The Reckless Oath We Made - Bryn Greenwood Page 0,57
tucked his shirt in all the way or laced it back up. I was basically sewn into my dress, but with his shirt hanging off one shoulder and open down to his belly button, Gentry looked like the cover of a romance novel. If he were a foot taller, with rock-hard abs and a chiseled jawline.
“Nay, thou art many hours late,” Gentry said. “This be Lady Zhorzha. My lady, this be Sir Rhys of Vatavia.”
“That’s what I’ve been hearing, that we’ve finally been honored with a visit from Lady Zhorzha.” Rhys put out his hand like we were going to shake, but when I gave him mine, he kissed it.
“Sir Rhys is the Porthos to our Athos and Aramis,” Edrard said. I didn’t have a clue what that meant, but I laughed anyway, and he looked happy.
“Nay, is he Porthos?” Gentry said.
“Well, I’m certainly no Aramis,” Rhys said. “’Tis thee through and through.”
“Prithee, if ye must speak of such things, wait until after we sup,” Rosalinda said.
“Camest thou to joust?” Gentry said. “Or wilt thou surrender ere we taken up weapons?”
Gentry wasn’t having any of that. Maybe I didn’t get their jokes, but I could see that much.
CHAPTER 21
Rhys
For the longest time, Gentry, Rosalinda, and Edrard had a pseudo love triangle going on. She followed Gentry around like a puppy, and Edrard followed her, and Gentry was oblivious to all of it.
Eventually Rosalinda gave up on Gentry and settled for Edrard, and everybody lived happily ever after. Not that she wasn’t carrying a torch for Gentry, but there was something desperate and sad about her that gave me the impression she would have settled for the first guy who offered to take her. It helped that Edrard went on being Gentry’s sidekick and Gentry went on being Edrard’s patron. Rosalinda and Edrard didn’t pay him anything to live on his land.
By the time I showed up on Saturday afternoon, the triangle dynamic had undergone a major geometrical shift. Rosalinda didn’t even give me a chance to figure it out on my own.
“You’re in luck,” she said as soon as I walked into camp. “Lady Zhorzha has graced us with her presence.”
“You’re serious?”
“As a heart attack.” It was so serious Rosalinda had lost her ridiculous accent, and didn’t manage to find it again all weekend.
“She’s actually real? And that’s actually her name?”
“I don’t know why you two have to be that way,” Edrard said.
“You didn’t think she was real either,” Rosalinda said.
“I was willing to give him the benefit of the doubt.”
“Really? In light of Gawen and Hildegard and the Witch, you think I should give him the benefit of the doubt of assuming his friends aren’t invisible?” I said.
“Well, she is definitely visible.” Edrard pointed toward the path to Bryn Carreg, where I could see Gentry coming down, followed by a girl in a green dress. A redhead, that was all I could make out from that distance.
Up close, she was a Rosalinda, albeit a higher-quality one. Taller and more hourglass than apple, but still, one of those big girls who hope a corset will hide the fact that her cleavage is more fat than tits. It must have burned Rosalinda that Gentry had basically picked a prettier version of her.
Anyway, Zhorzha was a Rosalinda until she opened her mouth and said “Hey, man” in this surprisingly sexy, rough voice. Honestly, if she dropped fifty or sixty pounds, she would be pretty hot.
The kicker was that Zhorzha was her real name, but she went by Zee. She seemed surprised, but not all that curious to find out we weren’t really Edrard, Rosalinda, and Rhys.
“What’s Gentry’s other name?” she said.
“Oh, he’s Gentry everywhere. He joined the SCA as a kid, so I guess his mundane name just stuck. Or maybe he never picked a court name or a fighting name. He is a knight errant.”
“Okay,” was Zee’s answer.
I tried all the usual questions with her and got one- or two-word answers. Wichita. Waitress. Physical therapy. Motorcycle wreck. We’d all assumed she was a figment of Gentry’s imagination for so long that we were scrambling to come up with some sort of backstory for her. She was not interested in supplying it.
“What do you think of Gentry’s castle?” I tried.
“It’s really cool. I didn’t know you could just build a castle.”
“Well, our Gentry can.” I kind of creeped myself out with that. I’d never been in a pseudo love triangle before, but I was seriously considering