The Knight of the Swallow was gone.
That was what people were saying. One moment the mystery knight had been standing at the pavilion, the crowd still roaring, and the next, simply not there. The gap-toothed boy was questioned, and he didn't know where the knight went. The black cloth with the white swallow was still there. The grey rounsey was still there, now idle in the stable. It was as if the knight vanished into thin air.
Aerion had looked. Finn had heard about this secondhand, through the crowd. The prince had sent people to check the pavilions, the stables, the roads leading out of the meadow. Whether he intended to honor the traditional forfeit of arms and horse, or whether he had something less ceremonial in mind, was a matter of some speculation amongst the smallfolk, who had opinions about it and were not shy about sharing them.
He hadn't found the knight, of course.
This was because the knight's armour was in Finn's bag, and Ciri herself was sitting beside him on an upturned crate outside a large tent, eating salted nuts from a basket and watching the crowd with the relaxed expression of someone who had not, several hours ago, unhorsed a prince of the realm and then questioned his honour in front of several hundred witnesses.
Finn ate a nut. He looked at her sideways.
"You were taunting him," he said.
"He deserved it," Ciri said, without looking up.
"He's vain and cruel," Finn said. "And if you had been caught, you would be dead. Or worse, depending on his mood. Still. At least we managed to make it look like you'd vanished into thin air."
Ciri's mouth curved slightly. "Handy thing, your bag."
"Don't change the subject."
She ate another nut.
Finn looked out at the meadow. The evening had thinned out the joust crowd, dispersing it into smaller clusters, with the people drifting toward food and drink and merriment. Children chased each other between the tent ropes. A pair of knights in travelling clothes argued pleasantly outside a wine stall.
"Aerion finding you is one concern," Finn said. "A manageable one, for now." He ate another nut. "What I'm actually worried about is that something has changed. Someone else was supposed to ride against him today. I'm almost certain of it. And whatever comes next in this place, the shape of it might be different now because of what we did."
Ciri looked at him then. "It'll be fine, won't it?" she said. "You've already changed my fate, for better or worse." She tilted her head. "What harm is one more change?"
Finn was quiet for a moment.
"You'll see," he said.
Ciri looked at him for a beat, then looked away.
—
The puppet show was the reason the big tent was there at all. People had been filtering in for the better part of an hour, finding spots along the edges of the open space inside, children working their way to the front while their parents held drinks and talked over their heads. By the time Finn and Ciri joined the crowd, there was already a decent amount of bodies inside.
The stage was modest. Two poles with a painted curtain stretched between them. In front of it, a tall Dornish woman stood with her back straight and her chin up, dressed in layered fabric that moved when she did.
The puppets quickly emerged.
They were stiff things, worked by rods from below, joints that didn't quite bend the way living things did. A knight in miniature armour. A dragon that swung on a wire, painted in reds and greens. Finn watched them with mild interest, tracking the mechanics of it, the way the woman's hands moved just below the frame.
Beside him, Ciri had gone quiet.
He glanced at her.
She was watching the puppets with the kind of attention she usually reserved for an opponent across a sword. The dragon dipped and rose on its wire, the little knight raised his shield to reflect the light, and Ciri tracked every movement of it with her eyes, not blinking much. Something in her face had eased in the way it rarely did. Not happy exactly. More like a version of herself that had briefly put something heavy down.
It occurred to Finn, not for the first time, how young she actually was. She was eighteen, perhaps even younger, similar to him. But unlike him, she spent her life running away from people that only saw her as tools and objects to be used. She probably seldom has watched things like this before.
The dornish woman narrated as she worked, her voice carrying the story in a clear, practiced tone. Serwyn of the Mirror Shield, she told them, who had faced the dragon Urrax and looked it in the eye without flinching, who had walked toward fire rather than away from it, who had driven his lance through the eye of the beast that no other man had been able to approach.
The crowd was quiet but attentive. Children leaned forward. Adults who had heard the story before listened to it again.
Finn turned his eyes to the crowd, scanning without hurry.
He found Aerion near the back.
The prince was not watching the puppets. He was watching the crowd, or perhaps not watching anything in particular, just standing there with the tight expression of a man who had not finished being angry yet. His eyes were flat.
Finn exhaled through his nose.
He had known Aerion would be here. He had read this part. He had known it was coming the moment he'd seen Ciri settle happily into the crowd with her nuts.
On the stage, the puppet show reached its climax.
A crack of sound, louder than expected, a small explosive charge the woman had rigged beneath the stage, and a bright flare of light and smoke that made the audience gasp and jerk back and then laugh at themselves for it. The dragon puppet convulsed dramatically on its wire. The knight stood triumphant. The woman's voice rose with the final lines of the story, the fall of Urrax, the victory of the shield and the man behind it.
The crowd clapped. Children cheered.
Aerion however, moved forward.
He came through the crowd without excusing himself, shouldering past people who scrambled out of his way when they saw the livery. His guards followed. His face had gone past the tight composure into something else entirely, furious.
"Stop."
The single word cut through the remaining applause. People fell silent. The tall Dornish woman lowered her puppets and looked at him with the stillness of fear.
"You think this is entertainment?" Aerion said. He looked at the stage, at the dragon on its wire with the lance through its painted eye. "You stand here in front of lords and ladies and their smallfolk and you make a show of slaughtering a dragon. Is this what you think is suitable? A depiction of the fall of our house? For children?"
The Dornish woman said nothing. Her hands were still.
"Take her," Aerion said to his guards.
The tent quickly erupted.
People pressed toward the exits, children were grabbed and pulled, drinks were dropped.
Ciri was on her feet, clearly angry.
Finn caught her arm.
She looked at him with an expression that was not a question. He shook his head.
"We shouldn't," he said.
She stared at him. "They're going to hurt her."
"I know."
"Then—"
"I know," Finn said again, quieter. "Wait."
Her jaw set hard. She looked at his hand on her arm, then at the guards, then back at him. He could feel the tension in her like a drawn bowstring. But she stayed.
The guards had the Dornish woman by the arms. She was struggling. Begging to be set free.
Aerion looked at her with contempt.
Then the tent flap moved.
The man who came through it was enormous. He took in the scene in a single look and his face, which had been open with panic, went through several things at once.
Aerion turned to look at him.
And then the sound came. Wet and grinding and brief. The Dornish woman's voice broke a gurgling scream. She was cradling her hand. Her face had gone white. Aerion had broken one of her fingers.
The large man quickly moved.
He came through the remaining crowd like the mountain. He hit the first guard with his shoulder and the guard went sideways into the tent pole, taking the fabric with him. The second guard he struck with his fist and the man's knees gave. He got to Aerion and hit him properly, a blow that snapped the prince's head to one side, with a kick to sit him down hard on the dirt floor.
Then the remaining guards were on him, four of them, pulling and holding, and he was strong enough that it took all four.
Aerion got to his feet slowly. He worked his jaw. He looked at the man being held between the guards with the particular expression of someone recalibrating.
"Why?" he said. It came out almost curious. "Why would you do that? Throw your life away for a whore?"
He touched his jaw carefully with two fingers.
"You've loosened one of my teeth," he said. The curiosity had gone out of his voice now. Something flatter had replaced it. "I think I'll start by removing all of yours."
Ciri pulled her arm free.
Finn's hand was already reaching for her again but she was faster, two steps forward, her hand going to where her sword wasn't, closing on empty air, and she stopped, but only for a second, already looking for something else to use, anything—
The tent flap moved again.
A simple boy walked in.
He was perhaps twelve, slight, with a shaved head that caught the light from the gap in the tent. He looked at the guards. At the man they were holding. At Aerion.
"Stop," he said. The voice sounded nervous but it did not waver.
Aerion looked at him.
"You little wench," he said. "What have you done with your hair?"
"I cut it off, brother," the boy said. "I didn't want to look like you."
Finn leaned close to Ciri's ear.
"There," he said quietly. "The man's saved. Let's go."
She looked at the large man. At the Dornish woman cradling her hand. At the boy standing in front of his brother with a shaved head and a nervous voice.
She looked at Finn.
He met her eyes and inclined his head toward the exit.
Her expression said several things, none of them agreeable. But she turned, and she let him steer her through what remained of the dispersed crowd and out into the open air of the meadow, where the evening was coming in slowly and the noise from inside the tent was already fading behind them.
They walked in silence for a moment.
"What was that?" Ciri said.
"Something that is supposed to happen." Finn simply said.
"So you just let a woman be hurt like that?" questioned Ciri.
"She was hurt but ultimately safe." Finn said. "She'll leave the tourney after this. She's fine. Come on, let's go to the tent, I'll explain there."
—
Back at the camp, the fire had been going for a while by the time Finn finished talking. He had told it plainly, without softening it or stretching it out. Names, events, sequence. What was supposed to happen and what would happen because of it.
Ciri had listened without interrupting, which was not always her way. She sat with her knees drawn up and her arms folded across them, looking at the fire, and when he stopped talking she stayed quiet for long enough that the fire popped twice before she said anything.
"That is the history you want to keep?" she said. Her voice was not angry. It was something more uncomfortable than angry. "You want to let a great man die."
"This is not our world," Finn said. "We can't play god in a world that isn't ours to live in, Ciri. And it doesn't matter anyway," he continued, after a moment. "Because I think we've already changed something. And I'm afraid I know exactly what."
Ciri looked at him. "And that is?"
Finn picked up a stick and turned it in his hands without using it for anything.
"Before today," he said, "Ser Hardyng was supposed to ride against Aerion in the joust. Aerion would have killed his horse and broken his leg." He set the stick down. "That injury was what drove Hardyng to join Ser Duncan's side in the Trial of Seven. And his brother-in-law, Ser Beesbury, would follow because of it."
Ciri was quiet for a moment.
"And now none of that will happen," she said.
"No," Finn said. "Because Aerion rode against you instead. Hardyng never got near him. His horse is unharmed. His leg is fine. He has no reason to be angry and no reason to join anyone."
The fire crackled between them. Ciri stared at the ground in front of her feet.
"How many does Ser Duncan need?" she asked.
"As the name suggests, seven total. Including himself." Finn said. "Without Hardyng and Beesbury, he's two short."
She looked up. "Then we take their place."
Finn looked at her.
"I'll fight as the Knight of the Swallow again," she said. "And you take the other spot."
"No," Finn said.
"Finn—"
"A Trial of Seven is not a joust, Ciri." He said firmly. "People die in them very easily. That is not a figure of speech. Hardyng and Beesbury are both supposed to fall in the first tilt. Both of them. If we take their places, we may take their fate as well." He paused. "I can barely ride a horse properly. I told you this. Do you genuinely think I can survive what kills two trained knights?"
Ciri looked at him for a long moment. Then she looked at the fire. Her jaw was set.
"You just need to avoid the lance of your opponent," she said, quieter now. "You don't have to win the whole thing. You said you're decent with a sword, so force them to a melee. Just stay on long enough, make it count where it matters."
"Ciri—"
"I know," she said. She cut him off. "I know this is my fault. My whim. Because I wanted to do something exciting and I didn't think past the end of the lance." She looked at him directly. "But I will not let an innocent man die because of what I did. I won't." A pause. "Please. Help me."
Finn looked at her face. Then he looked at the fire. Then he leaned forward and pressed the heels of his hands against his eyes for a moment.
He dropped his hands.
"This is partly my fault for facilitating you too, and not telling you the whole story straight…" he said. "He exhaled slowly through his nose. "Fine."
Ciri's shoulders dropped slightly with relief.
"I need a horse," he said. "And a shield." He thought for a moment. "And probably to practice a little bit." He picked up his bag. "Right now…"
Ciri watched him duck into the tent.
"Thank you," she said, to the gap in the canvas.
A pause.
"Go to sleep," Finn said from inside, "I'll take care of my business."
She turned back to the fire and let herself sit there a while longer, the warmth of it pressing against her face, the meadow settling into its night sounds around her.