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.”

“Isn’t that cheating, him getting coaching advice during our fight?” I said to Edrard, mostly joking.

“It’s not poker,” Edrard said. “It doesn’t require cheating to notice you kept leaving yourself open.”

Zee’s headband was still tied around the cannon of Gentry’s vambrace, and before we walked back to camp, he returned it to her.

“I thank thee for thy favor, my lady,” he said.

If it were me, I would have gone in for a kiss, because that was kind of the whole point of all the chivalry crap, but he bowed to her. I’d been telling him for years he could make bank with the ladies, but he never did.

“You’re welcome,” Zee said. “You did good, I think. You won, right?”

“Most assuredly, your champion prevailed,” I said.

“Thou fought bravely, Sir Rhys.” Gentry bowed to me, too, and then slung his armor on his shoulder, and followed Edrard and Rosalinda back to camp. Zee fell behind while she put her hair up, so I dropped back and let Gentry get ahead of us.

“Looks like you chose your champion wisely,” I said. She rolled her eyes at me.

“My dad always told me you should dance with the one what brung ya.”

CHAPTER 22

Zee

   You can’t blame me for trying,” Rhys said, as we walked back to the main camp. “Plus, it’s not like Gentry even notices stuff like that. We could be back here making out and he wouldn’t care.”

“I’m pretty sure you were trying to usurp the one job he does care about.”

“Oh! Usurp! Damn. Lady Zhorzha dropping the big words on me.”

“Gentry,” I said. He was ahead of us, close enough to hear us, but he wasn’t paying attention.

“Good luck with that. He’s gone off the grid. You can’t get through to him when he’s like that. Come on, though, am I really being so terrible?”

“No, it’s cool. You’re being about average.”

“Ow! Thou dost wound me, lady,” Rhys said, and gave me what I guessed was the smile that usually worked on medieval maidens. I didn’t have the energy for witty banter. It wore me out.

“Gentry!” I yelled. His head came up and he turned to look at me.

“My lady?”

“This knave is bothering me.”

“Sir Rhys, leave the lady be. Thou art little better than Gawen.”

Gentry fell back to walk next to me, but Rhys stuck with us.

“Do you know about Gawen?” he said. “About Gentry’s invisible friends?”

“Is this what you usually do when you come out here?” I said to Gentry. “Work on your castle and have sword fights?”

“Yea, my lady. And sleep.” He gave me a little smile.

“He’s still training like he wants to qualify for Battle of the Nations, but you’ve pretty much given up on that, right?” Rhys said.