Page 55 of Bridget & Gabe Are Not Okay

The only people who touched Gabriel regularly now, aside from animals, were Gwen and the physician. There had been a time when even that had felt almost like too much, but now it was as if there were something missing. He wished he’d never known that there was another way to live. He was always surrounded by people, forever ducking away just to steal a moment for himself, marched every day through corridors and into meeting rooms flanked by five, ten, twenty people, so why did he feel so… alone? Untouched?Starving?

Arthur and Leonard had almost matching hair today. Arthur’s was a short, dark, glossy braid, strands flying free where the hair had grown back choppy and uneven, Sir Leonard’s longer and neater, both of them adorned with gold silk ribbons.

Gabriel put them together in his mind like a child making two dolls kiss, wondering if it worked. Leonard was a decade older, pretty and proud, and seemed to have a slightly meaner streak than Arthur, whose jokes were almost all self-deprecating or gentle rebuffs. He also seemed half in love with himself, something Gabriel wouldn’t think Arthur could abide—but who knew, on that front? People changed. Grew.

Well, other people did. Gabriel stood still and watched them pass him by.

Besides, Sir Leonard was at least half involved with Sir Bowen, and Arthur tended to demand one’s full and undivided attention.

They were alike in lots of ways, though: the same strange and quick wit, their care over presentation, their propensity to talk and talk. Gabriel was sure they could pass time together quite entertainingly, when they weren’t bickering. Was that how courting was supposed to work? Was it enough?

Gwen and Bridget certainly seemed to be figuringsomethingout, but seeing as until very recently Gwen hadn’t been able to get so much as a letter back, she was hardly a font of good relationship advice. They were riding side by side again today, talking in low voices. Gwen shifted on her horse, and Bridget leaned casually across the gap to adjust something on Gwen’s saddle for her; Gwen briefly touched her arm with her fingers in thanks.

The hair stood up on Gabriel’s arm in just the same place. Phantom intimacy. Pathetic.

Sir Hurst, who had been riding so close behind Gabriel his horse was practically nipping Penelope’s rump, pulled up alongside. “We’re approaching the bridge, Your Majesty.”

“Right,” said Gabriel. “So what’s the… strategy, here?”

“The real Green Knight was an immortal of sorts. One ofyour knights will simply best this impostor, he will beg for mercy, making it clear that he fears for his own mortality, and the rumors will be put to rest.”

“What if he’s not to be bested?”

Sir Hurst huffed. “Unlikely, sire. You are riding with some of the finest knights in the kingdom.”

The bridge, when they spotted it, did not seem big enough to accommodate anyone living beneath it. It was barely curved enough to constitute an arch, and was falling down in at least five places. The land was wooded on both sides, although they had passed a few small dwellings on the way, the tentative beginnings of a town that came to fruition after you’d crossed this stream.

There was a small group of onlookers, mostly children, gathered by a rotted fence post that no longer belonged to any particular fence. The youngest seemed to be throwing rocks in the general direction of the bridge, but they stopped once somebody shouted, “Shit, it’s the bloody king!”

Gabriel never knew what people saw when they looked at him. Lord Best had told him once that he’d heard people referring to Gabriel asThe Red Prince, which seemed fair enough due to the fact of his gingerness, but later, when he’d asked Gwen about it, she’d told him, reluctantly, that it was spelledThe Read Prince, and it was actually meant to be an insult. Reading too much was weird. Reading too muchandbeing crap at speechesandannouncing a whole swathe of laws that people found baffling and infuriating was beyond the pale.

They dismounted, and Sir Hurst accompanied Gabriel to the bridge, so that Gabriel might give the impression of a mighty royal challenger while Sir Hurst’s sword stood at the ready between them. There was quite a steep drop-off to the river, and Gabriel leaned slightly over it.

“Er. Hello?”

Nothing. He looked at Sir Hurst, who shrugged. “Perhaps with a little more volume, Your Majesty.”

Gabriel tried again. “Hello, I’m… I’m in search of a man who calls himself the Green Knight. And… I’m also the king.”

Not great, and Gabriel definitely heard some snickering from behind him.

There was a long pause. He was about to tell Sir Hurst that perhaps the gentleman had ventured elsewhere for the day when a scruffy head of hair appeared from below, followed by a man’s face.

It was battle-worn and leathery, his nose perhaps once Roman but now broken into many distinct segments, his hair graying but streaked with something green. He had a high, wide forehead and thick brows; if Gabriel had needed to describe him in one word, he would have saidcraggy. He squinted up at them, then said, “’Scuse me one second.”

He disappeared. Sirs Leonard, Bowen, Florian, and Bridget came over to have a look too, hands hovering near their sword belts, and Gabriel just looked at them and said, “I don’t know.”

In short order the knight was back, this time wearing a dented and rusty helm. He hitched up his trousers, then put two large hands on the rocky outcrop by Sir Hurst’s feet so that he could haul himself up.

It was clear at once that there would be a problem. The man washuge. Gabriel was a respectable six feet, and this man was at least a head taller, and so broad he could have eaten three Gabriels and had ample room for pudding. His armor was old mail, and it too had rusted and taken on a strange greenish hue, like there was moss growing between the rings. As Gabriel watched, horrified, the man leaned back down and graspedsomething over the lip of the cut bank, and then heaved an immense axe into view.

“You’re the king,” he said to Gabriel, who could only hope he wasn’t visibly trembling. The man had a gruff voice, plain and practical.

“Yes.”

“And you’ve come to fight me,” he said, glancing behind Gabriel at the traveling party, “with thirty men.”

“Um… some of them are women.”