‘Raoul? I’ll be switched,’ he said, awed. ‘Lady Alanna told me you were looked after, but this? Gods all bless. Goldenlake the Giant Killer.’ He whistled. ‘This is very good. I love it. Not even the conservatives will question your right to a shield if he’s your master. He may be a progressive, but he’s still the most respected knight in Tortall. Even the ones who claim you’re magicked to succeed will have to shut up.’
‘What do you mean?’ Kel demanded. Sometimes Neal took forever to get to the point; sometimes, even when he got to it, the thing didn’t feel like a point at all. This was starting to feel like one of those times.
‘You’ll be in public view most of the time,’ Neal explained. ‘Not everyone you meet will be your friend, so they won’t lie for you, and some will have enough Gift of their own to tell if magic’s being worked on you. No one will be able to claim you did anything but what was under everybody’s nose after four years in the King’s Own.’
‘If I cared for their opinion, I’d be relieved,’ Kel informed her friend. ‘So you think this is good.’
He nodded vigorously. ‘I’m envious,’ he admitted. ‘Lord Raoul’s got to be the most easygoing man alive. My new knight-mistress is famed for wielding sharp edges – sword, knife, and tongue.’
Kel scratched her ear. She hadn’t considered the Lioness’s temper, though the realm’s sole female knight was infamous for it. ‘You’ll just have to get on with her,’ she said. She knew her words were silly as they left her mouth. Neal couldn’t just get on with anyone. He could no more resist poking at other people’s conceits or ideas than he could resist breathing.
‘I’ll manage,’ Neal said. ‘She and Father are friends, so she probably won’t kill me. Now,’ he went on, changing the subject, ‘why are you packing, if you have such a wonderful knight-master?’
‘I have to be ready to go with him at any time,’ she explained, sitting on her bed. ‘My room’s next to his. I don’t even know how often I’ll be in the palace – he’s on the road all year.’
‘We’ll see each other during the Grand Progress,’ Neal pointed out. ‘Unless – maybe you won’t … I know you wanted Lady Alanna.’
Kel had to make this better. ‘Not see you, when you won’t eat vegetables if I don’t nag you?’ she demanded. ‘I’ll bet Lady Alanna—’ Her throat tightened. Dreams died so hard, and this one she had kept for most of her life. ‘I’ll bet she doesn’t care what she eats, let alone what her squire does. I should send Crown along to peck you as a reminder.’
Neal’s answering grin was shaky, but it grew stronger. ‘As if these feather dusters would be separated from you,’ he retorted.
‘I hope they can,’ Kel told him. ‘I doubt even Lord Raoul will welcome fifty-odd sparrows.’
Neal slung his legs over the arm of the chair. ‘I bet he and Lady Alanna planned this. They’re friends, and she did say you were looked after. And she has to know what people would say if she took you.’
‘That maybe I was right to look up to her all these years? That if anyone can teach me how to be a lady knight, it’s her?’ Kel asked bitterly. She wished she hadn’t spoken when she saw the hurt in his face. Most times I can keep silent, she thought, folding a tunic with hands that shook. But the one time I say the first thing in my mind, it’s to Neal. I should have said that to anyone but him.
His eyes were shadowed. ‘You are angry.’
Kel sighed and straightened to work a cramp from her back. ‘Not with you.’ Never with you, she thought, wishing yet again that he liked her as a girl as well as a friend. ‘To tell you the truth, I don’t know what I feel. First I was just about as low as I could be – Neal, I had a vision.’
He raised an eyebrow. ‘My dear Kel, I’d say Jump, your sparrows, even Peachblossom are likelier to have visions than you. I have never known anyone who had both feet nailed to the ground.’
She had to smile. He was right. ‘It didn’t come from me,’ she informed him. ‘I was in the Chapel of the Ordeal—’
‘Finally!’ he interrupted. ‘You took your own sweet time in going—’
It was Kel’s turn to interrupt. ‘Do you want to hear about my vision or not?’ She described what had happened when she touched the Chamber’s iron door. ‘And then I went to the tilting yard and Lord Raoul found me,’ she finished. ‘But Neal, it felt just as real as anything.’
He smiled crookedly. ‘Then here’s a word of advice – don’t touch the door again. That Chamber is a law to itself. No one knows how it works. It’s killed squires, Kel. Killed them, driven them mad—’
‘And left plenty to become knights,’ Kel pointed out before his imagination galloped away with him. ‘Like it will us.’ She refused to admit he’d raised goose bumps on her skin. I climbed down from Balor’s Needle, she thought, reminding herself of the day she’d finally lost her terror of heights. I can handle the Chamber of the Ordeal.
Remembering the realness of her vision, Kel shivered. She checked her hands to make sure there were no ink blotches on them, then picked up a shirt.
When Kel’s maid, Lalasa, returned from signing a lease for her dressmaker’s shop, she found Kel and Neal trying to fit Kel’s weapons-cleaning kit into a trunk that was nearly full. After shedding tears over the news – Lalasa was sentimental – she banished them, saying the palace staff would see to everything. There was nothing to do but go to lunch and share their tidings with their friends. They talked there until the second bell of the afternoon about where they all would go.
When Kel returned to her room, only her night-things remained. Everything else had gone to her new quarters, though she wasn’t to report for duty until noon the next day. ‘I like to sleep late when I can,’ Raoul had explained. ‘It’s not something I get to do often. Neither will you, so take my advice, and sleep in.’
Lalasa sat by the window, sewing basket open beside her, a wad of green cloth in her lap. A stack of neatly folded green clothes lay on a stool beside her.
‘I took the liberty of getting your new things from the quartermasters for the King’s Own, my lady,’ she said as Kel closed the door. ‘These are some of Lord Raoul’s spares – he gave word to use them – but grain sacks have a better fit.’ She clipped a thread and shook out the garment, a tunic in Goldenlake green bordered in yellow. Though Kel would ride with the Own, she served Raoul the knight, not the Knight Commander. ‘Try these, and the breeches,’ Lalasa ordered. She held out both. ‘I measured them against your clothes, but I want to double-check.’
Kel stripped off tunic and breeches and donned the new clothes. Something had changed her retiring Lalasa into this brisk young female. Kel suspected that Lalasa’s getting her shop and dress orders from Queen Thayet may have caused it. They had both changed since their long, frightening walk down the side of Balor’s Needle six weeks ago. Kel thought that Businesswoman Lalasa was a treat; she still wasn’t sure about Squire Keladry.
Lalasa gave the clothes a twitch and nodded. ‘Now these.’ Kel tried on two more sets of Goldenlake breeches and tunics while her maid pinned and straightened. Kel’s shirts, at least, would be the same white ones she’d worn as a page; it was one less piece of clothing to try on.
‘You’re not to take things to those sack stitchers at the palace tailors’,’ maid informed mistress. ‘They come straight to me, and not a penny will I take for the work.’ Her brown eyes filled with tears. ‘Oh, my lady,’ she said, her voice wobbling. ‘Out with all those men, and just a dog and some little birds and that dreadful horse to look after you.’
Kel had to chuckle. ‘The animals look after me just fine,’ she said, offering the older girl her handkerchief. ‘And surely you’ll be too busy to work on my clothes.’
‘Never,’ Lalasa said firmly, and blew her nose. ‘Never,