The Reckless Oath We Made

by Bryn Greenwood

  “My lady,” Gentry said behind me. Even after all the times I’d snooped in other people’s homes, I was embarrassed to get caught. “Wilt thou walk with me?”

  “Yeah. Let’s take a walk.”

  We went up to our camp first, and he put a blanket, a jug of water, and a book into a basket, so I grabbed the book I’d borrowed from him. The one about the boy who runs away to become a knight.

  Our walk was more like a hike. Across a meadow and up another hill. The path wasn’t clear-cut, and long skirts aren’t great for hiking, but Gentry did what he’d done the night before, and pulled me up the steepest parts of it. I thought there must be another hill, because I could see a limestone embankment through the trees, but it wasn’t a hill. It was a stone house.

  Not a house. A castle. A castle in progress.

  “Lady Zhorzha, I welcome thee to Bryn Carreg,” he said.

  “This is yours? Your house?”

  “Yea. ’Tis my keep. Tho I have many labors before me.”

  “Wait. You’re building this? You are building it?”

  “Yea. Stone by stone,” he said.

  My mind was blown, because that was a lot of stones to be building one by one. The walls were taller than me, and on the end closest to where we had come up the hill, the tower was probably three stories high. There was a gate there, big enough to drive a car through, and that was where we went in.

  The walls were probably three feet thick and made out of blocks of limestone. I laid my hand on it as we walked through, and it was warm from the sun shining on it. Inside the tower, there was a door that led out to the courtyard, and a bank of stone stairs that went up in a spiral around the outer wall. Where there would have been a roof, there were blue tarps stretched across big wooden beams. The whole thing was probably forty feet across.

  I put my hand on the wall again, because it was so familiar.

  “Have you been to Colorado?” I said. “There’s this guy. I don’t remember his name. It’s not that far from the Royal Gorge and—”

  “Bishop Castle,” Gentry said. “My lady, yes, I have seen it. It—it—it—”

  I got to laughing, because that’s how excited he was; he couldn’t get any words out. He had to set down the basket he was carrying, so he could scratch his shoulders with both hands.

  “It’s amazing!” I said. “This is amazing! I can’t believe you’re building a castle.”

  “I saw Bishop Castle when I was a boy of ten, no more. Thou hast the book I read in thy hand. I would not rest til I had seen a castle. My father took me thither. Us alone, for brother Trang was yet a babe and my mother stayed home and—wilt thou come up?”

  Of course, I would. We went up the stairs, even though there was no railing, and I remembered that about Bishop Castle, too. How in some places you were going up stairs with nothing to stop you from falling off, or standing with your back against the castle wall with the wind whipping around you. This wasn’t anywhere near that tall, but it was closer to four stories than three. When we got to the top, Gentry pulled back the tarp so we could poke our heads out, and I could see why it was worth all the walking to have built up on the hill.

  There was a long rolling slope down to a creek, and above the creek, three ponds stair-stepped down the hill. A big one and two small ones. Two of them were mossy-looking with lily pads and grass along the edges. The third one was lined with stones, so the water was clear.

  Beyond that were hills and more hills, all the way to the interstate. From up there, it felt like I could see the whole state of Kansas.

  I could also see what Gentry meant to do with the castle. There would be three towers, all connected with walls to make a courtyard in the middle. The one we were in was tallest, with the second one only about fifteen feet high, and the third one just a foundation with a couple rows of stones.

  “How big is it going to be?” I said.

  “Each tower shall stand five and forty feet. The curtain walls shall be eighteen feet. This be the gate tower. T’other two towers shall have no gate but to the bailey, and two chambers above the lower. Along the south shall be the scullery and the bath, for I buried the septic below.”

  “Septic? Your castle’s going to have flush toilets? That’s pretty damn fancy.” For a second I was worried I’d offended him, because he frowned, but then he smiled and nodded.

  “Elsewise, methinks it would like thee not,” he said.

  Unless I was wrong about how Middle English worked, he was building a castle based on what he thought I would like.

  “How long have you been working on it?”

  “This summer shall be my fifth year.”

  “How old are you?” I’d always assumed he was younger than me.

  “I am four and twenty years, my lady.”

  “And you own the land?” He nodded. “So you bought it when you were nineteen? And started building a castle?”

  “Yea, but my debt will not be paid for nigh a score of years. And mayhap ne will my keep be built ere I have paid it.”

  “But still.” It deflated my excitement, not for him, but for me, because it was a reminder that I was twenty-six years old and I had nothing to show for it, except debt. I didn’t own a house, and my car—the only real thing I owned—Gentry had paid for half of that.

  We rested our elbows on top of the wall and looked down at all of his hard work, with the sun shining on us and the tarp flapping, until he yawned.

  “When do you sleep?” I said, because I couldn’t figure it out.

  “Now I shall sleep.” He yawned again, and after I went down the stairs, he fastened the tarp back. I figured we would go back to the tent for him to sleep, but he carried the basket around to the south side of the castle, where there were two giant oak trees at the edge of a bluff. He laid the blanket out there in the shade, but that was just for me. He stepped out into full sun and sat down in the grass to take off his boots. Then he took off his shirt, rolled it up to make himself a little pillow, laid back in the grass half naked, and fell asleep.

  I sat on the blanket, knowing I wouldn’t be able to sleep. My brain was too busy, and it seemed strange sleeping outside like that. Gentry was completely sacked out, though. He rolled over a few times, switching between cooking his front and his back. Once, a bee landed on his back and walked around, so I used the book to fan it away.

  While he slept, I read. It was a kid’s book, but super serious. This poor kid, Stephen, was taking it on the chin from all sides. People being shitty to him, and every time he’d rise above it, the world crapped on him again. His brothers were assholes, then he had to kill his dog, and he got sent away to become a priest, even though he didn’t want to be one. So he ran away and took up with a knight, like Charlene had said Gentry tried to do, but then the knight got killed. Stephen had all these troubles, and then in the end, he went back and became a priest anyway. It was really fucking sad, especially for a kid like Gentry to have read when he was only ten.

  I felt the same kind of sad when I thought about Marcus being with the Gills. They weren’t mean to him, but I never felt like they loved him for who he was. More like he was something they liked to keep around to show off. Their only grandson. They were always trying to mold him, how he talked and dressed. What bothered me most was that however they treated him was probably how they treated Loudon, and he turned out to be an epic asshole. Thinking about that made me cry, for Marcus, for the kid in the book, for Gentry, for Mom and LaReigne, for Dad. At least that dress had plenty of fabric to dry my eyes on. I was curled up sniveling like a baby when Gentry woke up and stretched.

  He carried his shirt and boots over to the blanket. My little spot in the shade had shrunk so small, I’d crossed my legs to keep my toes out of the sun. While I dried my eyes, Gentry got out the bottle of water and took a long drink. Then he sat down on the blanket and offered the bottle to me. I only t
ook a few sips, because I was nice and cool in the shade with a breeze on me. Gentry, on the other hand, had sweated so much his chest hair was wet. I could feel the heat radiating off him.

  “Did you sleep okay?” I was shocked he could sleep that way at all.

  “Yea. I ne’er sleep so well as I do here. How farest thou, my lady?”

  “Oh, I rested and read a little. This is a sad book.”

  “’Tis?” He had his head down, unrolling his shirt like he was going to put it on, but he stopped and frowned.

  “A lot of sad things happen to Stephen. Did you really run away looking for a knight when you were a little boy?”

  “My mother told thee?”

  Instead of putting his shirt on, he flopped back on the blanket and laughed. Honestly, I didn’t mind looking at him. He wasn’t chiseled like a guy who spends hours lifting weights, but he was solid, like a guy who spends his weekends building a castle. His body hair had perfect margins. Black hair on his forearms and his knuckles, but nowhere else on his arms. Same deal with his chest: a perfect butterfly shape of hair, but none on his shoulders or back. He had a little bit of a gut—at his age, it could have been baby fat or beer—and that was where all the sweat had run off him and soaked into the waist of his pants.

  I recognized the surgical scar on his right shoulder from physical therapy, but on his left forearm, he had a bunch of old puncture scars, white against his tan. An even dozen, I guessed, because scars like that come in sets of four. He had more on his left shoulder, and a set of them up high on his throat under his chin.

  “Wow,” I said. “That must have been a big dog.”

  “A fair-sized dog, and I was a small boy. ’Twas thus I came to live with my mother and father. The judge would not leave me return to the house where Miranda dwelt, for the dogs remained there.”

  The dogs remained there. He’d gone into foster care, because his own mother wasn’t willing to get rid of her dogs after he was bitten?

  “Is it okay if I touch you?” I said.

  “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?

  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.