree. Olives symbolized healing and peace. Crown had earned both.
*sobbing*
But it seemed to her that grape leaves stuffed with ground lamb, and hot mud baths for the skin, were jokes the locals played on gullible northerners.
“The glory of knighthood is lovely, isn’t it?” Raoul asked as they urged the indignant Peachblossom and the calm Drum to pull. “The brilliance and fury of battle, the sound of trumpets in the air, the flowers, and the pretty girls—or pretty boys, in your case—climbing all over us.” Kel, every bit as muddy and weary as her knight-master, grinned. “I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, my lord. You are a bad man.”
What if Cleon had found someone new, someone small and lovely? What if he’d found someone with dimples? Dimpled girls were her worst daymare: men were supposed to be unable to defend themselves against them.
“He wouldn’t take the Own away, would he?” Kel asked, horrified. The king could be unfair, but surely not that unfair. “Worse.” Raoul patted his face with a cloth. “He said if I take more time away from his bootheels for my own pleasure, he’ll seat me with the greediest matchmaking mother in each district.” Kel winced. Surely there ought to be laws against that kind of punishment.
Looking around, she saw she was in her own tent. Jump rose on his hind legs, planted his forepaws on the side of her cot, and dropped an apple onto the sheet that covered her. Four sparrows landed beside his offering, each with a grape in its claws.
THE CUTEST
Cleon smiled. “The queen sent him to his room.” Kel gaped at him. “She what?” “Oh, not in front of anyone,” Cleon assured Kel hastily. “They were in that tower of yours. I wouldn’t have heard if I hadn’t been using the, er, necessary that’s on the floor right below. The queen said if Raoul was going to squall like an infant cheated of a sweet he could go to his room until he grew up.”
She wiped her hands on her breeches and laid her palms against the iron door. For a moment she had the oddest fancy that something in the metal breathed, You again. “Yes, of course it’s me,” she whispered. “I’m proving to myself that I’m not afraid of you.” But you are, that strange not-voice replied. “I like lying to myself. It’s fun. Would you just please do it?” It did.
Kel marched back to her knight-master’s rooms. He was reviewing maps on what was supposed to be his dining table, explaining them to Jump and the fascinated sparrows.
I love him
Raoul rested his face in his hands. “That fathead Glaisdan,” he said, his voice muffled. “He kept telling me that one Tortallan horseman was the equal of ten northern savages.” “Maybe they are,” said Flyndan dourly. “It’s the eleventh savage that gets you.”
“We learn more of ourselves, seeing the kraken, than we can learn in ten years at home,” Qasim said over that first campfire on the Great Road North. “Speak for your own home,” Lerant quipped. “My aunt Deliah was a kraken.” The men chuckled. “Only two arms,” Dom insisted, mouth full. That raised a laugh.
“I was stupid,” she told Raoul when she saw him next. “Good. You know it. Now you won’t make that mistake again,” he said with a grin. “You’ll get to make others. Try to remember that armor works much better when it’s on.”
Among the Own there were two opinions: kill the soldiers because they fight and officers are useless, or kill the officers because they think and the soldiers will break up and panic without them.
“When in doubt,” the mage Numair Salmalín had taught the pages, “shoot the wizard.”
Lerant goggled at their prize. “What in the name of Torsen Hammersmith is that?” “Good question,” croaked Kel, whose voice was raw. She must have been shouting, though she hardly remembered it. “So happy you asked. Give us another, if you like.” Lerant shook his head. “You get more like my lord every day. I suppose you’ll want combat pay for the dog and birdies next.” “They earned it,” Wolset told him. The other exhausted men nodded.
Kel thought asking her for wedding ideas was like asking a cat how to raise horses, but she did her best.
Back and forth they continued the instruction, reminding her of her duty to uphold the law and her own honor, to keep her word, to heed the rules of chivalry. Kel let all of it fall into her heart like stones into a still pool, sending ripples through her spirit as they fell. Those words were the reason she had come this far, the whole reason she needed to be a knight. She wanted them to be as much a part of her as blood and bone.
Kel remained for a moment, looking at her sword. The blue tempering shone in the light from her candles, pulling her eye to that elegant blade. “I dub thee Griffin,” she whispered, running her fingertips along its length. “We have work to do.”
