When Sir Gawain lifts his sword to salute the crowd, one of the stands collapses under the double weight of spectators, spilling a hundred shrieking, bruised, indignant fans onto the ground.
And when Sir Gawain handily knocks Sir Belmar off his horse in one try, without even shattering his lance, it takes the physicians well over twenty minutes to fight through the crowds to get to the lists and help the downed knight limp away. Half of them never make it at all, too busy tending to the fans who, having succumbed to the intense weight of their adoration, fainted before Gawain ever made it onto the field.
The weavers’ guild makes a fortune milling the cheapest garments they can manage with Sir Gawain’s pennant painted on thefront. They call them tournament shirts, though the fans tend to shorten the name to something quicker to say.
The local portrait artist is busier than he’s ever been, knocking out card-sized paintings of ladies with Sir Gawain in his armor, their hands juuuuust about to lift his visor and reveal his face.
And a local blacksmith, emerging out of relative anonymity, displays a sudden talent for crafting tiny, beautifully detailed figurines of this new star—his smithy is completely overrun.
Our principal players now find themselves stuck under a rather crushing weight of deception in the face of intense, unrelenting scrutiny.
Sir Orson, cruising through his matches as well, was originally delighted to spread as many mad rumors about Sir Gawain as he could imagine. Now, however, he’s left to sit in stunned silence as his friends take turns sharing the wildest rumors they’ve managed to overhear or invent. He’s all: “Um, guys... I mean, it probably wasn’t the trollking,and he probably couldn’t shoot fire out of his eyes....” Or: “Well, no, I’ve never seen him levitate during his pregame ritual, and I’m pretty sure he can’t control the other knights’ horses with his mind, either....”
Olivia, doing her level best to keep Gwen in one piece—largely through the expert application of tight bandages and lurid green ointment—avoids the worst of the hubbub by lurking around the castle dungeons. She can’t get access to the imprisoned villagers yet, but she’s become quite the hit with the local lads employed as guards, because she always comes bearing snacks. Thus far, they’ve all been perfectly harmless. Who would drug a cupcake, after all? Certainly not Olivia. Certainly not yet, anyway.
Sylvie’s suspicions of Céline only seem to deepen, her mistrust ofthe other half of the mystery—Sir Gawain himself—slightly mollified by the obvious, undeniable happiness of her friend Isobelle. Jane modifies one of the T-shirts, sewing fluttering ribbons to the sleeves and tying the baggy hem into a knot around her midriff, showing a scandalous few inches of the curve of her stomach. Hilde begs Isobelle endlessly for her latest account of her “alone time” with Sir Gawain.
Isobelle herself, unable to hide the change in her heart from her friends, has to censor herself every time she opens her mouth. She can’t confess that when she and Lady Céline went to visit Sir Gawain, they actually went and made out in Isobelle’s hat cupboard. Or that when they left to take a bracing ride around the castle grounds, they never made it out of the stables, and had to spend a good twenty minutes picking straw out of each other’s hair.
Most of all, she can’t confess that underneath her undeniable happiness, worry seethes like a subterranean river eating away at the foundations of a castle. After Sir Belmar was Sir Lorenzo, who got in such a good hit before Gwen retaliated and unhorsed him that Gwen couldn’t breathe for almost a full minute. The skin on her chest was so black and blue that Olivia had had to alter several dresses to include a high-necked collar.
The victory against Lorenzo secured Gwen’s place in the final round, to face Sir Orson for the ultimate victory, but Isobelle can’t confess to her friends that she’d stop Sir Gawain riding in it if she could.
She can’t even confess it to Gwen.
And Gwen... well, even for Gwen,especiallyfor Gwen, there’s no escaping Gawain Fever. Even as Céline, she’s mobbed by people seeking her acquaintance now, hoping to learn more about her brother by cozying up to her. Gifts show up at Isobelle’s suite multiple times a day, and Olivia occasionally has to serve as bouncer to prevent eager ladiesfrom trying to infiltrate Isobelle’s inner circle. The moments Gwen sneaks with Isobelle are the only moments of peace she gets.
If we’ve timed this right, we should be in the bridge of your anthem now. Perhaps it strikes a minor key—perhaps the beat fades out, a symbolic evocation of the dark night of the soul that looms over our heroes.
Each knight Gwen takes down is another step closer to victory, to saving Isobelle.
But... then what?
Gwen is now the most famous man in Darkhaven. What would happen to all that fervor and fanaticism if they learned that Sir Gawain was no knight, that he was not a noble, not even a man at all?
She sleeps at night by visualizing her next joust. The next opponent, the next strategy. She looks ahead, but she stops herself before she looks too far, because that hazy mist of uncertainty that follows victory in the upcoming final is too terrifying to face. The tiniest glimmer of something elusive and fragile and beautiful lurks there, a hope she can’t name even to herself for fear of shattering it. There comes a moment, in her imagination, after the victory: a blinding release as she pulls off her helmet in front of the world.
But even she cannot see further than that instant, and she drags herself back to the parts of her path she knows. The next joust. The next opponent. The next strategy. She stops herself from stepping beyond the borders of the map she can see, because there... well. There be dragons.
She knows, as Isobelle knows, as everyone in on the secret knows, that this run can’t last forever.
This is, after all, a story... and what good is a story where the heroes can’t seem to stop winning?
Chapter Thirty-Seven
You’d be very surprised by what a fancy lady can get done
Two days before the final joust was to occur, Olivia summoned Isobelle and Gwen for a council of war. Not to discuss what would happen after the tournament ended—even Olivia could not see that far ahead—but to lay out her plan for helping the villagers who had come the night of the dragon bonfire, who had been arrested for making a scene.
Olivia herself was far from thrilled with the plan she’d made, but time had run out, with the tournament final looming up ahead. She’d drilled both Gwen and Isobelle on every step, until they could repeat it back to her word for word—and now they were making their way down, down into the twisting corridors beneath the castle.
Under any other circumstances, a secret mission of this sort would have been quite thrilling.
Isobelle was, however—despite carefully cultivated popular opinion—capable of taking things seriously. And just now, she was taking the safety of the women imprisoned beneath the castle very seriously indeed.
“Are we clear?” Olivia whispered, as they paused at the midpoint of the servants’ staircase.
“We stay put, and don’t speak to the guards,” Gwen whispered.
