Gwen was forging a sword.
She was up to the hammering bit, and honestly, it was extremely gratifying to watch. She lifted the hammer thing, and then it arced down through the air, striking the sword with a spray of sparks. Her face was a mask of soot-smudged concentration. Perspiration beaded her brow, and she used her forearm to brush her hair back, before starting again. A single droplet of sweat gathered at her clavicle, then slid with tantalising slowness down into the shadowed cleavage at the neckline of her tunic.
‘My word,’ murmured the woman next to Isobelle, who could only agree. Gwen’s words from the night before came back to her.We could light the fire in your room.
Gwen, she thought,my fire is lit.
She squeezed through the crowd of bodies, and took a place sitting on the ground at the front, near some of the other young people. The heat was more intense here, but Isobelle wasn’t entirely sure whether the source was internal or external.
‘Where’s the town smith?’ she whispered to her neighbour, a woman gazing at Gwen with frank admiration.
‘Working the bellows, m’lady,’ she replied without taking her eyes off the scene before them. ‘He stopped offering her advice a couple of hours ago.’
Isobelle fanned herself and settled in to enjoy the view.
Perhaps half an hour later – disappointingly soon – Gwen and the smith exchanged glances, and at her nod, they both stepped back to take a break.
Isobelle popped up to her feet, hurrying over to her knight champion before anyone else could claim her.
‘Oh, be careful,’ Gwen said by way of greeting when Isobelle raised her arms. ‘I’m all sweaty and I smell like cinders.’
So Isobelle, keeping her smile bright, clasped her hands behind her back to demonstrate her compliance. She wished she’d had enough brain function in the last half-hour to contemplate an opener to this conversation. Lacking other options, she simply jumped in. ‘I’m glad to see you making a new sword,’ she offered. ‘I’m still sorry about the old one.’
Gwen shrugged. ‘That’s what they’re for. Sometimes they break. Sometimes you lose them. Sometimes you drop them into the ocean while fighting a betentacled sea monster.’
‘But it wasyoursword,’ Isobelle protested. Behind them, the crowd was starting to disperse, and the smith had diplomatically removed himself in search of a drink. ‘All the time you’ve spent engraving it – those beautiful designs …’
‘And now it’s gone,’ Gwen replied, turning her back to retrieve the half-finished sword from the anvil and plunge it into a waiting basin of water with a searing hiss and a billow of steam.
More than ever, Isobelle was certain something was wrong. Gwen had a complicated relationship with her own feelings, to be sure, but she’d never tried to shut Isobelle out this way.
‘Gwen!’ Risking the sweat and the cinder-scentedness, Isobelle reached for her arm, squeezing it gently. ‘You made that sword with your own hands. You made it when you were only dreaming of becoming a knight. When you were the only person who evenknewabout your dream.’
Gwen huffed a breath of faint irritation. ‘Isobelle, stop. It’s just a sword. I don’tcare, okay? Not everything has to be a big deal.’ She moved out from under Isobelle’s hand, busying herself storing the tools she’d borrowed off the local blacksmith.
No one else would notice that her movements were a little too jerky, that her voice was a little too tense. But Isobelle did.
A strange, unfamiliar feeling of helplessness curled its fingers around Isobelle’s heart – she swatted the feeling away and straightened. Isobelle refused to be helpless. In fact, refusing to be helpless was what had led her to Gwen in the first place.
The first priority was protecting Gwen from whoever was casting this curse upon her. Once that was dealt with, she’d sort the rest out.
‘Are you going to work on the new sword anymore today?’ Isobelle asked brightly. ‘If not, it’s time we paid Lord Bingleton a visit and get some truth out of him, instead of this tangle of fairytales and rumour.’
Gwen turned to eye her curiously, and then nodded,not bothering to hide her relief that Isobelle was letting the issue of her old sword drop.
Isobelle paused, then wrinkled her nose. ‘Maybe after a bath.’
14
They never came back
Lord Bingleton’s manor house was perched atop one of the rolling hills that gave way to the mountains surrounding Galanty-Uponne-the-Sea like the fingers of a cupped hand. The house was one of those large, somewhat sprawling affairs that had clearly been added to again and again over the generations, and now resembled a rather dated stone castle on one end and a picturesque mansion on the other.
Achilles and Princess Buttercup spent the entire ride bickering with one another. The dainty silver mare had a tendency to trip ahead of the stallion, veering to the side to force him to slow or turn, and then dancing innocently back to her side of the path.
Gwen was of the same mind as Achilles, and watched them with a scowl. Ordinarily, both the behaviour of the horses and the grumpiness it inspired in Gwen would have visibly delighted Isobelle – riding sojourns in generalusually delighted Isobelle – but she’d been in an odd mood all day. Quieter, more introspective, gazing thoughtfully at her reins and trusting Buttercup to follow – or goad – Achilles in the right direction.
They reined up outside the manor entrance, at which point a groom promptly appeared to relieve them of their horses. A servant emerged from the house to lead them inside, but Gwen held back and touched Isobelle’s elbow.
