Alaric threw out his arms. “Yes! Is there another knight worth facing here?”
The scribe’s shrewd gaze measured him again, the faint sparkle of opportunity dawning in his eyes. He leaned back; the chair groaned. “That’s not—tournaments are bracketed. You’d have to reshuffle the list. Other riders would need to?—”
Oh, for the gods’ sake. Did every conversation have to be so irritating? Alaric set more coins on the desk. Copper this time, but more of it. Enough to make the scribe’s eyes widen slightly before professional caution reasserted itself.
“The marshal won’t like it.”
“As if that concerns me,” Alaric interrupted, dismissing the objection with a flourish of his hand. “The marshal doesn’t need to know. A scheduling error. A clerical mistake. You’ve been here all season—surely there have been slip-ups.”
The scribe’s hand crept toward the coins. “There’d need to be a reason. The other competitors?—”
“Tell them I demanded it. Tell them I’m a fool. Tell them whatever secures my challenge.” Alaric’s voice remained pleasant, though fury had built in him. “I didn’t ride all this way to watch.”
At last, the scribe’s fingers closed over the coins.
“Alright. First bout tomorrow morning,” he said. “Don’t say I didn’t warn you.”
How amusing. Alaric inclined his head. “You have warned me admirably.”
Alaric turned away from the desk.
In the paddock, the Upstart strode toward his tent, scrawny squire lumbering behind him, burdened with helm and gauntlets. The slanted late-day sun cast the knight’s silhouette in sharp relief: broad-shouldered, surefooted, carrying that insolent air of entitlement as though the world must bow before him. How exquisite it would be to shatter that assumption.
Tomorrow, then.
Alaric found himself almost looking forward to it.
2
HAL
Hal’s body throbbed with victory and pain as he ducked into his tent. Sweat had dried crusty beneath his armour, and every joint fought against him after the day’s work. He’d felt it when his opponent fell—the shock running through his lance, up his arm, straight into his shoulder. That same shoulder now burned like fire. But pain was nothing next to winning. Pain was just what you paid for glory, and today, he’d earned his share and more.
“Perrin,” he grunted. “Get this fucking metal off me.”
“Yes, sir.”
Perrin’s hands were sure and swift, so Hal closed his eyes and let the young man work. The familiarity of it was soothing to him. The breastplate came away first, the dull gleam of the old metal further dimmed by the dust on the field. When he was freed from all that weight, he opened his eyes to watch his squire work. Perrin had the spatial awareness of a sheep safe in its herd, so Hal got to stare to his heart’s content. He traced the lines of Perrin’s face with his eyes—the soft curve of his jaw, the dark sweep of hislashes—framed by curls damp with sweat, his brow faintly furrowed in concentration. His skin, a deeper olive in the tent’s shadows, bore a flush from exertion. The boy looked sweet as he bit his lower lip.
Ah, not a boy. Hal chided himself; he shouldn’t think of Perrin that way. He was only two years younger than Hal, after all, a man at twenty-three. Technically too old to be a squire, but Perrin was too good to pass on. It was only that Perrin was short and soft around the middle, and couldn’t grow any hair along his jaw, that Hal saw him as younger. There was softness in Perrin, elsewhere, too—in his eyes, most especially when those eyes lifted to meet Hal’s own.
Hal felt a strange tightness in his chest as Perrin looked up at him, those large, expressive eyes holding something like admiration. It made Hal stand taller, made him want to puff out his chest and preen like some foolish cockerel. Perrin’s gaze flicked away, and a red flush crept up the young man’s neck, spreading to his cheeks. The sight of it sent a peculiar heat through Hal’s own body.
And instead of saying anything he meant to, Hal blurted, “What’s wrong with you, boy?”
Perrin’s hands fumbled with the next buckle. “Nothing, ser,” he murmured. Shit. He’d made his squire all sad again. Hal had a special way of doing that, it seemed. “Just thinking about the bout tomorrow.”
Hal grunted, allowing Perrin to turn his attention back to the armour. When he was done, Perrin got to polishing, and Hal collapsed on the edge of his cot. His muscles were crying out to him, all of them making loud complaints about how many hours that week he’d been on the horse, how long he’d been in his armour, how long he’d had his damn arm outstretched holding the lance.
Pain was good, he tried to tell himself, but pain was alsoloud, and harder to ignore at night. He decided he hated this part—after victory, after all the cheers—when his body reminded him it was just meat and bone. Even his skin betrayed him; he’d burned most of his neck out there. How he’d managed to be born with the pale skin of a sheltered noble, he couldn’t guess, but it was surely the Gods’ cruel joke. Hal sat there with his eyes closed, listening to Perrin scrub away. He tilted his head this way and that, stretching out the tightness in his neck. But in the silence, his victory cooled into stiffness, leaving him stranded. It was a triumph that meant little in the long run, and a pain he couldn’t ignore for much longer.
This was a limbo only Perrin knew how to navigate.
“My shoulders,” he said, watching Perrin rub his cuirass like his life depended on it. “They’re fucking killing me.”
Perrin’s hands stilled on the breastplate he’d been cleaning. He set it down without a word—Hal never really had tosaywhat he wanted, the squire could always guess—wiped his palms against his thighs and reached for the small clay pot of salve his lady patron had offered him at the last tournament. For the smell, she’d said; she’d wrinkled her nose at him when he tried to give her a favour from the lists. And she didn’t want him sullying his surcoat, neither, since she’d paid a pretty penny for it.Try to avoid the dust. But that Hal couldn’t do much about, not if he wanted to focus on a win.
He hadn’t been using the salve—the perfume?—the way Lady Isolde Kerran had intended, but he was getting his use out of it. The clean, bright smell hit Hal the instant Perrin opened the jar. Pine and something sharper beneath, mint maybe. Perrin’s fingers tested the consistency, warming it.
