Damsel Knight

by Sam Austin

  Her wrist draws a circle in the air with her sword, trying to get that feeling of ease that always comes with a sword in her hand. Her left hand may be clumsy, but there’s a whisper of it anyway. A thrill runs through her at the thought of having a challenge for once. She doesn’t have to imagine dozens of enemies, each more dangerous than the last. This is her enemy. This is her challenge.

  She darts forward, but not as close this time. This time she’ll make him come to her.

  He moves quickly, his sword swinging with enough strength to bruise if not worse. He has his leathers at least, and his cloak if the tale about its ability to deflect a blow is true, but she only has Neven’s shorts and tunic. He’s not unbeatable though. No man is, no matter how powerful they seem. He may have the fluidity of a jaguar, but underneath that he’s human. His hips and shoulders betray his swings before they happen.

  She parries the blow, using her feet to angle his sword so it skirts off hers. It’s hard work parrying, moving, and seeing at the same time. Yet the hard is what makes it great. Her muscles sing in a way they haven’t since she last practised with her father. Her brain revels in puzzling out his movements, whether a shift to the left is a feint or a clue as to where to move her sword. He whacks her five more times, each closer to slipping past her guard than the last. Then she slips to the right and it’s her turn.

  She rushes him before he can recover. She doesn’t have the strength to push him back, so she uses her feet to dance around him. Yet wherever she aims her strikes, his sword is there to meet hers. He’s too fast, too strong. Her foot catches on a clod of dirt, and all at once the tide changes again.

  She skips backward to avoid him getting too close. It’s too late. She’s lost too much time. She just manages to get her sword up to meet the blow, but it hits solidly, pushing her off her feet and sending her skidding across the cobbled ground. She pants heavily, sweat dripping into her eyes and down her chin. Her legs sting from her new scrapes, but above all that she feels alive.

  Grasping her sword, she scrambles to her feet. Her legs don’t thank her, but she doesn’t care. Fighting Sir Julius is the best she’s felt in a long time; since before the talk of betrothal came up. For a moment she feels comfortable in her own skin, and those moments come so rarely that she makes an effort to bask in it while she can.

  Then she sees his face. Nothing about his expression speaks of the battle he’s been in. His muscles are loose and relaxed, his eyes cool and calculating. “I’ve seen enough.”

  It hits her like a physical blow. Shame makes her insides shrivel. She had fun, but she lost. Her footwork was clumsy, her parries more so. Even her grip was off. The sword should be an extension of your own arm, and she held hers like a dim witted giant with a club. She feels like she did as a small girl when the other children laughed at her for saying she wanted a sword instead of a husband. Her eyes burn with unshed tears, her feet scream to run away and hide. She wants to scream that this isn’t fair. If her arm hadn’t -

  Bonnie steels her shoulders, reaches for something else to focus on so she won’t end up blubbering like a baby. There’s a lot to cry over, and she’s afraid if she starts she won’t stop. Not to mention the looks she’d get. Boys don’t cry. Boys never cry. She won’t either. Never.

  Anger greets her like an old friend. "You went easy on me, didn't you?"

  "Not as much as I thought I'd have to," he glances toward the middle of the square, frowning. "Still, there's a list of improvements to be made a mile long. You're cocky. You don't adapt to your opponent as much as you should. Your swings are clunky. Your arms are weedy. You have little to no awareness of your environment. A bear could creep up behind you, do a jig, and you wouldn't notice it was there."

  It's then she notices the strange silence that had fallen over the square since they started fighting. The men and boys still swing their swords at each other, the grizzled instructor still barks instructions, but their gazes glance their way too often for chance.

  They're watching them. They probably watched the whole fight.

  "I'm not weak." Something lodges in her throat. They watched the whole thing. They'll talk about her over their supper. The cripple boy who lost. Or maybe there's someone watching who sees through her disguise, knows she's just a girl playing pretend. "I can do better. Even if my arm never works again I can fight as well as any knight."

  "No you can't," he says firmly.

  Three words and the bottom falls out of her world. She's a knight. Even when she was a woman, she was secretly a knight. He strips that identity away like a woman swiping away a cobweb, and now she's nothing. Her stomach clenches.

  "Not yet anyway," he says, placing his hands on his hips. His lips twitch with the slightest of smiles. "That's why I've decided to take you on as a squire. We'll train you up, and if you work really hard perhaps you'll be ready to beat Sir Angus before summer comes around again."

  It takes a while for her to remember how to speak, but when she does all that comes out is: "Sir Angus?"

  "Big guy into burning anyone and anything so much as in the same room as someone who breathes a word about magic." Sir Julius gives an exaggerated shudder. "Scary guy. Big. Strong. But overconfident. And he'll look hilarious getting beat by a child with only ten summers."

  "I'm fourteen," she corrects him automatically. Squire. The word repeats again and again in her mind, and yet her brain can't seem to fit that word to herself. Squires grow up to become knights. She can picture the knight part well enough. She's had plenty of practice with that. But squires are highborn males. Her mother was highborn, but there's no way she can tell anyone that without them finding out she's no boy. "But I lost."

  "You made mistakes and you learnt from them," Sir Julius says. "And from what I saw you've been learning from them for a long time. You've got some good moves. A little repetitive maybe. I'm guessing you haven't had many different opponents for a while, but we'll soon put an end to that."

  "I'm not-" her tongue almost trips and says 'a boy,' but that would lead her straight to the fires Sir Angus talked about. "I'm not highborn."

  "Neither am I unless you didn't notice my colouring." He tilts his head as if to give her a better view of his smooth brown face. "King Robin may have ended slavery, but there's still no one of my colour among the highborn. Not one marriage in a thousand years, did you know that? I'm the only knight of fifty that isn't white. A brave knight saw my potential and gave me the chance to rise above my birth. A real chance. I took it. I won't say it was easy, but it was worth the struggle. Now are you going to accept or keep protesting your worthiness all day? I'll even find work for your friends if that will make you happier?"

  "Yes." It comes out squeaky and weird. She clears her throat and tries again. "I'll accept."

  Friends, plural. Her brain feels like it's going to burst from so many things to process. It's like stepping into another world. It would be natural to offer Neven a job, but women working outside the home is rare. A husband is supposed to take care of all his wife and children's needs. A man so poor his wife has to work is the lowest of scum.

  Bonnie hovers between being grateful Neven's mother has an option other than going back to a burned down village, to being insulted he would assume they needed work. In the end she's just grateful. Mrs Moore will want to stay close to her son, and with her husband gone there's not as much shame to it.

  And this way she doesn't have to kill Gelert. She can be a knight through her own merit. She can earn it through hard work, and not from some fluke.

  "Good," Sir Julius says. He tosses her his practice sword. "Now go see those friends of yours and celebrate. And see the medic about your arm when you get the chance. We leave for the city when the sun is high, so be here in an hour to pack my things."

  She blinks dumbly at him. "Aren't you staying to fight the dragon?"

  "Unlike Sir Angus I remember that dragons can fly," Sir Julius says, walking away. "We'll deliver some recruits to King's City, and give the
people there some scant protection. It does no good to run and catch a wolf when you leave your sheep undefended."

  She opens her mouth to say the other thing - that there's two dragons now. There has to be, because Gelert wouldn't. She closes her mouth, and stays quiet as he makes his way over to the men practising at the centre of the square.

  He may be nicer guy than she'd thought, but she still doesn't want him knowing about Gelert or Alice. Any man could kill Gelert with this strange spell over him, and then steal Alice and the kingdom for themselves. It's not like Alice's word would matter against a man's, if she dared speak up at all.

  Neven trots up to her side, panting. He bends over, placing his hands on his knees. He looks as exhausted as she feels. "He said yes," he manages finally.

  She blinks, unable to remember the question she'd asked. "What?"

  "It took some explaining. A lot of explaining, and he was pretty messed up about, y'know. It took a lot of time. But he says he wants to kill the dragon." Neven shakes his head. "Really really wants to kill it. So Alice took him out of the town in hopes of luring it down. Don't worry though, he said he'd wait for you to get there."

  Panic beats a frantic tattoo in her chest. "This is Ness? Since when has he waited for anything? Show me where they are now."

  Chapter 17

  She runs all the way to the old burial hill, where the villages before Porthdon used to bury their dead, back before the circle was formed. It's a long way away from the town, and the sides are almost as tall as the tower they rescued Alice from.

  "Stop it!" a voice screams once she reaches the top of the hill. "Innes, Gelert. Please stop!"

  Bonnie hears the startled intake of air as Neven recognises the voice. Alice. Only, she sounds nothing like the softly spoken princess they've come to know. She sounds like she's in agony.

  Bonnie skids most of the way down the other side. Neven does his best to keep up behind her.

  Gelert stands, his great head moving between Alice with her frantic waving arms, and Ness with his sword. His eyes are wide black pits, rolling and confused. Ness's sword is buried under the dragon's throat.

  Gelert's eyes catch her, and he makes that questioning whine, like he's telling her he doesn't understand this at all and wants her to explain it to him.

  "Stop Ness," Bonnie says between deep breaths. "Don't."

  Ness turns to look at her, keeping that sword in the same place Bonnie drove her own sword into long ago. Blood pours down his arm, thick and a brighter red than any of Gelert's scales. His black hair is cropped close to his head, and his clothes are an over-sized red tunic and trousers with holes in his elbows and knees. His eyes are those of a stranger, the brown so dark it looks black. "Bonnie? I'm doing what you asked - what you wanted."

  "I don't want this." The words tumble out. A heartbeat later she realises they're true. She doesn't want this. She's never really wanted this.

  His eyes skate over her, mouth drawn back in a sneer of disgust. "This dragon's your gift from the ancestors, right? The technicality that's going to let you be a knight instead of tending a husband. I'm helping you!"

  Alice is standing right there, but she's staring too hard at the sword to take notice of his words. At least, Bonnie hopes she is.

  Ness shoves the sword in deeper. His eyes have a manic quality, and his copper skin is beaded with sweat. Blood sheets his arms from fingertip to elbow.

  Gelert makes a pained groan.

  Bonnie runs. She skids to a stop beside him at the last minute. If she rams into him then he might cut something important. Instead she ducks into his hold, knocking his elbows apart and grabbing one of his thumbs, trying to pry his grip loose.

  "What are you doing?" Ness asks, struggling to keep hold. He's strong. "We've got to kill it. It's a dragon!"

  "He's my dragon!" Bonnie shouts. She twists his thumb away from the metal and rams her weight backward hard. Ness stumbles away, but not as far as she'd like. At least his hands are off the sword.

  "Boone!" Neven shouts. He moves over to them, then stands next to Ness. "You agreed to this. This was your idea!"

  "Yeah, well. It was a stupid idea," Bonnie says, keeping her body between Ness and the sword. "This whole thing was a stupid idea. We shouldn't have gone to the castle. We shouldn't have tried to kill Gelert."

  "It's a dragon!" Ness says, scowling. "If you're too much of a woman to get this done, I will, but it needs to be killed."

  "Boone." Neven shifts his weight but doesn't move from Ness's side. "Remember the field of bones. Every one was a man the dragon killed. Once that spell breaks no one will be able to stop it. What happened last night, that could happen again."

  She knows that. Doesn't he know she knows that? It was her village too. They were her people that died as well as his. "You don't know him like I know him. There's got to be another way."

  "What about justice?" Neven asks. He gestures toward Gelert. "What about your family?"

  "He is my family." She thinks of the box, of the door. Doubt floods over her. "My father brought a box home from one of his slayings when I was five. He told me not to open it, so I did, and inside was Gelert. He was tiny; the size of a cat, and he was good. He slept with me at night, played with me all day."

  She can still remember his face the first time she saw it. The way his big black eyes stared up at her like she was the most important thing in the universe. The way he scampered after her everywhere she went, and screamed whenever she left his sight.

  Ness turns a peculiar shade of purple. "Your parents let a girl have a dragon as a pet!?"

  "My mother fainted when she saw us playing," Bonnie says. "But my father was only surprised. In the north beyond the circle, it's said to be good luck if a dragon bonds with you. That you'll never get a more loyal friend. See? Everyone talks about what the bad dragons do, but what about the good? How can one thing be all bad?"

  Neven rubs a hand over his hair in an irritable motion. "Because it's the size of a castle with razor sharp teeth, and enough fire to burn the whole circle. Because those bones were cracked and chewed on. Because parents die, and children die, and you should care about them. Or he's going to tear families apart, like yours."

  That's something she can't get away from. "He got big. My mother was scared, so my father locked him up. Then these men came and started arguing with my father. I opened the door and let Gelert out. I thought he'd help. He didn't."

  Anger crashes over her again, saying the words, but it's a duller anger. He killed her parents, and she hates him. He's the only family she has left, and she loves him.

  It's a confusing mess of emotion, but not as confusing as the past few days. She'd thought she wanted to kill him, and was only waiting for the right time to do it. Now she knows that's not true. She never wanted to kill him. She just didn't know that until she admitted it out loud.

  "We can teach him not to hurt people," Alice says quietly, heavy tear tracks parting the dirt on her face. "I don't want him dead either. He's my friend too. He'd listen to me talk and never minded if I talked too much. He'd bring me the plants I wanted. He didn't always get it right, but he tried."

  "And he killed everyone who went near your tower," Neven says, not unkindly.

  Alice flinches and looks at the ground. "Not you," she mumbles.

  "That's it!" Bonnie says, a thrill of excitement running through her at finally having some kind of plan. "He didn't attack us, and he hasn't attacked anyone since us. So we go to the city, we get a druid to renew the spell. If it works forever then he can go back to the dark forest. No one will disturb him there. If it doesn't, then we just need long enough to get him past the barrier stones."

  Ness shakes his head. "No one's listening to your half cooked ideas. Now get out of my way."

  He goes to push her aside. She rams her good shoulder right in the middle of his chest.

  "We're not killing him," Bonnie draws each word out, making herself as clear as she can.

  “What about Neven?�
� Ness asks between gritted teeth. “Did you ever consider him in all this? If he marries this girl he could become king. This is his chance to be something great. You know he’s not cut out for fighting or farming.”

  “I won’t marry anyone if Gelert dies!” Alice shouts through tears. She stomps her foot like a small child having a tantrum. “I’ll stay alone for ever and ever, and I’ll hate all of you!”

  Silence reigns. Even Alice seems surprised by her outburst. She ducks her head, but her fists stay clenched tight at her sides. Her body seems to be at war with itself. Defiance battling against years of meekness.

  Gelert lowers his head and swipes at the side of her face with the tip of his tongue. The sword sticks out of his throat like the tricks travelling entertainers pass off as magic.

  “You’re a girl,” Ness says, voice firm and eyes hard like stone. He’s looking at Alice, but Bonnie gets the feeling the words are meant for her as well. “What you want doesn’t matter. You need to act like a girl. The sooner you accept that, the less pain you’ll go through.”

  Bonnie shoves him hard, and when he stops stumbling she shoves him again. “You leave her alone!”

  He grabs her by her dead shoulder. She feels pressure, but nothing else. “I’m done!” He shouts, his mouth inches away from her face. His spittle lands on her cheek. “I tried being nice. I tried accepting all … this. Here’s the truth. Me and Neven are the men here. We fix the problems. We protect you. We’re going to kill the dragon, and you can’t stop us!”

  She twists out of his grip and hits him with an open palm. The crack splits the air between them, then echoes in her ears a few times more. Her body feels like it’s burning from the inside out. She wants to hit him again and again, next time with a closed fist like her father showed her.