Hard Day's Knight

by Katie MacAlister

  Chapter Thirteen

  The first day of the actual jousting competition (as opposed to just qualifying rounds) dawned, I was told, as bright and brilliant as it had the last few weeks. I didn’t know, having spent the morning lying smooshed up against Walker’s side, wonderfully at peace and happy as his breath ruffled my hair in regular, even breathing tinged with the slightest hint of snoring.

  “What do you think, should I keep him?” I asked Moth, who lay in meat-loaf mode on Walker’s belly, reaching out a paw occasionally to bat at my fingers as I drew lazy circles on Walker’s chest. “He’s bound to be trouble, what with that whole obstinate male thing going on.”

  Moth’s whiskers twitched.

  “No, I’m not saying he’s not worth the trouble, it’s just that I had this idea of everything working out easily, and look at him! He’s everything I don’t like in a man—stubborn and pigheaded, way too handsome, and blind about so many things that should be obvious to him.”

  Moth yawned.

  “Well, that is true; he does have many fine qualities.” I scratched Moth behind his ear, making the big cat’s eyes close in pleasure. “He’s brave, honest, generous, and caring, and he has a lovely soft heart under that misanthropic exterior. I just wonder if I’ll ever see the real Walker, the one he was before the accident, or if that dashing, carefree, adventurous man is gone forever?”

  “I hope to God he is; he was a right pain in the arse,” Walker’s chest rumbled pleasantly beneath my ear. “Talking to the cat, are you?”

  I kissed the nipple that rose so pertly next to my face. “Only because you were snoring the morning away.”

  “I never snore!” he said, outrage dripping from his voice. “And for someone who says she dislikes animals, I certainly do find you around them a great deal.”

  I made a face at Moth, who was now drooling on Walker’s adorable belly as I scratched under his collar. “I’ve told you, I’m stuck with him. It’s not a matter of my choice at all.”

  “Why didn’t you become a vet?” Walker asked suddenly.

  I looked up at his face for a second, then pulled my body away from his. “Breakfast first, or shall we fight our way through the hordes to the showers? I say showers first. I’m a bit sticky from last night.”

  He wrapped his long fingers around my arm as I tried to scoot out from under the sheet that served as a blanket. “Why didn’t you become a vet? CJ said you were well into the program when you quit. Is it because you don’t like animals?”

  I pulled my arm away, tugging the sheet until it was wrapped around me in toga fashion. “Come on, don’t be such a lazybones. If we don’t hurry we won’t get any hot water. Those Norwegians are such shower hogs.”

  “Pepper,” he said, sitting up after carefully removing Moth from his stomach. “Why won’t you answer my question?”

  “Why do you care? Is it so important a question that I have to answer it?” I shrugged into a pair of jeans and grabbed a T-shirt.

  “I didn’t think so, at least not until you avoided answering it. If it wasn’t the animals, why didn’t you become a vet? You certainly had the family background for it.”

  “Oh, yes, I had the background,” I said, mentally wincing at the bitterness in my voice. “There’ve been vets in my mother’s family for almost ninety years, going all the way back to my great-grandfather, who was one of the first vets in Scotland. Veterinarians we have aplenty in our family. Software engineers, however, are notably scarce. There’s just me, you see.”

  “So you quit vet school because your heart wasn’t in it? You preferred computers to animals?” Walker probed, pulling on his tights and tunic.

  “Let me just add ‘tenacious’ to your list of qualities,” I grumbled, sticking my feet into my sandals and grabbing my bag of shower things. I tossed Walker a towel, taking another one for myself. “So! What are you going to do about finding out who vandalized—no pun intended—Bos’s lance and Marley’s leg?”

  “I’ve told you, I’m looking into both. Is the reason you quit vet school because your heart wasn’t in it?” he asked again, ignoring my blatant attempt to distract him.

  “Looking into how? Are you grilling people? Asking questions? Hiring a private detective? I can help, you know, I’ve read lots of detective stories. I cut my literary teeth on Agatha Christie. My family used to call me Pepper Poirot. I want to detect with you.”

  “Pepper . . .” His thinned lips told me he wasn’t going to let go of his infuriating curiosity about something that had no relevance.

  My teeth ground for a moment, keeping back the reply that wanted to burst out, but after a couple of seconds’ thought, I decided, What the hell. He’d find out sooner or later. “No, it’s not the reason. I quit vet school because there was no use in continuing, okay? Happy now? Good. I’d like to find a shower and wash off the proof of our activities, if you’re done with the third degree. Moth, you move one paw from this tent and I swear I’ll be wearing a cat-shaped hat before the day is out.”

  I unzipped the door to the tent and strode out into the still-cool morning air, ignoring Walker until he caught up to me, stopping me with one big hand on my arm.

  “What is this about?” he asked, turning me so I was facing him. Around us, the Faire was coming to life, people milling around the tent city, going to or from the bank of showers and toilets, feeding horses and themselves, talking, chattering, laughing—everyone happy to be alive on such a glorious, promising morning.

  Everyone except me.

  “This is about nothing, all right? Nothing—which pretty much sums up my career had I stayed in vet school. Now, if you don’t mind, I’d like to get cleaned up.” I turned and marched off to the low building that housed the showers and toilets.

  “Why would you think your career would have been nothing? If your whole family are vets—”

  I stopped and put my hands on my hips as best I could while holding the shower things. “What did your father do? Was he a farrier?”

  Walker shook his head. “No, he sells insurance. What does my dad have to do with this?”

  “Pretend for a minute he is a farrier. Not just any farrier, though—a world-class farrier, one who works for zoos and international wildlife organizations. Imagine he’s the sort of guy who gets asked to international conferences to speak on . . . oh, I don’t know, hoof welfare.”

  “Pepper—”

  I held up a hand to stop him. “I’m not finished. Now stretch your mind a little and imagine that your grandfather was also a farrier, but he, too, was a one-of-a-kind farrier, a man who came up with unique ways of shoeing horses, a man who embraced every aspect of horse care, a man who not only rode in the Olympics, but who pioneered a method of treating injuries in racehorses’ feet.”

  “I see,” Walker said, his eyes steady on me. I had the oddest sense that he did see, that he was looking deep into my soul, seeking to bare all my secrets. It was an extremely unwelcome sensation.

  “Do you? There’s more. Let’s take this make-believe scenario a little further—imagine that your great-grandfather was a man who was a world-renowned researcher at a time when there was no research being done into animal welfare. Imagine that he was one of the creators of a drug that revolutionized hoof care. Imagine all that, and ask yourself if you still would want to be a farrier. I think your answer will help you understand why I didn’t become a vet.”

  I left him standing there as I walked toward the showers, my gut roiling at my having to admit something so painful.

  His voice was positively icy. “So you quit because you felt like you weren’t good enough? That’s rather hypocritical of you, don’t you think?”

  I stopped at his words. I didn’t want to—I didn’t want to talk to him about such an insignificant bit of history anymore—but there was enough anger in his voice that it fired up my own ire. I turned to look back at where he was still standing. “Hypocritical? You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

  “Don’t
I?” Slowly he approached me, his eyes mirroring the scorn in his voice. “You lectured me for the last two days about this very same thing.”

  “No, it isn’t the same thing—”

  “Yes, it is. You said I didn’t have the confidence in myself to succeed. You rubbed my nose in my own insecurities, and I let you because I believed you were superior, and now I find you’re doing the exact same thing I’m accused of doing—namely, of being a coward.”

  Now that stung. I lifted my chin and glared at him, mindless of the people strolling past and around us, calling greetings to us that weren’t answered. “I might be a lot of things, Walker, but knowing that I could never be as good as my mother or grandfather or great-grandfather does not mean I’m a coward. It just means that I know my own limitations.”

  “That’s what you tell yourself, is it?” His jaw was tight, but he didn’t frighten me. “That’s what you say to get through the periods of self-loathing and misery, isn’t it? Don’t forget, according to you, I’m a coward, too. I know what I’m talking about.”

  “You don’t know squat about me,” I answered, furious but unwilling to admit why.

  His beautiful silver eyes narrowed. “Answer me this, Pepper—do you want to be a vet? In an ideal world where nothing but you matters, do you really want to be a vet?”

  “There is no ideal world,” I said, refusing to take his bait.

  He grabbed my arm and hauled me up close, not in an embrace, but so he could glare down at me in an attempt to intimidate. “That’s not an answer. Do you, in your heart, want to be a vet?”

  I gritted my teeth and refused to answer.

  He let my arm go and stepped away, as if he were disgusted by my nearness. I didn’t blame him. At that moment I disgusted myself. “What a fine pair we are. You too frightened of failure to even try to get what you want in life, and me all too aware of my failures to risk trying again. Do you know what the difference is between us?”

  “No,” I answered, my throat tight with unshed tears. “What is the difference?”

  “Nothing,” he said, turning on his heel and marching off toward his tent.

  “There you are!” CJ called, waving me up to sit next to her on the section of the bleachers she had claimed with several red-and-gold blankets embroidered with the Three Dog Knights emblem. The arena was packed, this being the first official day of competition, probably a good 70 percent of the audience in garb, with another 20 percent families making an attempt to get into the spirit of the thing by donning bits and pieces of rented garb for the day. Women in T-shirts and shorts wore padded head rolls and veils, small children in expensive tennis shoes ran wild with plastic swords and Robin Hood hats, and guys of every shape and size wandered around in leather jerkins and gauntlets. “We saved you a spot. You haven’t missed much, just a couple Americans taking headers.”

  “Crunchies,” Fenice said, Gary flanking one side of her.

  “I beg your pardon?” I asked as I settled Moth onto the blanket next to CJ, giving him his favorite catnip toy to keep him occupied. “What’s crunchy?”

  “Who, not what. Or should it be whom? It doesn’t matter—the term applies to knights who spend more time on the ground than in the saddle. They crunch when you step on them, do you see?”

  “All too well, thank you,” I said, the piece of leftover pizza I’d shared with Moth as breakfast doing a backflip in my stomach. “So when is everyone on?”

  CJ shoved a piece of paper into my hands. I glanced at it as the speaker overhead burst into song, a rock anthem used with gleefully anachronistic disregard, the announcer calling for the next two participants to enter the ring. Two men on bays entered, one horse in a fancy yellow-and-black drapery, the other in blue and green. They rode a promenade around the ring, bowing and waving and generally playing it up to the crowd as the announcer related their name, affiliations, and jousting wins. Women and girls (and a couple of enthusiastic guys) leaned over the railing waving the premade cloth favors sold by a couple of vendors, scarves, homemade favors, and even a pair of panties as the jousters rode the ring.

  “Good God, they really go whole hog for the competition, don’t they? This is nothing like the qualifying. Is that woman waving what I think she’s waving at that knight?”

  “Looks like a G-string to me. Qualifying is for serious jousters—this is for the public,” CJ answered.

  “Yeah, but this is the competition.” She shrugged. I leaned forward and touched Fenice on her arm. “Do you guys have the fancy horse blankies like these knights?”

  “They’re called caparisons, Pepper,” she answered with a grin. “And yes, we have them, too.”

  “Butcher’s is a full caparison of green with silver fleur-de-lis on it. Walker just has red and gold cruppers that can adjust to different-size horses,” CJ said.

  “Cruppers as in the straps that hang over the horse’s rump?” I asked absently, reviewing the day’s schedule of jousting. Walker had told me in pillow talk that each morning that names were drawn randomly to pair up jousters, with the list of who was going up against whom posted immediately thereafter.

  “Yes, those sorts of cruppers.”

  “Ah. So Bliss is first at a little after nine against one of the Norwegians, then Walker and an Aussie at ten thirty, Vandal versus one of the Palm Springs ladies right after that, and Butcher and one of the Whadda Knights at three.”

  “Colin. He’ll cream Butcher,” Gary said loudly of his teammate. CJ, never one to take criticism (implied or not) of her gigantic lamb, pulled off her gold velvet muffin hat and smacked the back of Gary’s head with it.

  I frowned at the schedule. “What happens if someone draws their own teammate as a competitor?”

  “In team competition, the chief marshal would throw the name back and pull another until someone who wasn’t a teammate is pulled. In individual competition, it’s luck of the draw, and quite often you do draw your own teammate,” Gary answered with a shrug.

  “I didn’t realize there were team and individual jousts,” I said slowly, flipping over the day’s schedule to look at the overall tournament schedule, only to choke at what I saw. “Good god! The winner gets two hundred thousand dollars? Two hundred thousand? No wonder people have come from all over the world to participate!”

  Fenice nodded as CJ grinned and said, “That’s just for one event. The winning team of the four jousting events gets two hundred grand to divide. Each winning person in sword and archery also gets one hundred thousand. Then the jouster who wins the individual competition gets another two hundred thou, and finally, the one person who has the highest individual score in jousting and the skill games is the tourney champion, and he or she gets another two hundred thousand.”

  “Wow! That’s a whole lot of money—almost a million dollars!”

  “It is a million—there are lesser amounts of money offered to people in the first four places of each competition. This is the largest purse ever offered to jousters. It’s unprecedented.”

  No wonder everyone on Walker’s team was so frantic to have him joust, thereby keeping them in the competition. If they won even one event, they’d stand to walk out of there with a pretty big chunk of change.

  “It’s an experiment to see if jousting has the support to become an Olympic event,” Gary added as the crowd applauded the two jousters, now taking their places at either end of the list. “Of course, they have to get past the politics first, which frankly I think is a lost cause.”

  “Politics?”

  “Shhh!” CJ ordered, the crowd roaring as the two knights spurred their horses forward.

  I gave the two men in the ring the briefest glance, more interested in what Gary had said. I leaned forward and tapped him on the shoulder until he turned to look at me, saying softly, “What sort of politics?”

  “There are four different jousting organizations, each supposedly better than the others, but really they’re almost the same, with a few key differences. There’s the American Jousti
ng Association—your friend Farrell is the head of that—and the International Tournament Organization, who are mostly the Aussies and Kiwis; then there’s the World Jousting and Combat Association, which is predominant here in Canada and Europe, and finally there’s a new group called the Federation of Armed Combatants set up by people who didn’t like the restrictions in the other three—they’re the bad boys of the jousting world.”

  “Ah. So each organization does what—holds its own jousts?”

  He nodded, glancing toward the ring for a moment as the jousters threw down their broken lances and rode back to their starting points. “They hold their own tourneys, award their own titles, keep different scoring systems, and have different rules for jousters. Each one names their best jouster as the world champion, so it can get confusing when you have four world champs at one time. The real reason that jousting isn’t in the Olympics has nothing to do with the question of public support, as the tourney organizers claim—it’s because there is no one international organization. Until there is, jousting won’t be anything but an amateur sport, even at this level of competition.”

  “Hmm,” I said, sitting back, my attention suddenly caught by the sight of a familiar figure standing just outside the arena. Walker and Butcher were dressed in identical red tunics and black leggings, the three golden dogs on their tunics blazoning the team’s emblem. Walker held an armload of red-and-white-striped lances, while Butcher carried a couple of painted shields, both evidently waiting to squire Bliss at her turn. “What a poop.” I sighed, my eyes on the dark-haired man of my dreams.

  “Trouble in paradise?” CJ leaned over Moth to whisper. “Walker doesn’t look very happy.”

  I raised both eyebrows and tried to look haughty. “I gave the man a full-body massage last night and fulfilled his every wanton desire, and let me tell you, he has quite a few. That doesn’t sound like trouble to me.”

  “No, but the way he was muttering and snorting your name when he came around the camp this morning did. I’d say I told you so, but I’m not the sort of person who gloats over another’s troubles.” I gave her a narrowed-eyed look. She grinned. “Oh, what the hell—I told you so!”