The Reckless Oath We Made(46)

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.

“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.