“I like looking at you,” Isobelle replied. Sometimes, honesty really was the best policy. Gwen had a charming, unique style of loveliness that was all her own. “Did you want to try that cocktail, Sir Knight?”

Absently, Gwen lifted the glass for a sip. Then she blinked, a tiny flush of pleasure rising behind her freckles, and she took another, longer sip. “It’s all right,” she muttered, as if her delight at the frivolous drink weren’t adorably plain to read on her face.

She was quiet after that, her eyes distant. Longing and fear warred in her expression, the battle as easy to see as her pleasure had been.

“I think,” said Isobelle with great care, “that it must have been an enormous amount of work for you. Making the armor. Learning how to make the armor in the first place! Teaching yourself to joust—making the lances, finding the time.”

A grudging nod from Gwen conceded that all this was true.

“And I think,” Isobelle continued, treading even more cautiously now, “there’s only one reason someone would do all that.”

“And what do you suppose that reason is, my lady?” Gwen asked as she took another heartfelt sip from the cocktail.

“I think she must truly want to be a knight,” Isobelle said simply. “I think, unlike most of the oafs wandering around the castle right now, she must have found something noble in the idea.”

Gwen was silent, but her expression was eloquent—the yearning was there in her eyes, and the hubbub of the tavern seemed to fade away into nothingness around them, everything falling quiet, the dancers and drinkers blurring at the edge of Isobelle’s vision.

“I think,” Isobelle said, her eyes intent on the girl across from her, “it would be a great loss indeed if she were to give it up.”

For a time they were quiet, and Isobelle waited. Her heart was fluttering so strangely, beating against the inside of her ribs like a bird against the bars of a cage. She didn’t want Gwen to agree just because Isobelle couldn’t think of any other way to escape her fate. She wanted the world to be bigger than that.

“None of them were what I expected at all,” Gwen said, so softly Isobelle had to lean toward her to make out the words. “The other knights.”

“You could be,” she countered. “You could be what they aren’t. Someone should.”

“I’ll need to be up at the castle to train,” Gwen said, and Isobelle bit her lip against her smile. “But I can’t be Sir Gawain all the time, I’d never pass as a man without my armor on. I’ll have to stay somewhere as myself.”

“You can stay with me,” said Isobelle brightly, somewhat surprising herself. “I have a spare room.”