Dupont merely shook her head and handed Gwen the helmet. “Just enjoying what I see,” the woman said with a faint smile. “A girl who knows exactly who she is.”

Gwen’s shoulders relaxed—had she been anticipating Dupont would echo the same worries as Isobelle?—and she flashed her mentor a grin. “I’ll see you out there.”

The crowd was restless, the background din louder than usual as Gwen mounted Achilles and urged him toward the lists. She caught a glimpse of the stands, craning her neck—the entire place was packed, the crush of bodies so complete as to form an absolute wall of faces.

She gathered Achilles’s reins in one hand as the announcer stepped up—then halted as she heard the man shout, instead of her own name: “Sir Makarios of Rhodes!”

Gwen fought to catch her breath and not dwell upon the significance. They always introduced the favorite last.

“And now, the debutant from Toussaint, the knight who’s blown up overnight . . . Sir Gawain of . . .”

The crowd had begun to roar as the announcer began Gwen’s introduction, and now they were screaming so loud she couldn’t hear the rest of what the announcer was saying. Someone gestured at her, though, and she touched her heels to Achilles’s flanks, and he jolted forward.

The sheer volume of bodies and voices was like a physical force, and Gwen rode to her place in a daze—she could not quite focus on Isobelle’s box, but she saluted the ladies there with her sword, held on for dear life as Achilles reared picturesquely, enjoying the attention, and accepted the lance from one of the lance boys as she reached her spot.

The flag went down, and Achilles leapt into a run without Gwen even having to tell him to start. She lowered her lance, her first good glimpse of her opponent revealing an absolute mountain of metal thundering her way. Her grip slipped for a vital moment, and Gwen focused instead on twisting the way she’d learned from Dupont, and heard the tiny tinging scrape as the barest edge of Makarios’s lance sheared past her breastplate.

She wheeled Achilles around, catching her breath and shifting her grip on her lance. Makarios was easily twice her size, and he rode an absolute juggernaut of a warhorse. Gwen could simply try to dodge enough times to send the match to a sword fight, but she wasn’t sure how well she’d get away with that twisting maneuver a second time.

If she could knock him off balance, just the tiniest bit . . . his bulk would pull him right off his horse.

The flag went down a second time, and Achilles, snorting gleefully, burst into a run again. This time Gwen concentrated on the positioning of her lance, keeping it up a few inches, as if planning the same thing as last time.