Page 51 of Bridget & Gabe Are Not Okay

Arthur like an angel, bloodied and bruised and backlit by the weak sunlight, red-eyed and crying, leaning in to press his forehead to Gabriel’s—and Gabriel had known he could die now, if he needed to, because somebody he loved was here to send him on his way.

It had really hurt, not to die. All he could remember after that was the agony trumpeting inside his head, the very embarrassing amount of vomiting, the moment he discovered that his father was dead—that he was king—but eventhathad to play second fiddle to his arm.

“That sounds about… right,” he said to Florian. “But I didn’t kill anyone. And there’s no need to say that I did.”

“Okay,” said Florian, inking his nib and crossing something out.

“And I fell,” Gabriel added. “You can write that. Arthur found me. Saved me. I want that recorded. And of course, you’ll have the story of what happened next. From Bridget.”

Florian was bent over the page, writing rapidly. “I don’t actually. I asked Arthur, but I think he was sparing my feelings.”

His tone was casual, but Gabriel felt like a monstrous fool. Sometimes it was easy to forget that Lord Willard had been Florian’s father. They were absolutely nothing alike, and Gabriel was so accustomed to talking about the usurper among people who held him in common as an obvious enemy, he wasn’t used to being sensitive about the fact of his death.

Arthur had probably been better at handling it. In fact, he had been the only one there to witness both the king’s and Florian’s father’s deaths, their bodies striking the ground for the last time no more than fifty feet apart.

It was a strange sort of bond, linking them all together.

“I… I really am sorry, about your father,” Gabriel said. “I mean—obviously… it’s… he sort of had to, but—”

“Please,” Florian said, putting down his pen. “You don’t need to—”

“No, I know, it’s just… hard. Isn’t it.”

“Yes,” Florian said, his voice heavy with relief. “It is. My father was an incredibly difficult man to be around. I barely saw him in my teenage years, and when I did I knew I was an enormous disappointment to him. I knew him about as well as one might know a distant uncle, but he was still… my father. Part of me feels I should have tried harder to please him, or make peace. Lots of unsaid things. Lots of arguments I still have with him in my head. Horrible bastard. And yet.”

It felt suddenly very cruel of Gabriel to have brought him here, to try to coexist with people who couldn’t help but lookat him as the enemy, and to rub shoulders with his father’s killer. He had weathered it all so stoically, but Christ. Not much of a holiday.

“You can go home, if you want to,” he said. “Not that we don’t want you here, but… I would understand…”

“No, thank you. I’d like to stay. You are family after all.” He smiled wanly. “And I appreciate that you let me talk to you, without a guard. Sir Hurst has made it perfectly clear… I know I must be considered a security risk.”

He very much had been, and Gabriel was still in an ongoing argument with Sir Hurst about this very subject, but Gabriel said, “Ah—no, not at all.”

Florian opened his mouth like he was about to speak, then stopped himself and looked down at what he’d been writing. “So I just wanted to get down… today’s events. The Questing Beast, I wasn’t sure how we wanted to… frame it?”

“Whether we should lie, you mean,” said Gabriel.

“I suppose it’s a matter of perspective. Was the Beast real… was it the wildcat all along, or perhaps even the boar, or both…”

Florian had grown up in a cultist household, a household of believers, even if his father had twisted everything about Arthurian history to his own ends. “What do you think?”

“I think the cat was probably a cat, and the pig a pig,” said Florian. “Perhaps the Beast is still out there. Perhaps not. People make mistakes all the time. It doesn’t negate their entire belief system. It’s not quite that black and white.”

“Hmm,” said Gabriel. “I suppose you could say we fought a monstrous boar, because we did. And that we found another large black animal, slain. And let people decide for themselves.”

“Then that’s what I’ll do.”

They sat like that for a while longer, Florian prompting with questions and Gabriel answering as best he could, punctuated by the soothing scratch of quill on parchment, until Florian was finished. He said goodnight, and Gabriel waited until he’d been gone a while before slipping through the doorway, past the guards, to the tent that had been set up when they first made camp.

Inside, by the light of a small brazier, Bridget was asleep. Gwen was sitting next to her, leaning back against the cot, also dead to the world, with her neck at a very uncomfortable angle. On the bed opposite, Arthur had lost his blanket, his arms wrapped around himself as he slept, face smooth of lines except where the knotty white scar split his hairline.

Gabriel replaced the blanket, easing it over Arthur’s body and then backing away, struck by a kind of reckless horror that he had the audacity to touch him at all.

Twenty-Three

At dawn, Bridget found Gwen by her side. She shook the princess’s shoulder to half wake her, then guided her gently into the cot and left her there to sleep a while longer.

Bridget’s pain had lessened slightly in the night, each wave just enough now to make her breath catch for a moment before she exhaled through it and kept walking.