He stood among thousands, near enough to tens of thousands, though the counting of it defeated him after a certain point. The wooden plaque he'd been given, he now discovered, hadn't merely served to mark his horse and skip the wretched line, but had also earned him a proper seat in the wooden stands built up around the jousting field itself.
Among the front rows, no more than two feet above the trampled grass, close enough to see clear across the whole length of the tilt and out to the great heaving crowd beyond it. The poorer folk stood packed together further back, jostling and pushing at one another, standing on tiptoe like some vast twitching carpet of flesh, all of them straining desperately for even the briefest glimpse of the field.
