It had seemed so easy last night, under the moonlit canopy of trees, to give Isobelle as much time as she needed to understand her own mind and heart. But today, doused in the icy cold torrent of realization that their charade would be coming to an end not at some hazy, undefined future moment, buttomorrow, Gwen had felt an unfamiliar panic reach up and grip her by the throat. They didn’t have that time. They would never have that time.
Gwen couldn’t wear that mask again in front of Isobelle, not without shouting at her the way she’d done that afternoon.
Ever since she’d agreed to Isobelle’s plan, she’d been trying notto think about the stark reality of riding against seasoned knights and counting on her passion to mean more than their birthrights. She’d been trying not to look at the likelihood that she’d end up in jail—or worse—if she were found out. She’d been trying not to imagine Isobelle’s despair when Gwen failed her, as she would certainly do eventually, no matter how hard she tried.
Instead, every fear and worry Gwen had been ignoring, like some child covering her eyes against the monster-infested night, had come spilling out in one searing, wrenching explosion. Instead, she’d done exactly what she’d been trying so hard to avoid: she’d crushed Isobelle.
Gwen had told Olivia to inform Isobelle that she was feeling poorly and needed to rest before the tournament. Later, she’d listened to Isobelle’s footsteps, unmistakable in their light, graceful patter, pause for a long, breathless moment outside Gwen’s door—and then move away again, down to join the feast.
She ought to sleep. But her whole body buzzed and ached for action, to fight this enemy that tormented her—her body didn’t know that the enemy was time, and situation, and hopelessness, and longing.
Secure in the knowledge that anyone who would recognize “Céline” would be at the feast, Gwen donned her old riding dress, slipped out to fetch her gear, and made her way to the ballroom where she’d first begun practicing her footwork at the castle.
The room was cavernous and still, illuminated by the moonlight streaming through the diaphanous, sheer curtains. The ballroom’s golds and creams and peaches were muted, transformed into silvers and lilacs and deep, secretive rose. The very air quivered with unfulfilled purpose, with the echoes of the thousands of dances andballs that had been held in this space—whispers of memory that made Gwen feel like an intruder, someone who had crept uninvited into someplace sacred.
Which, in fact, she had done. She didn’t belong here. Isobelle seemed content to ignore the insanity of her scheme, counting on pure optimism to win the day and forcing Gwen to be the voice of reason. In her mind’s eye, she saw Isobelle’s face again as it had looked that afternoon, all beseeching eyes and quivering lips as she implored Gwen to remember how she longed to prove herself among the other knights.That’s why you were doing this, wasn’t it?Isobelle had whispered.
Gwen had felt two paths open up in front of her. To leap off the cliff, or turn away and walk back the way they’d come. To say,No, I was doing it for you, or... or do as Gwen had done, and flee.
Gwen gave herself a shake and pulled her sword from its sheath, the scrape of steel echoing loudly in the expectant air. After a few experimental swings of the blade, she launched into one of Madame Dupont’s exercises, an unlikely combination of delicate dancing footwork and deadly swings and blows from her sword. She could almost hear Isobelle playing the organ in the background, the remembered notes hanging ghostlike in the air; could almost see her form at the shadowed instrument.
She shook off that image and tried to focus instead on visualizing the man she’d be fighting tomorrow. To visualize winning, beating him, taking him by surprise. Those piercing, hawklike eyes wide with shock, looking up at her from the ground.
The way those eyes had looked as they scanned over Isobelle at the castle bonfire, like he was an acquisitive collector inspecting his latest purchase.
Gwen stumbled, dropped the sword, caught its hilt on the rebound, and swore as she staggered. She whirled and kicked at the floor and let loose an absolute flurry of invective, using every word she’d been trying not to use in her guise as Céline.
A voice came from the shadows on the far side of the ballroom. “I thought you would be here earlier than this, Mademoiselle le Chevalier.”
Gwen let out a bleat of alarm and confusion, even as her brain identified the voice from its rasp and its French accent. Her eyes searched the other end of the room until she saw the dark form perched on a window seat, barely distinguishable from the piles of cushions adorning the benches.
A lantern flared to life, illuminating Madame Dupont’s features and striking her silver hair to white gold.
“I knew you would not be so foolish as to try to sleep the night before battle,” the Frenchwoman continued, her eyes gleaming with amusement.
Gwen, still trying to swallow her heart back down into her chest where it belonged, gulped for a breath. “I’m beginning to think you have a secret love of the dramatic.”
Dupont gave a light bark of laughter. “Secret? Ma chérie, it is not a secret at all. You are here to practice, non? I will light the fire so we can see.” She rose from the window seat and crossed toward the large fireplace at the end of the hall, her stick tapping a decorous rhythm with her steps.
Gwen sighed and sliced her sword down and to one side with a muted hiss of wounded air. “Practice? I’d settle for venting some of this energy. I feel like crawling out of my skin.”
“Then we shall vent,” Dupont replied. She knelt down beforethe hearth, where the beginnings of a fire had already been laid, and struck the flints together. Sparks shot from her fingers like magic. “Your lady is at the feast, I take it? Dazzling them all with her wit?”
Gwen forced herself to shrug, fighting the urge to rise to that bait and fire off a retort about how Isobelle wasn’theranything. “I think so. I decided I’d be better off resting, or at least not letting her get me wound up.”
“Isobelleisan enlivening presence,” Dupont agreed with a dry chuckle as the sparks settled against the kindling.
Gwen muttered an agreement. “People think that she’s shallow,” she murmured. “But really, she just... throws herself wholeheartedly into whatever lies before her. Whether it’s choosing a dress or, you know, recruiting a village girl to ride in a tournament for her.”
“Not all who meet her see enough to realize that.” Dupont leaned in to blow gently on the infant flame, encouraging it to move across the kindling and onto the larger sticks behind it. “Or the power she wields. After all, here we both find ourselves, practicing for an adventure of her design.”
Gwen sheathed her sword and crouched beside Madame Dupont so she could help sort through the split logs. Tearing at them for kindling was a good vent for her turbulent thoughts, and as the silence stretched, she had the unsettling feeling that Dupont had somehow read her mind—had somehow known that when Gwen had said she needed to vent her energy, what she really needed was to speak.
The pile of ready kindling next to Dupont had grown to somewhat ridiculous proportions before a splinter jabbed its way into Gwen’s thumb. She hissed an epithet and tore the offending shardof wood out and threw it into the flames.
Closing her eyes, she summoned her courage and blurted, “I’m not so sure I should do this thing tomorrow.”
Dupont drew a slow breath, though there was no break in the minute sounds of her tending the fledgling fire. “I think if you were not nervous, it would mean that you did not understand the magnitude of what you intend to do. But you must not mistake nerves for knowledge of what is to come.”
