We walked quickly, almost ran, pressing through the stream of townspeople at the arch of the outer gate, and then moved with the crowd along the cobblestones toward the castle hill.
At the inner walls encircling the castle grounds, there were already many people. The crowd stood in a semicircle before a low stone platform set into the base of the wall, which I had noticed on our first day of arrival without understanding its purpose then. Now it stood empty, and that expectation in itself held people in a state of tension. The hum was steady, without distinct voices, and in it there was an anxious note that distinguishes curiosity from unease.
We took a position at the right edge, where the platform was visible without obstruction.
After waiting some time, we saw a man step up onto the platform, whom I did not recognize at first, remembering only afterward that I had already seen him once, from above, from the balcony at the Southern Gate, on the day the Hunt opened. Tall, broad in the shoulders, with dark hair touched by grey at the temples and a neatly trimmed grey beard. A long green doublet with gold embroidery fit closely across his shoulders, and on the right one sat a silver pauldron in the shape of a stag's head with spread antlers.
I leaned toward Elara.
"That's not the queen" — I said quietly.
"No" — she answered, without turning.
"That's her Hand. Ulrich Thorne."
Thorn stopped at the edge of the platform, gave the people a few seconds, and the crowd quieted on its own, without any call for silence.
"Residents and guests of Waldruhm" — he said, and his voice proved to match everything else about him, even and deep, without unnecessary force.
"By the will of Queen Edith Valdrich I announce: tomorrow, at the city arena, the annual summer Tournament will be held!"
Half the crowd responded immediately, with a hum and several separate shouts of approval. Someone clapped. I could see the shoulders of the people around rise, could see something living appear in their faces after several days in which there had been little that was living.
But the other half did not clap.
A voice rose from the right, male, sharp, and loud enough to be heard around it.
"And what about those who didn't come back?! Their families are waiting for answers, not tournaments!"
Then from the other side, another.
"Where is the queen? Why doesn't she come out herself?!"
Thorn did not flinch, and stood with the same expression on his face, holding the pause for exactly as long as it took for the shouts to sound completely, without cutting them off.
"The investigation into the outcome of the Hunt is still ongoing" — he said then, in the same even voice.
"The queen is personally engaged with this matter. The results will be announced in due course. The tournament does not suspend that work. It continues the festival that our residents, warriors, and guests of Waldruhm deserve, while the crown does its part."
The square grew loud again, now in several layers at once, and I could no longer make out individual words in the hum.
I looked at Elara. In her eyes I read a mixture of worry and quiet resignation.
"It looks like we'll have to close the stall tomorrow" — she said with a sigh.
"Why?"
"Because most of the people will go to watch the tournament. And Leo and Bernard definitely won't want to miss something like this."
She turned her head slightly and looked at me with a faint smile, in which a question was already forming before she asked it.
"And you, I suppose."
The crowd around us continued to hum, someone was still arguing at the platform, but here, two steps removed from that noise, Elara waited for an answer with the air of someone who already knows what they are about to hear.
I smiled, and that was enough. Elara smiled and rolled her eyes, and we moved away from the square, while the crowd behind us continued to work through what it had just heard.
---
The Merry Ploughman was noisier than usual. The news of the tournament had already seeped inside and settled into the conversations at every table. I was eating, holding a spoon over a clay bowl of thick soup from which a faint steam rose, and had only just raised it to my mouth when Leo leaped straight onto the bench, nearly upending the mug of ale from Bernard's hands, Bernard sitting across from him with the grim and focused expression of a man who had just received a personal insult.
"YES! The tournament is happening! Aren, you have no idea what an incredible event this is!"
His eyes burned as though he had already managed to sign himself up for three bouts and win them in absentia.
Bernard looked slowly at his mug, then at Leo, then at the mug again, satisfied himself that the ale was still there, and returned his gaze to some middle point in front of him with an expression of quiet suffering.
Elara, sitting beside me with her chin propped on her palm and her elbow on the tabletop, did not raise her head. She simply closed her eyes for a second longer than usual.
"So what kind of tournament is it?" — I asked, shifting my gaze between Bernard and Leo.
Leo looked at me with surprise.
"Oh... wait, did I never tell you?" — he asked, sitting down slowly.
"Noble knights, each representing their house, fight in duels to prove their strength and bring glory to their house and name!" — Leo explained, gesturing with his hands.
"And the champion gets the chance to receive a reward personally from the queen" — Elara added, turning her face toward me, her cheek still resting on her palm.
"And that's not all" — Leo continued, making me look back at him.
"Usually only knights of the Green Order compete in the tournament, and the champion may earn the right to advance in the ranks of the Order! But sometimes, for greater glory, a knight may be willing to accept a challenge thrown at him from the stands. And if the challenger wins, he has the right to continue competing in the tournament in place of the defeated knight of the Green Order!" — Leo announced.
"And if he wins the whole tournament?"— I asked.
Leo froze for a moment, mouth slightly open, and an expression crossed his face of someone who has asked himself a question for the first time and is genuinely surprised to find he doesn't know the answer.
Bernard set his mug on the table. Slowly. With that particular manner he adopted when he felt that a grown-up conversation had ended up in the wrong hands.
"That's never happened" — he said briefly, not looking at anyone in particular.
"A challenge from the stands gets thrown maybe once every few years, and even then it's usually some young fool with money and no sense. You don't just put down knights of the Green Order."
Leo did manage to find something, though with less force than usual.
"Well... theoretically" — he began, lowering his voice slightly, as though presenting a debatable hypothesis,
"If that ever did happen, the crown would be obliged to recognize the victory. That's the law of the duel. They can't refuse."
He scratched the back of his head.
"So such a person would receive both the prize and an audience with the queen. And what she does with him after that..."
Leo shrugged with the air of someone who found that part of the equation less interesting than the first.
Elara raised her head and looked at me with the same expression as a few minutes ago at the square, when I had confirmed her guess with nothing but a smile.
"Aren" — she said evenly.
"Hm?" — I turned to her.
Elara looked at me for a few seconds without blinking, with that patient and simultaneously wary expression one directs at a person who has not yet done anything wrong but is already thinking about it.
"You're not planning to get involved in this, are you?" — she said, and her question was not particularly questioning.
Leo immediately turned his head in my direction and stared with undisguised interest, having clearly decided that his opinion of the correct answer aligned with the exact opposite of Elara's.
Bernard reached for his mug and took a long, deliberate drink.
My face twisted in bewilderment, and I looked at each of them in turn, unable to understand where this unanimity had even come from.
"Why are you all looking at me like that?" — I asked, feeling entirely uncomfortable.
"I was just asking out of curiosity. You don't really think I've actually decided to get involved?"
Their expressions, skeptical and at the same time amusingly contorted, caught me completely off guard.
"I can't even hold a sword! What on earth made you decide I was capable of something that stupid?"
"Well..." — Leo said slowly, raising his brows and looking away, rubbing the back of his head.
"In these six months of living with you we've already learned that your curiosity needs to be handled with care" — Elara answered with a smile, in which nervousness and warmth were present in exactly equal measure.
Bernard slowly raised his mug, covering the lower half of his face with it, and fixed me with an expression that was completely stony and at the same time inexplicably eloquent.
"I will never forget..." — he said, with a pause he was clearly savoring,
"The time you decided to find out why the forge bellows hiss so loudly."
Leo instantly clapped his hand over his mouth.
"You walked over, crouched down in front of the nozzle, and stuck your face in it." — Bernard took another unhurried drink.
"I was pumping the handle at that moment. At full force."
Elara groaned quietly and buried her forehead in her folded arms.
"You got thrown back two paces, your eyebrows were singed halfway off, and you sat on the floor with the expression of a man who had just made a great discovery..." — Bernard continued without a single smile, with that intonation that made the story ten times funnier than any other could be.
"And then you turned to me and asked: 'What is air for?' "
Leo was no longer holding back, his shoulders shaking.
Bernard set his mug back on the table.
"That's why" — he concluded, looking at me.
My face went stony from a mixture of absurdity and shame, and I straightened up with an air as though that might lend my words more weight.
"That was one time. And I still didn't understand a lot of things at that point" — I objected in an even voice.
"Oh?" — Bernard set his mug down with a smirk he almost kept contained, but not quite.
"What about that time last week" — he began, leaning back against the bench and folding his arms across his chest,
"When Erik asked you to watch his stall for ten minutes while he stepped away?"
Leo instantly raised his head with an entirely new expression on his face.
"A trader from the next row came up to you and offered to exchange ten bundles of dried fish for half a sack of salt." — Bernard spoke slowly and thoroughly, clearly enjoying himself.
"Erik hadn't told you anything about situations like that. You didn't know what to do. And instead of saying 'the owner's not here, come back later,' you..."
Elara lifted her head from her arms and looked at me with the expression of someone hearing this story for the first time and already feeling sympathetic in advance.
"You negotiated with him." — Bernard continued.
"On your own. Right there. You settled on eight bundles and a third of a sack, shook on it, and when Erik came back you reported it to him as though nothing had happened at all."
A short pause.
"Erik stood for half an hour afterward just looking at the salt. In silence."
Leo burst out laughing in full voice.
"He told me later..." — Bernard added, reaching for his mug again,
"That it was the 'best' deal of the entire week."
Shame and hopelessness took hold completely, and I simply pressed my face to the wooden surface of the table.
"He was speaking too convincingly, and I wanted to try trading the way Erik does" — I muttered into the tabletop.
"That's exactly why we worry" — Bernard answered, reaching across the table and clapping me on the shoulder with that particular solidity of his, which is simultaneously comfort and a verdict.
"There's no guarantee that watching a spectacular duel won't make you want to try the same thing."
"And besides" — Leo added with a smile,
"All the knights of the Green Order competing in the tournament are conductors."
I raised my eyes without lifting my head from the table and looked up at him from below.
"Conductors? They'll be using magic?" — I asked.
"What's a conductor?" — said Bernard, with mild puzzlement.
Leo straightened slightly with the air of a man given a rare opportunity to explain something to an adult.
"That's what they call the gifted in Aisengard and the Trade League. Well, the blessed, in our terms." He shrugged.
"The same thing, just a different word."
Bernard looked at his mug for a few seconds with the expression of a man weighing whether it was worth getting deeper into this, and decided it was not.
"Blessed is blessed" — he said.
Elara, who had been watching me lying on the table in silence this whole time, finally propped her cheek on her palm and looked at me with that restrained but entirely transparent warmth.
"So we're going to the tournament to watch" — she said.
"Just to watch."
I smiled and gave a short nod, with an audible "Mm-hm."
Leo's laughter, the muffled hum of the tavern, and the smell of hot soup kept us at that table for a long time, and for a while everything else retreated far enough away that it was almost impossible to hear.