“My lady, I am thy servant.”

“Is that a yes? When you say that, it doesn’t sound like yes to me.”

He propped himself up on his elbow, so he was facing me, but he didn’t look at me. There was some stray grass on the blanket, and he flicked it away.

“My lady,” he said and cleared his throat. “Yes. Thou mayest touch me.”

I hadn’t intended to turn it into a big deal, and with anybody else, I wouldn’t have even asked. With him facing me, I settled for putting my fingertips on the top of his shoulder.

“I wondered if you were hot to the touch, and you are. I don’t know how you can stand that.” When I took my fingers away, he put his hand up to his neck.

“It troubleth me not, tho sooth thy hand is cool. Come August, when the sun is nearer, I shall ask thee share thy bit of shade with me,” he said, like that was a given, that I was going to be there in August. “Let us go down and see if Sir Rhys hath come.”

When we got down to the main camp, Sir Rhys had come. He was a taller guy, maybe six-two, blond, and good-looking, even if I wasn’t a fan of goatees.

“Here you are at last, Sir Gentry. I was starting to think I’d come out here for nothing, but I can see you were otherwise occupied,” he said, grinning at Gentry and then at me.

Rosalinda gave us such a weird look that I turned and looked at Gentry. He’d come around the fire to shake Rhys’ hand, and he wasn’t doing anything unusual for him. Except he hadn’t 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?”

“One-track mind. It’s late. Let’s joust tomorrow.”

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 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?