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Chapter Forty-Two The terrible sound of a thousand people not knowing what to say

Gwen’s eyes were on Isobelle, drinking her in.

She tried to calm her heart, which was thudding in a ragged, lurching rhythm

of relief at the sight of her.

A part of Gwen had been sure Isobelle wouldn’t be there after the things they’d said to each

other the night before.

You’re no better than they are.

Isobelle’s words, sharp as daggers, still hurt.

Gwen had awakened still angry and left before Isobelle that morning.

But once she met up with Dupont at Sir Gawain’s changing

tent, the anger had shattered into a tangle of fear and longing and despair and hope that made her hands shake as she tried

to put on her armor.

Madame Dupont had curled her freckled hands over Gwen’s, meeting her eye, squeezing her fingers until they stopped shaking.

“Show them who you are,” the woman said, solemn, nodding.

“Let everything else fall away.”

Now, Gwen longed to lift her visor so she could meet Isobelle’s eyes properly.

Let her see in Gwen’s face that it wasn’t about

beating the other knights, or showing that she was the best, or even changing the hearts and minds of the spectators.

It was

about proving something to herself .

Something that had been inside Gwen as long as she could remember, long before she ever met Isobelle.

She may have started on this path to save Isobelle—but she had to finish it for herself.

Isobelle had seen her, the real her,

when no one else had.

.. not even Gwen herself.

She would ride and finish this tournament.

And when she’d won, she would salute Isobelle, and then run.

Achilles could clear

the rails that blocked off the end of the lists, and Gwen could be away before anyone realized her headlong flight was anything

other than a display of victorious adrenaline.

She could lie low while the dust cleared, and as the rest of the county was

trying to figure out where Sir Gawain had gone, she would come back for Isobelle.

And if Isobelle still wanted to go.

.. Gwen would go with her.

Gwen’s eyes burned as she gazed intently at Isobelle’s face, willing the other girl to somehow see past her visor, to see

her heart in her eyes.

But Isobelle wasn’t even looking at her.

Her head was turned, gaze lifted to fix on something more distant, and she.

..

she’d gone white.

Gwen twisted to see a column of guards marching down past the spectators.

The cheers and chanting of the crowd had changed

to a confused, wild susurration of conversation and speculation.

Something was wrong.

Achilles, sensing his rider’s uncertainty, danced back a few paces, half turning toward the exit.

The end of the lists was

covered by guards, too.

There would be no escaping that way, unless the guards left before the joust began.

An anxious whinny

made her glance to her right, where Orson’s horse was becoming restless too, reacting to the tension in his rider’s body.

“Dismount, Sir Gawain.” The voice came from Lord Whimsitt, standing in his box with both hands braced against the barrier.

Gwen looked up at him, not moving yet, her head spinning as it tried to catch up.

Whimsitt’s voice was even, but she was close

enough to see his face as he looked down on them—on her.

She was close enough to see the anger transforming his ordinarily

placid countenance into something aggressive and full of fury.

She knew that look. She’d been getting it all her life—whenever a man realized she had made the weapon he’d commissioned from

her father.

When she’d beaten her childhood friend play-fighting with sticks.

Every time she’d ever been stronger or smarter

or cleverer than they expected her to be, every time she’d dared to step out of line without softening the surprise with a

smile or a lowering of her eyes.

She’d seen it just yesterday, on the face of the nicest man she’d met these past weeks, when

she’d beaten him at swordplay.

It was the same look now that turned Whimsitt’s face into such a threatening, furious mask.

He knows.

That certainty washed through her like a cool, calm stream, carrying with it the last traces of her confusion.

Her exits were

blocked.

She was surrounded by guards.

Even if she was willing to hurt or even kill perfectly innocent men who were just following

their lord’s orders, there were too many of them for her to fight.

She ran a hand over Achilles’s neck to calm him, and then dismounted.

One of the guards came up to snatch at Achilles’s reins,

leading him away with some difficulty as Achilles reared and attempted to get back to his mistress’s side.

“Lift your visor,” Whimsitt’s voice came again, low and cold.

Gwen lifted her chin, her hands at her sides.

“If you would let me finish the tournament, my lord, I will—”

“Lift your visor and show them who you are!” Whimsitt’s calm evaporated, this repetition of the command sounding out in a

higher, more penetrating shout.

This time, he did not wait for Gwen to comply, but rather gestured to one of the guards, who

leapt forward and seized Gwen’s helmet.

The metal scraped at Gwen’s ear, leaving behind a searing line of pain as the man

wrenched the helmet from her, half knocking her down in the process.

Gwen caught herself as she staggered, and went still, listening as reaction swept across the stands.

Those farther away could

not see what was happening, but ripples of gasps and cries of shock and alarm scattered back from those closest to Whimsitt’s

box, murmurs and explanations spreading across the stands before dropping into an unnatural hush.

Gwen stood, the breeze ruffling her hair and tugging at the loose strands that had fallen from her bun, a trickle of blood

dripping from the spot where her helmet had scraped a layer of skin off her ear.

.. and listened to the terrible sound of

a thousand people not knowing what to say.

Her gaze swung across the hushed crowd, seeing not individual faces so much as a bewildering composite of wide eyes and open

mouths, of shock and confusion and disgust. Now and then she thought she saw something else—hope or admiration—but she lost

sight of it whenever she tried to focus on those few faces, seeing only more anger and betrayal wherever she looked.

Finally, her eyes found Isobelle again.

Her cheeks were glinting with tears, her hands white-knuckled where they clutched

at the barrier.

Gwen’s own heart wrenched, seeing her heartbreak—she bit her lip, then mouthed the words: I’m sorry.

It would probably be the last chance she had to tell Isobelle anything at all.

Isobelle’s face crumpled, just before Whimsitt—seeing this exchange—stepped between them, face purpling with fury.

“As you see, this... this woman has made a mockery of our oldest, most sacred traditions!” His face twisted around the word “woman” as if it had tasted nasty

on his tongue.

“She has stripped her opponents of their right to face their peers in noble combat, she has robbed you of your

final, and tainted this ancient rite.”

Gwen felt that heated, metallic something deep inside her stir, rising in a way it hadn’t since that first qualifying joust,

after she’d heard the way the other knights talked about Isobelle.

“No, you are robbing them of their final!” she burst out, tearing her arm away from the guard’s grip and striding toward Whimsitt’s

box.

“If you let me ride, if you let me show you what I’ve been showing you, all this time—”

The guard had scrambled to catch at Gwen again, joined by one of his comrades, so that the two of them wrestled Gwen back.

Whimsitt was gesturing, indicating something violent by the curse words spilling from his tongue—but the guards, uncertain

about punching a woman in the mouth the way they’d apparently happily do a man, simply dragged Gwen down onto her knees.

“ You will not speak! ” shrieked Whimsitt, slamming his hands down on the railing hard enough to make the stands reverberate with the blow.

Murmurs

scattered through the crowd as they whispered and shifted nervously, uncertain how to react.

Whimsitt stood panting, regaining

some measure of his composure before he continued.

“I was informed last night of this woman’s vile treachery and deceit. She will be taken into custody and held until we have finished the tournament festivities. And then... then she will pay for her crimes.”

The words fell into the silence of the crowd like the incantation of a spell.

Having been told what to think, how to react,

a handful of spectators began jeering, calling out a few of the more vile obscenities Whimsitt was too well-bred to speak.

The jeers spread, not as fast as the chanting and cheering had done when Sir Gawain first rode out onto the field, but fast

enough.

Gwen turned in time to see them pull a giant straw effigy of Sir Gawain down off the post they’d been using to wave

it around.

The crowd milled about and then cast the effigy down onto the ground before the stands.

They’d tied a rope around its neck.

Gwen’s vision and hearing went strange after that—the scene played itself out in bits and pieces, some mental scribe inside

Gwen’s head struggling to record everything and noting only a few random moments.

She felt rough hands tear at her straps, and then a blade slicing through the leather to pry the pieces of her armor away.

You’re ruining it , she wailed, her voice stuck inside her own mind, as they pushed and pulled at her.

She knew she ought not to care about

such a small thing now, in the midst of all that was happening, but she’d made that armor herself, piece by piece over the

years, modifying and perfecting it with an attention to detail that she hadn’t even understood herself until she wore it on

the jousting field.

They tossed the pieces of her armor into the dust.

She felt cold metal around her wrists as they jerked her arms behind her back, the loud, heavy sound of a lock closing, the weighty clink of chains.

She saw Isobelle, her mouth moving soundlessly, the words lost in the hubbub as she tried to climb over the railing of the box to get to Gwen.

Olivia was holding her back, her expression as stoic and unchanging as ever.

Hilde was there, crying quietly and holding on to Jane, who stood watching with a faint, confused frown, as if she’d never

fully understood the revelation of Sir Gawain’s identity to begin with, and was only now grappling with the implications.

And Sylvie... wasn’t there.

Gwen felt a stab of sorrow, searching for anger and finding none.

She couldn’t even blame Sylvie for betraying her to Whimsitt,

for it must have been she—the truth of Gawain’s identity was the only dagger Sylvie had.

Could Gwen blame her for using it,

even if the target it found was her own heart?

The guards hauled Gwen roughly to her feet, wrenching her bad shoulder hard enough to tear a cry of pain from her lips.

“Hey!” Orson’s voice snapped as he pulled off his helmet, his eyes flashing.

“You’re to detain her. Not hurt her.”

Gwen glanced over at him, grateful to have an ally in all the chaos—and then froze.

His eyes met hers and slid away immediately, his lips tightening.

Then he drew himself up, lifting his chin, and looked back

at her.

Gwen stared at him, a strange numbness spreading through her as her body understood what she had seen before her mind caught

up.

“It was you,” she murmured, wishing the guards had left her on her knees, for her legs were struggling to hold her up.

“ You told him who I was.”

Orson tucked his helmet under his arm and met her gaze.

His eyes held sorrow—but not regret.

“You would have won if you’d been allowed to ride,” he said, under the din of the crowd as Whimsitt stood, barking orders.

Orson took a breath and let it out slowly.

“You would’ve beaten me.”

Gwen was still staring at his features, so perfectly sculpted, his blond hair stirring in the breeze, his blue eyes straight

out of every ballad of perfect knighthood she’d ever heard, when a shadow passed over the sun.

She shivered, grateful to the shifting clouds for breaking the tableau.

But then the sun blinked back in again, faster than any cloud could move.

A cry of confusion rippled through the crowd as something swept past them, above them, impossibly huge.

Gwen looked up in time to see a sinuous forked tail vanish across the sky.

For a long, long moment, no one moved.

No one so much as glanced at their neighbors to see if they’d imagined the sight—no

one wanted to know if what they’d seen was real.

And then, with a roar that shook the very ground beneath Gwen’s feet, the creature swept up the hill, behind the stands, and

launched itself into the sky with a ribbon of searing, spraying flames that engulfed the tents at the far end of the lists.

A single voice, high and piercing with terror, screamed: “ DRAGON! ”

The crowd erupted into screams, turning from a quiet, meek pool of humanity into a seething, vicious, storming sea.

Everyone tried to flee, and with the stands at twice their normal capacity, there was nowhere for anyone to go.

Screams of fear turned to screams of agony as many were trampled, and people spilled out over the barriers onto the lists in an attempt to find escape and shelter.

Whimsitt vanished immediately, though his voice was still shouting orders, demanding the guards do something.

“It’s after

the gold in the prize pot!” he screamed from a crowd of other nobles also fleeing the scene.

“Stop it!”

A few halfhearted crossbow bolts went whizzing up into the sky, nowhere near the dragon, which was half a league away, gleefully

setting fire to the town encircling the base of the hill where the castle sat.

Only when every one of the thatch-roofed buildings

was surging with flames did the great beast, its scales gleaming a burnished bronze in the sun, turn back toward the tournament

grounds.

The guards holding Gwen burst back into action, instinctively holding her as they ran away toward safety, dragging her toward

the castle.

She fought them, trying in vain to break free.

“I can help!” she cried, digging in her heels, carving twin grooves

in the mud.

“Let me go, I can fight!”

Then one of them, too terrified to obey his compunctions about hitting girls, drove his fist with expert accuracy into her

bad shoulder.

Gwen felt her muscles go limp, her vision spinning as pain flooded her senses.

The last thing she saw, as dizziness

swept through her and robbed her of the last of her sight, was a blond-haired, blue-eyed girl standing absolutely still, clutching

the railing and staring after her.