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Chapter Twenty Just don’t tell the other knights I screamed

It seemed all Darkhaven had turned out for the dragon bonfire.

The grassy slopes around the castle were a riot of sounds and

colors, with commoners and nobility alike mingling to enjoy the spectacle.

Dotting the grounds were piles of wood and brush

waiting to be lit, and directly down the hill from the castle gate was a vast open area and a platform where the speeches

and main entertainments would take place.

From the moment Olivia had popped into Gwen’s room with a pile of fabric over one arm and a box of cosmetics in the other,

Gwen had been dreading the entire affair.

Dealing with Isobelle was a challenge at the best of times, when Gwen was wearing

armor or riding her horse or holding a sword, and all was as it should be between them.

But thus far, every effort to face

her down on her home turf—the land of fabrics and cosmetics and social niceties—had been disastrous.

She’d tried a halfhearted protest, but Olivia had taken a step back and looked at Gwen, chin lowered, eyes intent, and said

evenly, “The only way you are escaping this room is wearing this dress, these cosmetics, and these hair ribbons. Do I make

myself clear?”

Now, as Gwen stood on the edge of the bonfire grounds, waiting for Isobelle to finish rounding up the girls, her heart was doing a flip-flop in her chest. She’d never been one for pretty garments, or rouges to make her lips redder, or herbal rinses to make her hair shine.

Hazily, she remembered her mother occasionally doing her hair or prettying up a dress with a spare bit of ribbon, but by the time she was old enough to learn those strange and arcane rituals of femininity for herself, her mother was too ill to teach her the proper magic.

For the most part, trying to look “pretty” made Gwen uncomfortable.

Far more uncomfortable than she felt roasting on a summer’s

day in a suit of armor, facing down an opponent over a sharpened bit of stick.

At least the worst thing that could happen

to her in that situation was gruesome and painful death.

But this dress...

this dress was doing something to her.

It was a deep, dark green that looked inky in the twilight, except for the way its velvety fibers caught the light and flashed

whenever she moved, like verdant lightning.

Olivia had cut the neckline low and square, revealing freckles on Gwen’s pale

shoulders that she hadn’t even noticed herself before.

Despite the veritable army of potions and pots and paints Olivia had

brought with her, she’d done very little to Gwen’s face except to darken the lines of her eyelashes and add a deep, dusky

rose to her lips.

And through her hair she’d tied a ribbon of the same material as the dress, pulling the strands back on

one side into a twist and left to fall in heavy waves on the other.

Olivia had shown her a mirror right before she left.

Gwen looked like some kind of sorceress, emerging from the forest with

magic crackling around her ankles and smoky, sultry promises in her eyes.

As she stood waiting, Gwen could feel eyes on her, though when she turned in a slow circle, she could see no one staring.

She tried to dismiss the sensation, and yet something was sending a shiver down her spine—a not altogether unpleasant sensation.

“Céline!”

Isobelle appeared from behind a group of ladies who looked somewhat surprised to find her popping up in their midst. Isobelle’s

dress was a brilliant violet blue, cut in her signature style and done up in flounces and layers.

Her hair was absolute perfection,

eyes sparkling, lips a bright pink and shining softly in the light from the torches.

Gwen swallowed, trying to find some other

detail to stare at.

Isobelle’s cheeks were pink, much pinker than Olivia ought to have painted them.

Closer to her now, Isobelle lowered her voice

and murmured, “Gwen, you look so beautiful!”

Gwen shrugged, glancing away to watch the crowd.

“Olivia is talented.”

Isobelle’s fair eyebrows drew in.

“Why do you always do that?” she asked, a flicker of genuine distress in her face.

“If I

compliment you on your riding or your smithing, you’re fine. But god forbid I should say you look nice, or you start scowling

and rolling your eyes at me.”

Gwen blinked at her.

Moments ago she’d been standing there, reflecting on how uncomfortable all the finery made her feel,

and Isobelle had seen through her in a heartbeat.

“I... I don’t know,” she managed, fighting the inexplicable urge to tell

Isobelle absolutely everything about herself, her past, her heart.

“But you’re right, I do do that. I’m sorry.”

The scowl smoothed away, and the gleaming lips curved a touch.

“Why do I get the feeling you’re telling me what you think I want to hear? Never mind. Just say ‘thank you, Isobelle, you look gorgeous, too.’”

“Thank you, Isobelle.” Gwen let her breath out as Isobelle came up beside her to link arms and steer her over toward the festivities.

A shiver ran up Gwen’s arm from the point where Isobelle’s hand rested against her sleeve, and Gwen ruthlessly halted the

rather foolish smile threatening to spread across her features.

“You look gorgeous, too.”

“Good girl,” said Isobelle, her tones velvety with smugness.

“Now, we can either catch up with the girls—they’ve got a spot

not too far from where the speeches will take place—or we can explore.” Isobelle’s eyes swung up and to the side, watching

Gwen through her lashes.

Had Gwen imagined the slight, barely perceptible trailing off, a sign of reluctance, when Isobelle mentioned joining the other

girls?

Or did she just want Isobelle to be reluctant, want her to wish for Gwen’s company over that of the others?

She’d never had a close female friend

before—was it normal to want to keep her all to herself?

“Gwen?” The blue eyes widened a touch in concern as Isobelle turned toward her more fully.

“You okay?”

“Uh.” Gwen cleared her throat.

“I’ve never seen this version of the dragon bonfire before—it’s different in the village. Let’s

explore.”

The concern evaporated, and Isobelle flashed her a look of pure delight.

“Excellent, that’s what I was hoping you’d say.”

Isobelle led her through the makeshift festival streets, with tents set up in rows along the hillside selling food, drinks, and knickknacks.

One stall owner was painting faces with a most spectacular level of skill—Isobelle proposed Gwen get a knight’s visor painted on her face, and then burst into silvery laughter at Gwen’s expression.

Musicians were stationed at regular intervals, all playing their own music, so the tunes shifted as they walked—spritely fiddle morphed into soulful flute into a drum circle into a quartet playing a waltz.

“We could dance?” Isobelle’s offer was a touch hesitant.

The only couples moving around the quartet were composed of men and

women.

In the village, no one would care too much to see two women or two men dancing together, even in a partnered dance

such as this one.

But perhaps the rules of high society were stricter about this—they certainly were about far more trivial

matters, like which fork to use and how deep to drop into a curtsy.

“I don’t know how much more dancing I can take after Madame Dupont’s endless drills,” Gwen admitted ruefully, giving Isobelle’s

hand a squeeze in the crook of her elbow.

“Though, between you and me, I actually rather enjoy it.”

“Anyone who doesn’t enjoy Dupont isn’t paying attention,” Isobelle replied airily, moving along from the quartet.

“That woman

could defeat a dragon all on her own.”

“Gosh, how marvelous would it be to see that?” Gwen’s mind had filled with the most fantastic image of the stately middle-aged

woman in armor, astride a war horse, javelin tucked under her arm as she faced down an enormous, craggy bronze dragon.

“It’d

almost be worth having dragons around just to witness it.”

Isobelle laughed, evidently not nearly so captivated by the image as Gwen, and led them on through the festival.

Scents of grilling meat and frying dough filled the air, along with wafts here and there of spices and caramelizing sugars.

Music continued to float by, tugging Gwen’s attention this way and that.

Though the big bonfires had yet to be lit, smaller fires had been laid, sending their sparks shooting skyward like ephemeral fireflies trying to court the stars.

Suddenly, the only thing Gwen could think of was the night before, in the hayloft, when she’d interrupted Isobelle.

But what I want to say is—

Isobelle, please.

As Gwen kept her eyes resolutely on a floating ember until it vanished against the indigo velvet above them, she could have

kicked herself black and blue for not letting Isobelle finish that sentence.

Then a gust of flame shot out inches from Gwen’s face, close enough that the heat struck her before she knew what she was

witnessing.

A lithe young dancer, his chest bare and his leggings leaving little to the imagination, bounced around in front

of them, sipped from a flask, and then shot another jet of fire up into the sky.

Belatedly, Gwen realized she was clutching at Isobelle, and her throat was raw from some sort of shriek.

Isobelle, for her

part, seemed rather more collected, and was doing her damnedest to hide the way the corners of her mouth wanted to dance.

Gwen carefully loosened her grip on Isobelle’s arm.

“Whoops.”

Isobelle raised an eyebrow, her grin positively lascivious.

“Hold on to me all you want, young lady,” she said in a low voice.

“I’m sturdy, I can take it.”

Gwen snorted, rolling her eyes a fraction.

“Just don’t tell the other knights I screamed.”

Isobelle mimed locking her lips shut before throwing away the imaginary key, then pulled Gwen on to look at another stall.

Gwen looked down at the spot where Isobelle’s hand rested on her arm.

“Er—Isobelle,” she started, not completely certain where she wished to steer the sentence.

“Last night, you started to say something and I cut you off. Did you—”

“Ooh!” exclaimed Isobelle, her head lifted and turned to one side.

She’d evidently been listening for something going on elsewhere

in the festival.

She began tugging at Gwen’s arm, dragging her off in the direction she was looking.

“I think we’re just in

time! Come, I’ve been so wanting you to see this.”

The emotion tangling Gwen’s response into a wordless murmur of assent was rather difficult to pinpoint.

Frustration, certainly.

But also a heavy dose of relief.

Just be glad everything is as it was , she told herself sternly.

And enjoy what connection you have as co-conspirators.

Isobelle led her to a space that had been cleared on the slope of the hill above, dominated at the far end by a group of musicians.

To judge from the crowd gathering around the area, some favorite event of the festival was about to take place.

The drummer had begun a low, pulsing beat.

The crowd rather melted in front of Isobelle to let her and Gwen up to the front,

either recognizing the tournament’s sacrifice and her reputation, or else assuming that the size and number of layers and

frills on her dress meant she should be allowed to do as she wished.

Gwen had a flash of insight—was that why Isobelle wore such insanely over-the-top dresses?

The drummer added a second, lesser, syncopated beat that made Gwen’s blood sing strangely, until she recognized it for what

it was: a heartbeat.

Slow, decorous, far more languorous than any human heartbeat, but a heartbeat nonetheless.

An ancient heartbeat.

The hairs had begun to lift all along the back of Gwen’s neck before the first dancers emerged from the crowd.

Their costumes were a riot of color—some in brightest red, orange, and yellow, and others in more muted shades of green, brown, burnished gold, and maroon.

Something deep and primal and instinctual was signaling Gwen at the sight of those colors, though she could not have explained why.

The dancers began to move, in seeming chaos at first. Then the rest of the musicians began to play, adding to the pulsing

heartbeat the screel of a reeded woodwind, the low bleat of a deep horn, and several layers of strings weaving the sounds together.

As if the

music were the start of a spell, the chaotic movements of the dancers coalesced into one single, fluid shape that undulated

in the firelit night with eerie realism.

A dragon.

The creature roared out of three dozen throats at once, and out of its mouth spilled the dancers costumed in the colors of

flame.

The slope of the hill they moved on was nearly invisible in the darkness, and the illusion of a three-dimensional dragon

taking form before their audience’s eyes was stunningly complete.

The movements of the dancers were so perfectly synchronized

that it was impossible to see them as separate people instead of one massive, deadly beast. So much so that when the dancers

scattered and coalesced again, in a new place, as if the dragon had taken wing and flown to the opposite edge of the cleared

space, the audience members closest to them screamed and leapt back.

Gwen’s heart was pounding, her muscles demanding action.

Some instinct from deep within her wanted to reach for a weapon, even as the rest of her mind tried frantically to remind her that what she was witnessing was a dance, a celebration, a mere echo of ages long past. That there were no dragons, not anymore.

The dragon veered sharply toward them, and the flame dancers shot out in a riot of reds and yellows.

Isobelle, laughing, leapt

back, but Gwen couldn’t move.

One of the dancers caught her eye and grinned knowingly—then she tugged lightly at the edge

of Gwen’s skirt, as if to say, See?

Now you’re dead. And then she skipped off to rejoin the rest of the dragon.

A new instrument joined the musicians at the high end of the hill: the bright, brassy glare of a trumpet.

From the side of

the square came a lone dancer, not a part of the living, breathing creature the others had become.

This one wore a suit of

armor—or, at least, silver-threaded leggings and flowing drapes that suggested the overlapping panels of a suit of armor—and

a helmet.

The knight.

He came wearing a sword at his belt and with a long, gleaming lance tucked under one arm.

He charged the dragon, which scattered

and coalesced again on the other side of the clearing.

The dragon roared at the knight, spitting flames that reached out toward

him with grasping arms—but he leapt and dodged, landing and rolling easily back to his feet.

For a long stretch of heartbeats, they were perfectly matched.

The knight could not charge fast enough to strike the dragon

before it fled, and the dragon could not get an angle good enough on the knight to roast him alive.

Gwen’s head spun. Distantly, she realized she’d forgotten to breathe.

Then the dragon twisted the other way during one of the knight’s charges, and it caught the lance in a sweeping blow with one of its arms. The sound it made as it shattered was a screech of strings and the deep thump of an ominous drum.

The knight went sprawling, landing inches from where Gwen and Isobelle stood.

With a start, Gwen realized that the body wearing

the knight’s armor was quite obviously female, and not even a young, boyish female at that—the dancer moved with such overt

masculinity that Gwen would never have known had the woman not landed literally right before her eyes.

With a scream of rage to match the roar of the dragon, the knight lurched to his feet and drew his sword.

Without his lance,

he seemed tiny, one man facing down dozens—one man facing the most massive creature ever to walk these lands.

The fight was quick and brutal.

Without his lance the knight was doomed.

The dragon closed in, swarming around the knight

so thickly his gleaming silver armor became invisible.

The knight leapt back, but then lost his balance—for a horrible moment

he stood there, as if on the edge of a cliff, about to fall.

At Gwen’s side, Isobelle cried a wordless shout of warning, as

wrapped up in the spectacle as Gwen was.

The dragon saw its chance and charged.

The knight moved with deliberate grace.

He had never been off-balance at all.

Before the dragon could stop its charge, the

knight had raised his sword and driven it deep into the eye of the beast.

The dozen-throated dragon howled in rage and pain, and flames spilled out of its mouth to lie, smoldering, against the hillside.

Its wings flapped futilely—its arms tried to grab for the knight, who held on grimly to the sword long enough to twist it

once—and the beast collapsed into a hundred pieces, scattered on the grass.

Dimly, Gwen was aware of the crowd screaming, thundering applause, but she could not take her eyes off the dancer who had been a knight.

The silver-clad figure was still gazing down at her sword, embedded between arm and rib cage of the dancer whose costume had born the eye of the dragon.

She pulled the sword out, very much the way someone would pull a blade from a beast they had killed.

Gwen half expected her to clean it of the creature’s blood.

The dancer gave a shake, stepped back, and replaced the sword in the sheath at her belt.

Slowly, slowly, she became herself again.

It was Isobelle pulling her hand from Gwen’s arm that shook her from her trance.

The dancers who had been the dragonsfire

were skipping around the perimeter of the clearing and weaving through the throngs of watchers, holding open jingling velvet

bags that were beginning to sag under the weight of the coins the viewers tossed in.

Isobelle had let go of Gwen in order

to fumble in the pocket of her skirt, pulling out a fistful of coins and shoving them into the nearest bag.

Gwen swallowed and forced herself to take a deeper breath.

She felt almost as though she had been that knight, as though she

had not simply witnessed the epic battle, but fought it herself.

The fire that had coursed through her veins and held her

riveted to the spectacle was beginning to recede, and as Isobelle turned to her, face shining with excitement and pleasure,

Gwen had to bury her hands in the folds of her skirt to hide how they were beginning to shake.

Isobelle’s gaze followed the movement, and a fraction of her joy dimmed.

She folded her own arms across her chest rather than

reach for Gwen’s arm again.

Still, she was smiling as she tilted her head.

“Come on. There’s one more thing I want to show

you.”