Hard Day's Knight (11 page)

I perked up at the thought of that, looking straight at Walker. “Oooh, yeah!”

“It shall be so,” Farrell proclaimed, and without giving me a chance to flash Walker the leer I was warming up, he reached up, grabbed the neckline of my mail, and hauled me sideways, planting his lips on me as I slid off into his waiting embrace.

I’ll say this for Farrell—the man knew how to kiss. That thought popped through my mind as he locked his lips on mine. It was a distant sort of thought, and academic analysis of just exactly how his lips were moving over mine, an assessment of his technique from the brush of his lips to the way his tongue tried to tease its way into my mouth.

I thinned my lips, not willing to give him the intimacy he wanted. I was willing to let him end the show with a grand gesture, but a gesture it would remain—empty of meaning and purely for show.

By the time I put my hands up on his chest and pushed him back, the people around the edges of the ring were hooting and hollering advice that was—fortunately for the children present—couched in the worst sort of Olde Medieval Speake.

“Thanks, but no thanks,” I said to Farrell. His nostrils did their annoyed flare again, but he stepped back easily enough, sweeping me a bow that rivaled Vandal’s for effectiveness. I turned to give Volcano a reluctant scritch behind her ears, feeling she deserved it after treating me so well, and looked around her to find Walker.

He wasn’t there. Moth was, an annoyed expression on his furry face as CJ clutched him to her chest, but Walker wasn’t there. Damn.

“Pepper,” Farrell said behind me. “Wait—”

“Thanks for the loan of Volcano; that was fun. Oh, here’s your mail. Maybe sometime you can show me how to joust against a person. And thanks for dinner; it was great.” I struggled out of the mail, dumping the heavy set of linked rings into his hands as he tried to stop me. “Thanks for your help, Jody. You’re the best squire a girl could have.”

She giggled as I walked past, struggling a little in the soft sand-and-dirt mix that made up the warm-up ring. The spectators alongside the ring were dispersing slowly, a small clutch of people gathered around the Norwegians as they doled out money to people who’d bet on me. Several of them called out greetings as I made my way along to the far end of the ring. I waved, thanked the people who yelled congratulations, and hurried as fast as I could over to where CJ and the entire group of the Three Dog Knights—minus Walker—huddled together in a tight circle, clearly talking about something important.

“Hey, guys,” I said by way of (an admittedly weak and feeble) greeting. Given the coldness that had come over them before I had left for dinner with Farrell, I decided a happy, joking attitude was the one that was going to win friends and influence people. “That was a lot of fun. What did you think of my form? Am I ready to give up my day job and become a jouster?”

The group broke up and scattered like they were billiard balls struck by an anvil.

“Hi, Pepper,” CJ said, looking at Butcher from the corner of her eye.

I looked from her face to the others. CJ avoided meeting my eyes, but the others had no such difficulty. They all grinned big, shark-toothed grins at me.

Instantly I was suspicious. “Uh . . . is something the matter?”

“No, nothing, not a thing, not one single, solitary thing,” Fenice said, looking at her fellow Knights. “Nothing’s the matter, is it?”

“No, nothing is the matter. Something is very right,” Bliss said; then she reached out and squeezed my hand. “Be at the practice ring tomorrow at seven. I’ll take you through running the rings.”

“Running the what?” I asked, wondering if everyone was being nice to me because someone had called with bad news. Was my mother dead? Had my apartment been burned? Were CJ’s parents going to take even longer coming home, leaving me with extended Moth duty?

“Rings. You’ll need to know how to run the rings. Tomorrow, seven.” She waved at one of Fenice’s Americans, the two of them heading off to where the Norwegians were now toasting their success as bookies.

“Um . . .” I said, totally at a loss. I looked back at the remaining people. “Okay. Rings. Oh, jousting rings, did she mean? I heard someone mention them.”

Five heads nodded in synchronicity. Four smiles got brighter. One cousin avoided my eyes.

“Why are you guys being so nice to me?” I couldn’t help but ask, my suspicions getting worse with every flash of their piranha smiles. “Has Seattle dropped into the ocean? Has my mother been captured by bandits? Have CJ’s parents bequeathed Moth to me?”

“We’re just happy,” Fenice said.

“Really? Because I hit the quintain?”

“No, because Walker was so angry,” Bos said. He was a nice man with sweet brown eyes, not what you’d think of when you imagined dashing knights of old, but he had a twinkle in his eye that had me smiling back despite my confusion. “You ready, honey?”

Geoff, who was standing next to Bos with a bucket of grain and a currycomb, nodded, winked at me, then toddled off with Bos to the far stable, where the Three Dog Knights’ horses were housed.

“Okay, maybe you guys would like to explain to me what’s going on, and why Walker would be angry that I took his advice and hit the quintain.”

Fenice put her hands on her hips and glared as Vandal sauntered out of the shadow of a nearby stable, his mouth smeared crimson. “For God’s sake, Patrick, wipe your mouth! You look like you’re seven and have been into the jam pot.”

“Probably pretty close to the truth,” Butcher rumbled to CJ, who giggled. Fenice marched over to her twin and grabbed him by his ear, scrubbing her sleeve across his face. “Piggy, that’s what you are, a little pig! I can’t leave you alone for a minute, can I?”

“Fenny,” Vandal whined as she dragged him off toward the tents, “let go of my ear; you’ll rip it off!”

“And a good thing, too. Here you are engaged to my best friend, and you’re all over anything in skirts,” Fenice snapped.

“Not
everything
in skirts,” Vandal argued as she pulled him around the corner of the building. He was still trying to rescue his ear as they disappeared, his plaintive voice reaching our ears. “I leave the guys in kilts alone—”

I turned back to Butcher and CJ. “And then there were two,” I said with a meaningful arch of my eyebrows.

CJ looked panicked for a moment, then shoved Moth into my arms and, with a craven cowardice I hadn’t known she possessed, said, “Sorry. Butcher and I have to go try to make little Butchers. It’s been four months. See you tomorrow, Pep.”

Butcher gave me a wry grin, half embarrassment, half resignation, as my tiny little cousin towed him off into the darkness, looking for all the world like a tug leading an ocean liner.

I sighed and glanced down at Moth. He had a jaded look on his face, the look that usually prefaced his eating someone’s tent. “I don’t suppose you’d care to tell me what that was all about?”

He captured a small insect that fluttered past me, chewing on it thoughtfully.

I looked around us. Someone in a nearby stable clicked off the bright floodlights, leaving me and Moth standing alone in the now-dim puddle of yellow from a nearby security light, the sound of crickets and other night insects taking prominence again as the voices of my audience drifted away. The last few flickers of shadowy forms disappeared as people returned to their tents and the evening’s peaceful slumber—or connubial entertainment, as the case might be.

Behind me, the warm-up ring yawned dark with shadows, the quintain a black shape looming at the far end. Not even Farrell hung around to try to hit on me. I was a bit disappointed by that. Not that I was interested in him in a sexual sense, but still, it did a girl’s ego good to know
someone
wanted her.

“Oh, well, I’ll always have you,” I told Moth. His whiskers twitched as he spit out an insect leg. I set him on his feet, looping the end of his leash around my hand. “Yeah, I know; it’s not a very comforting thought, is it? Come on, cat; let’s get some sleep. Sounds like we’re going to need it.”

 

The cloudless, clear blue sky the following morning promised that the day was going to be another scorcher. Being an early riser, I wasn’t bothered much by the time difference, so I was up and had fed and watered Moth and given him his morning walk by the time Bliss came into the practice ring that she and Vandal had used the day before.

“Good, you’re on time; I like that.” She nodded in greeting. Behind her the gray mare she’d ridden earlier bumped her nose against the back of Bliss’s head, mouthing her hair. I flinched, knowing just how much it could hurt to have a horse eat your head, automatically reaching for my own hair, now pinned up in a braid. “Geoff’s going to help us this morning. Is that all you have to wear?”

I looked down at my wrinkled jeans that were the only riding clothes I had. “It’s that or Wench garb.”

She made a face, one hand smoothing down her sweats before turning to gently slap the gray mare’s muzzle. “It’s better than a skirt. This is Cassie. She’s a nibbler, but a good girl. Why don’t you tie your cat over there, next to those packing crates, and we’ll get started.”

I hesitated, not because I didn’t want to tie Moth up somewhere, but because I had no idea why I was really standing there next to a horse, about to learn how to joust at rings. “Why exactly are we doing this, Bliss?”

She palmed Cassie a bit of carrot, giving me a surprised look. “Thought you had a point to prove?”

“I do. I did. Last night I did, but I proved it. Didn’t I?”

She shook her head. “Not if your goal was to prove that women can joust just as well as men. All you proved last night was that out of two tries, you could hit the quintain once.”

“Oh.” I felt a bit deflated by that realistic assessment of my triumph the evening before, but had to admit that she did have a point. “The thing is, I’m not really dead set on proving that women are just as good as men, at least as far as jousting goes.”

She stopped feeding Cassie bits of carrot and looked at me, disbelief clearly visible in her dark eyes. “Do you mean to tell me that you have no intention of honoring the challenge you issued?”

The implied judgment made me a bit uncomfortable. I picked at the hem of my T-shirt, fidgeting despite the fact that I knew I had nothing to apologize for. “It wasn’t really a challenge—”

“Did you or did you not tell Farrell that women could joust as well as men?”

“I did, of course I did, and I believe that, but there are a lot of women jousters here, so they really don’t need me to help their cause—not that I could, because I don’t know the first thing about jousting,” I pointed out quickly, hoping to escape the peal I could see she wanted to ring over my head. “It must take years to work up to this level of jousting, and as you said, all I did last night was hit a target—”

“It doesn’t take years to learn, although practice does help. We can teach you all you need to know in a day or two,” she said dismissively, waving when Bos trotted out from the stables with a bunch of white rings hanging on a stick. “Come on; up you go. We’ll work you on the rings this morning, and after the qualifiers are over this afternoon, Vandal and Butcher will walk you through jousting with a person.”

“But I don’t want to be a jouster,” I protested as she scooped up Moth and walked over to a stack of wooden crates sitting next to the ring. “And even if I did, even if a miracle happened and I was suddenly the best jouster there ever was, there’s no use in my learning how to do it now because I couldn’t compete. It’s too late to join a team, surely?”

She tied Moth’s leash to a post and took half the rings from Bos before turning toward the list. Tall poles that marked the dividing line of the list suddenly sprouted wooden arms, each equipped with a long metal rod with a hook in the end. Bliss placed one of the white rings on the hook and shook her head at me. “It’s not too late. Teams can add alternates at any time. As long as they pass the initial qualification test, which is basically proof that you can control your horse, anyone can join a team. But that’s not the point—you issued a challenge, and now you’re honor-bound to stand behind it.”

“But it wasn’t a serious challenge; I just couldn’t stand Farrell being so smug anymore—”

“You don’t think defending women’s participation in this sport is a serious issue?” Bliss stormed over and shook a ring at me, making Cassie toss her head nervously. I grabbed at the bridle as the horse tried to sidle away. “It may not be to you, but take it from one who has fought long and hard for the infinitesimal amount of respect granted to women jousters that it is
very much
a serious issue. Do you know that most tournaments refuse to allow women to compete with men—if they allow them to compete at all—or that the women’s purse is less than the men’s? Can you imagine how demeaning it is to be told you can’t do something because traditionally it has been a man’s sport, and you’re not good enough to participate? Do you have any idea how frustrating it is to sit on the sidelines and see jousters whom you know you could beat, but not be able to because of the misguided belief that women who joust with men are nothing more than magnets for accidents and injuries?” She took a deep breath and closed her eyes for a moment, clearly trying to gain control over herself. “If you don’t believe what you said about women being men’s equals, then it’s useless my trying to persuade you.”

“I am serious,” I said in a soft voice, aware that Bos was hanging the remainder of the rings while keeping one fascinated eye on us. “I meant what I said, but Bliss, this is the twenty-first century. The issue of women’s equality is over and done with. We won! We’re equals!”

“Not in the world of jousting,” she answered in a low, gritty tone. “This is a stronghold of chauvinistic attitudes, and we need every fighter we can rally for our cause.”

“You sound like a suffragette.” I gave her arm a little squeeze.