Page 85 of Bridget & Gabe Are Not Okay

“Why doyouthink we have guards here, if you’re going to act like we’re entirely unprotected regardless? Come on, I want to talk to you.”

Bridget glanced at Gwen again, and then followed him reluctantly from the hall and into a side chamber, which contained a table, chairs, some sauce-soaked trenchers, and three mostly demolished pies.

“Did Gwen put you up to this?” Bridget asked warily. Bowen ignored her.

“Do you know why horses sleep standing up?” he said, sitting down at the table, picking up a knife, and probing hopefully at one of the pies.

Wrong-footed, Bridget frowned and sat down too. “Do I…What?”

“Horses. Not always of course, but sometimes.”

“I don’t see what that has to do with—”

“Well, I’ll tell you,” said Bowen, finding a soft cut of meat and spearing it happily. “Because they’re prey animals. They’re conditioned from years and years of running away to be ready to flee at a moment’s notice. So they can doze off standing, but then if a bear or a pack of wolves comes along, away they go.”

“Is this a metaphor?” Bridget asked miserably. “I don’t like metaphors.”

“No, I’m being very literal. They’re flighty because they have to be. Danger is around every corner. And I think after you’ve been at war, you feel the same way. It’s such a big, terrible thing that it gets woven into your system, and it’s hard to get rid of it. We called it battle nerves, or soldier’s heart. Makes you tired, frightened; sometimes you feel like you’re back there on the field. After that, you’re always sleeping standing up.”

Bridget looked down at her hands, because looking at Bowen right now would have been excruciating.

“But you’re not like that,” she said. “Are you?”

“No,” said Bowen, “because some people are, and some people aren’t, and it seems almost… random. I’ve seen an enormous warrior turn pale and weep at the sight of a paper cut, and I’ve seen boys scarcely old enough to spit escape unscathed. It’s not about weakness, it’s not about failure.”

“And how do you fix it?” Bridget said, impatient to getto the happy ending where the problem was solved and she never had to think about it again. “How do I go back to how I was before?”

Bowen put down his knife. “You know you wouldn’t be that person anymore anyway, Bridget. There’s not… some good, perfect version of you that existed before, and some broken version now, all because of that one battle.”

“I would be that person,” Bridget said, frustrated. “Or at least I would be… better.”

“Maybe,” said Bowen. “Maybe not. Different, perhaps. Better? Impossible to say.”

“This isn’t helping,” Bridget said, getting up, embarrassed by how loud her voice was. “Just tell me what they do next? The soldiers who came back wrong.”

Bowen was looking at her very kindly, which was of course awful. “If they’re unlucky, and most of them are, they can’t quit. They turn mercenary, or end up at war again, and sometimes it breaks them completely. If they’re lucky… they retire. Heal. Talk about what happened to them. Put down their swords, find another way to make ends meet.”

“That’s bullshit,” Bridget snapped. “They justgive up?”

“Bridget—”

“Sorry, Bowen, but no.”

“I’m not saying you have to be someone completely different, I’m just trying to—”

“No.”

She couldn’t stand to be in this room anymore, listening to Bowen articulate her worst fears. She stormed out and found herself in the Great Hall, where the noise and smells and sounds of merriment were too much to handle. There was a door to her left and she took it, discovered a staircase, and followed it up six floors, seven floors, eight, until there wasnowhere else to go but outside, onto the battlements of the northwest tower.

It was freezing; the wind blowing in off the sea felt like the flat scrape of a knife, but at least it was so painful and urgent that it mirrored her anger.Retire.She wasn’t going to retire. Ever. Or at least, not for twenty years. Forty. She’d worked her whole life for this, and it was only just beginning. She was nineteen years old. So many years ahead of her, and they were going to be dedicated to one sole purpose. Her calling.

Retire. Ha.I’d be better off dead.

“Bridget?” Damn it. Gwen had followed her.

Bridget’s eyes flew to the doorway behind her, the door gaping open. This was a dead end, with only one exit that wasn’t an eighty-foot drop onto hard, unforgiving rock. Stupid place for a princess in a foreign land to be, unguarded.

“Go back inside,” Bridget called over, trying to hide the tremble in her voice.