The Reckless Oath We Made - Bryn Greenwood Page 0,58
it, especially since Gentry more or less served her up to me. He hadn’t bothered to stake any claim on Zee. Not even a my girlfriend.
All he wanted to do was joust, because why worry about girls when there were swords and armor? That was how Gentry saw the world, so we walked over to the fighting grounds and started dressing out.
The reviewing stand was a log bench off to one side of the field where we practiced. The girls sat there, Rosalinda wearing her usual greedy look and Zee looking mildly curious. I often wondered if that was Rosalinda’s porn. When she was having sex with Edrard, did she fantasize about Gentry beating the shit out of him?
As always, I was ready first, because Edrard was a doughy bumbler, and Gentry was so goddamn ritualistic about everything. No variation allowed. Everything done in the exact same order every time. God help you if you had to fight him when he was wearing a new piece of armor. You’d spend more time waiting for him to get it the way he wanted it than you spent fighting.
To kill time, I went over to chat with the ladies.
“Gentry made that?” Zee said, pointing at my shield.
“How did you know?”
“That’s what he does, right? Rivets airplanes?”
“Correct. So what do you think of our little idyll?” I don’t think she knew what the word meant, because she didn’t answer. “Do you like our little camp?”
“I’m not convinced about this dress business, but the rest of it’s nice,” she said.
“Well, I brought steaks for dinner, so you don’t have to try your stomach on whatever random animal Gentry manages to kill.”
“Art ’ou ready, Sir Rhys?” Gentry called.
“Wish me luck,” I said.
“As though you need luck,” Rosalinda said.
“Mayhap you would be kind enough to offer me your favor, Lady Zhorzha?”
Again, either she didn’t know what I meant, or not answering was her thing, because she just looked at me.
“Traditionally,” I said, in case she didn’t understand, “when a knight was going to joust in a tournament, a lady would give him a scarf or a glove, as a gesture of her favor. He would wear it around his arm or his neck, and return it to her after winning. You could give me your headband.” She was wearing a completely anachronistic zebra-striped scrap of fabric to keep her hair out of her face.
“Okay, I don’t know how to speak Middle English,” she said. Instead of looking at me, she was staring across at where Gentry was helping Edrard adjust his pauldrons. “But I have read about a thousand romance novels, so I know what a favor is. I know a lady only gives something like that to her champion, and you aren’t mine. So either you’re trying to pull some kind of trick on me. Or you’re trying to pull something on Gentry.”
She stood up and walked across the field, pulling the headband out of her hair as she went. When she got to Gentry, she said something and he answered. Then she tied her headband around his arm. By the time she got back to where I was standing, I was still trying to come up with something clever to say. I settled for, “Well played, Lady Zhorzha.”
The kicker was that Gentry beat me. It wasn’t rare, but he usually got me with brute force, because he was pretty tireless, but he actually won on strategy that day. He kept swinging at my legs, until I got into a rhythm. Before I knew what he was doing, he slammed his shield down on top of mine and pinned it to the ground. Then he swung his sword right into the gap between my gorget and pauldron, and tore a buckle loose there. He followed it up with a roundhouse blow with his blade under the edge of my helm, hard enough it popped up against my chin.
That was our fifth or sixth bout, and he’d already finished Edrard like an appetizer, so when I went down, it was over.
“My brother, art ’ou well? I meant not hit thee so hard.” He knelt down next to me, pulled off his gauntlet, and reached for the buckle under my helm. I pushed his hand back and unfastened it myself. I was going to have a bruise on my jaw.
“You really got my number,” I said.
“The black knight says thou art too much inclined to guard thy leg over thy shoulder.”