The knights' pavilions were arranged in a long row beside the wall that separated the plain meadows and the tourney grounds, each one dressed in the colours and sigils of their occupants. They used silks and velvets, embroidered banners, with squires in matching livery standing at attention. The pavilion of House Tyrell smelled faintly of roses, and the pavilion of House Targaryen is filled with depictions of dragons. Those definitely aren't cheap to procure.
Then there was Ciri's.
There was only a length of plain black cloth hung between two stakes, with the white swallow painted on it in broad strokes. There was no furniture beyond the bare minimum, which is a chair. No squire in matching colours, just a gap-toothed boy Finn had found near the stables and paid three silver stags to stand there to help her carry the lances and the horse.
Finn meanwhile stood in the crowd on the opposite side of the fence, his arms folded, and looked at the pavilion he had paid to secure.
Finn had wanted Ciri closer to the front of the running order, which meant he needed the Master of Games to think that Ciri is of highbirth, which meant a bribe that he gave him during the registration. He had paid for it. He was already regretting it.
He was regretting several things, if he was being honest.
Around him, the crowd murmured. He caught pieces of it.
"—never seen that sigil before—"
"—a swallow, of all things—"
"—mystery knight, clearly, but the placement—"
"—perhaps it's Maekar's boy. The missing one—"
"—an Arryn, maybe? Though the sigil's wrong—"
Finn listened to this without turning his head. The speculation had been running since the pavilions were first arranged and people had noticed the plain black cloth sitting between two considerably more ornate neighbours. A mystery knight was not unusual at a tourney. A mystery knight placed amongst the highborn deserves more attention however. It implied drama. It implied an exciting thing to look forward to. People were filling in the blank with whatever name made sense to them.
None of them were close though.
He exhaled slowly and turned his attention back to the lists.
The afternoon's jousts had moved at a normal pace. Truthfully, he is worried. Because from the looks of it, Ciri is going to overlap against a story line, and that means that there is a possibility that something will change. He had a bad feeling about this.
Then the murmur in the crowd grew louder.
Prince Aerion Targaryen rode onto the field.
He was easy to pick out. The armour alone would have done it, bright and ornate with the three-headed dragon on the breastplate, but it was the horse beneath him that drew the eye first, a tall red destrier that moved like it knew it was being watched. Aerion rode with the particular ease of someone who had never seriously considered the possibility of losing anything.
He walked his horse along the line of pavilions slowly. Letting himself be seen. Letting the crowd settle into a hush.
He stopped in front of his cousin's pavilion.
Finn knew this part. He had read it. Aerion looked down at the young knight there, and he said something cutting. The cousin bore it with the patience of someone long grew tired of hearing it.
Then Aerion moved on.
Finn felt his shoulders drop slightly.
Then Aerion slowed.
Then Aerion stopped.
He was in front of the black cloth with the white swallow on it.
Finn closed his eyes for exactly one second.
Aerion looked at the sigil. He looked at the boy-squire, who had the good sense to look at the ground. He looked at the knight standing beside the pavilion in plain armour with a closed visor and a painted shield.
A cold smile crossed his face.
"A mystery knight?" He found it mildly amusing. His eyes went back to the swallow on the black cloth and he made a short sound, not quite a laugh. He reached out with his lance and struck it against Ciri's shield, a lazy, contemptuous tap. "Come then, little bird. Let us see how you fare against a dragon."
The crowd rippled.
Finn pressed two fingers to his forehead.
"Fuck," he said, quietly, to no one. "I knew this was a bad idea."
—
Underneath the helm, Ciri was smiling.
She had heard the taunt that Aerion was throwing at his cousin. She had felt the lance tap against her shield. She had stood completely still through all of it, chin level, shoulders square, the way Vesemir had taught her to stand when someone was trying to get a reaction out of her.
But underneath the visor, in the dark where no one could see, she was absolutely delighted.
She turned to the gap-toothed boy, who looked like he was reconsidering the three silver stags.
"My horse," she said.
He scrambled for the lead rope.
The grey rounsey stood waiting with patience. Ciri put her hand on its neck for a moment. The noise of the crowd was loud now, pressing in from all sides.
"Right," she said quietly. "I'm going to call you Kelpie."
The horse simply flicked an ear.
She put her foot in the stirrup and swung up into the saddle. The armour made it heavier going than she was used to, the weight distributed differently. She adjusted. Shifted her seat until she found her balance.
She picked up the lance the boy held up to her, feeling the length of it. She had never jousted. She had ridden most of her life though, across plains and through forests and over mountain passes, she had ridden hard and fast and in worse conditions than this. But a lance was not a sword, and a jousting run was not a chase. That for her made it exciting. A new thing to experience.
She rolled her shoulders once. Tightened her grip.
Then she kicked Kelpie forward towards the tilting ground.
—
The crowd was loud when they lined up. Aerion on his red destrier at one end, Ciri on the grey rounsey at the other. The size difference between the horses was not subtle.
The horn flared.
They moved. Galloping towards one another.
Once again, she had never jousted before. But just before the tilt, Finn had told her that jousting is three quarters horsemanship. And she was bloody good at that.
She braced.
Then the lances connected.
The crack of it split the air and the crowd cheered.
Aerion's lance caught her shield and splintered, the impact shuddering through her arm and into her shoulder. His shield held. Hers held as well. She rocked in the saddle, hard, felt herself tip over slightly, before quickly rebalancing on the saddle.
Aerion had not fared as cleanly. He swayed. His upper body pitched to one side, the broken lance dropping from his grip. He recovered, but not before the crowd had seen it and made its noise about it.
The gap-toothed boy ran forward with a fresh lance. Ciri wheeled Kelpie around and took it from him without dismounting, barely slowing. She turned the horse to face the far end of the track.
Aerion had straightened. His mood, what Ciri could guess from a distance, had changed.
They lined up again. The horn flared again.
This time Aerion came harder. The red destrier pushed the ground in long, furious strides, and the angle of his lance shifted as they closed, dropping, veering. At the last moment he pulled it away, as if cancelling his tilt at the last second.
Ciri felt the miss before she processed it, the lance cutting past her left side, the rush of displaced air, and then her own lance was swinging through empty space where his body should have been. The deflection threw her weight to the right. For one bad second she was more sideways than upright.
"Damn it—"
She hauled herself back, legs clamping, and got straight again. She pulled Kelpie around hard and faced down the track.
She had felt what he'd done. He hadn't tried to hit her shield. He'd gone high, deliberately, the lance angling to the sky. He didn't want to even hit her, a dirty trick.
She looked at him across the length of the track.
The horn flared again.
She rode again.
This time she watched his lance from the moment they cleared the starting marks. She watched the angle of his shoulder, the tilt of his wrist. She had learned, years ago in training at Kaer Morhen, that the body committed before the weapon did. You read the man, not the blade.
She read him.
Halfway down the track she saw the tell. His lance dipping again, this time low, aiming for her horse, even more dishonest than before.
She waited. Let him commit.
Then she shifted.
She dropped her weight to the right and veered Kelpie half a stride sideways, just enough, the low lance cutting through air where the horse's legs had been. At the same moment she drove her own lance forward and across, catching Aerion not square in the chest but at the shoulder, punishing the overextension his low blow had forced him into. He had leaned into the strike. He had no base to absorb it.
He fell.
Not gracefully. The red destrier surged on without him and Aerion hit the dirt in a clatter of expensive armour that the crowd heard and responded to immediately, a roar that swelled and broke over the lists like a wave.
Ciri pulled Kelpie up and turned him.
Aerion was already getting to his feet, which was both a relief and a problem.
"Such dishonor!" The words were out of her before she had fully thought about them, pitched to sound as manly as possible, and loud, carrying across the field. She could feel the laughter trying to get out from her throat and clamped down on it hard. "Is this how a prince conducts himself?!"
In the crowd, Finn put his face in his hand.
Stop, he thought. Stop talking. Stop it right now.
The crowd, to its credit, was not entirely unsympathetic to the point she was making. There were voices in it that agreed, loudly, and voices that didn't, also loudly, and the overall effect was a noise that Finn found deeply exhausting.
The herald's voice cut through it.
"Prince Aerion demands continuation! The joust will continue on foot in a duel!"
—
Ciri dismounted and handed Kelpie's reins to the gap-toothed boy, then she turned.
She pressed her lips together behind the visor.
The hired squire stepped forward with a sword. She looked at it. It was not her sword, just one that mildly resembles its shape.
She looked at Finn.
He was looking at her. He had an annoyed expression.
She looked at the sword being offered to her, as if demanding an explanation from Finn, but alas, there was no answer.
She grumbled something under her breath, took it, and turned to face the field.
Aerion was already there, his own sword drawn, shield raised. He stood like a man who had decided that what had just happened would be addressed thoroughly.
Ciri rolled her shoulder. Then the other one. The armour sat differently standing than it did in the saddle. She adjusted her stance, widening her base, dropping her centre of gravity lower than she would have normally.
She raised the sword.
Aerion came to her without warning.
He was good. She registered that immediately and without surprise. He was trained, he was strong, and he was angry, which made him faster than he might otherwise have been and less careful. He drove forward with a sequence of overhead strikes that were clearly intended to use his slight size advantage and the weight of his armour to simply push her down.
She didn't try to match it. She stepped away. She redirected the hits. She used the length of the borrowed sword to keep him at a distance where his reach advantage didn't function the way he wanted it to.
The armour slowed her. She had accounted for that. Knights trained in armour from the time they were boys and somewhat stopped noticing it. Ciri had put this particular set on for the first time this morning.
He swung wide. She stepped away again, close enough that the swing went past her entirely, and drove her elbow into his sword arm. He staggered. She put distance between them again before he could grab her.
He adjusted. He got careful. The angry recklessness settled into something more controlled, and for a stretch of time they moved around each other without either of them landing anything meaningful, the crowd noise dropping into a whisper, watching quietly.
Then Aerion feinted high and went low.
She had been waiting for it. She had seen the pattern. She caught the blade on the flat of her own, turned it, stepped past him, and hit him in the back of the knee with the pommel of the borrowed sword. His leg buckled. He went down on one knee.
She put the tip of the sword to the back of his neck.
The quiet in the crowd was total.
Aerion's hand opened, almost regrettably. His sword dropped into the dirt.
A long pause came.
Then, slowly, with the particular stiffness of embarrassment, he raised his empty hand.
The crowd erupted.
Ciri lowered the sword. She stepped back and let him rise.
She turned away from him before he was fully upright and walked back toward the pavilion, the noise of the crowd washing over her from all sides. Somewhere in it she could hear her own name being called, not her actual name, the Knight of the Swallow, her registered name, and the sound of it sent something warm and uncomplicated through her chest.
The gap-toothed boy held Kelpie's reins and stared at her with undisguised awe.
She found Finn at the fence. But she didn't approach him.
He looked at her for a long moment.
"Come on," Ciri could almost hear what Finn was mouthing towards her. "Let's get that armour off before someone tries to talk to you."