Chapter 40 – Surprisingly Good

The College of Heralds took its sweet time announcing the results of the first trial.

The heralds stepped up to the scoreboards, compared their notes, compared them a second time, whispered, nodded, shook their heads, and compared them once more. Shaelith waited impatiently.

Given how long they always take for everything they do, you’d think humans lived significantly longer.

Grimbart stood beside her with his arms crossed and was already snorting contemptuously again as he watched the heralds at work. Shaelith couldn’t blame him. He had immediately taken the unbalanced arrow to Tancred and explained to him and the heralds what his well-calibrated Chronosteel fingers had detected, demonstrating just how poorly balanced it was. The gentlemen of the College had politely turned the shaft back and forth, exchanged meaningful glances, and finally declared that, try as they might, they could find no irregularity.

The embarrassed Tancred had then taken Grimbart aside and told him that such an insinuation without concrete evidence would leave a very bad impression on his colleagues.

Grimbart had kept the arrow anyway. You never knew.

Finally, the senior herald stepped forward, unrolled a scroll, and announced in a resonant, solemn voice that Prince Gwilet had clearly outperformed Benderast Stonefist in the direct comparison of the two opponents, and that the point for the Hunt therefore went to him.

“So, it’s one-zero for him,” Benderast noted, rubbing the back of his neck. “But well, I didn’t expect anything else.”

Gwilet stood over there under the red canopy with his father, accepting congratulations. “Thank you, thank you, Father, Your Majesty, Your Most Eminent Highness, I thank you for your congratulations.” He smiled at the onlookers with a smooth, condescending smile. “To you as well, my friends, thank you. Your support is a blessing, truly. And of course, I dedicate this victory to chivalric virtue! Forge Father is with the sincere!” 

“What a complete scumbag he is.” Benderast shuddered.

Honor puffed himself up. “HEAR! HEAR!”

“I guess it’s a kind of poetic justice that his cheating didn’t get him anywhere,” Grimbart remarked.

“Speaking of poetry,” Shaelith nudged Benderast, “we need to get you ready for the Trial of Courtesy.”

~

Obelaine had advised them not to spend too much time on Courtesy, since there was nothing to be gained there anyway, and Shaelith planned to take that advice to heart and prepare him just enough so that he wouldn’t completely embarrass himself.

“So, one more time,” she said to Benderast. “How do you address the three Triarchs collectively?”

He hesitated. “Wait… hey, that’s a trick question! You don’t address them collectively!”

“Good, you’re making progress. King Gelsevier?”

“Your Majesty!”

“Correct. King Gerarde?”

“Also Your Majesty.”

“Correct. Grand Master Rambaud?”

“Your Most Imminent Highness.”

Shaelith had to stifle a laugh. “Not quite. Try again?”

“Why can’t he just be ‘Your Majesty’ too?” Benderast sighed.

“I don’t make the rules.” Shaelith shrugged. “‘Eminent’ would have been correct, not ‘imminent.’ How do you address a duke?”

“I forgot.”

“Your Grace. And how do you address Princess Obelaine?” 

Benderast blushed slightly. “Your Highness.”

“Correct.” She raised an eyebrow. “Very good.”

“Um, thanks.” He cleared his throat.

I think we should talk about that sooner or later. But not right now.

“Good enough. Regarding the poetry-” Shaelith began.

“POETRY,” Honor thundered enthusiastically. “Ha! I am WELL-VERSED in poetry! Know that scarcely a greater connoisseur of noble verse waves in the Triarchy than I!”

“Honor,” Shaelith began carefully, “I really don’t think that-“

“Listen and learn!” The silk banner tightened as if drawing in a big breath. “O MIGHTY griff, o lion’s roar, / your glory soars through myth and lore, / but woe is him who is a coward, / his banner’s humor will be soured!”

“It rhymes,” Grimbart admitted from the sidelines.

“But that’s about it,” Thaelon mumbled.

“Um, yes, very… powerful, Honor,” said Shaelith. “But I’m afraid the College of Heralds might prefer forms of poetry that are a little less heroic and a little more courtly.”

She pressed the slim, leather-bound booklet that Obelaine had given her into Benderast’s hand.

“Just pick the poem you like best and memorize it. Obelaine said it’s enough for you to recite one flawlessly so you don’t embarrass yourself.” She held his gaze. “But take good care of it, because the book is very dear to the princess. If you crease even one page, I’ll make mushrooms grow out of your ears.”

Benderast seemed to take the threat more seriously than she intended, for he leafed through it as carefully as if he were holding a newborn chick in his giant hands.

Then he looked up and grinned mischievously. “Can I just use a poem by Honor instead?”

“No.”

~

For their dance lesson, they had found a quiet, reasonably level spot away from the tents, and Shaelith had found a gleeman who, for a few coins, was willing to strum a few of those boring courtly tunes.

She stood in front of Benderast, raised her arms to the starting position, and waited.

Benderast, on the other hand, was already overwhelmed by it all and seemed to have some sort of mental short circuit. He raised his hands, lowered them again, moved them toward her waist, pulled them back as if he’d burned himself, and finally held them in a peculiar, hovering position just beside her body, without touching her.

This is off to a great start.

“You have to touch me,” Shaelith said. “It won’t work any other way.”

“Yeah. Yeah, sure.” He placed a hand on her waist with the utmost care and immediately pulled it back. “Is that… is that too high? Or too low? I don’t want to-“

“It’s just right.”

“But you’ll tell me if I-“

“Benderast, you’re overthinking it.”

“I just don’t want you to think I-“

“I won’t.”

Very slowly and haltingly, he performed the steps Shaelith had shown him, and the movements were so out of rhythm that you could hardly call it dancing.

He was so preoccupied with not touching her the wrong way that he couldn’t lead her at all. It didn’t help that he was staring at his own feet the whole time. It also didn’t help that he still stepped on hers several times anyway.

“Ouch.”

“I’m sorry! I’m really sorry, I-“

“Just keep going, focus on the steps, and try to find a rhythm.”

“You need to be more confident!” Grimbart exclaimed. “You’re moving like a mountain goat on ice!”

“Maybe,” Mirrsoss suggested, chewing on some flowers, “it would be easier if you imagined that the two of you were water and your steps flowed into one another.”

“But he’s not water, Mirrsoss,” Thaelon said as Benderast stepped on Shaelith’s foot again. “He’s more like a sack of rocks.”

After what felt like the hundredth misstep, Shaelith lost her patience and pulled Benderast aside for a moment while the gleeman took a short break.

“Shaelith, I’m sorry, I’m not doing this on-“

“Listen to me.” She stopped. “If you’re so stiff and nervous all the time and keep staring at your feet, it’ll never work.” She exhaled deeply. “Just forget about your hands, okay? For the duration of these dance lessons, don’t worry at all about whether or where you’re touching me. You have to touch me to lead me. That’s the whole point of the exercise.”

He blushed slightly and could barely bring himself to look her in the eye. “I’m just afraid I’ll slip or something, and I don’t want you to think I’m taking advantage of the dance lessons to… um, that I’m taking advantage of it.”

She raised her eyebrows. “Well, is it your plan to take advantage of the dance lessons to cop a feel?”

“What?” He looked up, indignant. “No! I just said-“

“Then everything’s fine,” she interrupted him. “Stop worrying about it.”

“But I mean, by accident! What if-“

“Benderast, I’m not going to rip your head off over an accident. You’re making way too big a deal out of this. It seemed to me like you’d learned to take a ‘no.’ Now learn to take a ‘yes.'”

Benderast looked at her for a moment and then nodded. “Okay, I… okay.”

They walked back and lined up facing each other. Shaelith nodded to the gleeman, who began to play again, and Benderast took a deep breath.

Shaelith looked up at him and raised her eyebrows, and then Benderast placed his hand on her waist, this time firmly and naturally. He clasped her hand with his other hand, and on the next beat, he began to move. 

Instead of watching his feet, he looked at her in concentration, and suddenly he really did something like leading. Their feet only were a little out of sync now, and gradually it turned into a real dance.

And before she knew it, he had even spun her through a proper figure with just a little too much momentum.

What the-

The idealized, well-toned athlete’s physique of the body that the Story Engine had built for him and that Ben Blomquist had probably always dreamed of, took over the moment he forgot his awkward self-consciousness.

And then the closeness that had paralyzed him just a moment ago was suddenly no longer a problem, and the stumbling moose from a moment ago gave way to an almost graceful dancer who only hesitated briefly now and then.

“Look at that,” said Grimbart with a laugh.

“It must have been a truly fiery speech,” Honor declared, “with which the lady roused the courage of my bearer.”

Mirrsoss’s antennae twitched merrily, and she nudged Thaelon in the side with her elbow. “Now they’re water,” she whispered.

Shaelith let Benderast lead her through another spin before nodding to the gleeman.

“Not bad,” she said, a little out of breath as the melody ended, and took a step back. “Really not bad.”

Benderast beamed as if he’d just slain a dragon. “While we were dancing, the [Dancing] skill unlocked, and I think I can train it now, and also… um, yeah. Nevermind. So, my Dexterity isn’t the very highest, but it’s not hopeless!”

“Then let’s keep going.”

“Gleeman, keep playing!” And before she knew it, he had caught her by the waist and swept her into a dance again.

~

After another day of learning to dance, Benderast was now surprisingly good, and it was fair to say that dancing would likely be his strongest suit among the courtly disciplines he’d be tested in.

“I didn’t see that coming,” Shaelith thought, her heart pounding from surprise, as he unexpectedly swept her into a particularly daring spin.

He still stumbled over his words during the addresses, though, and even though he was trying hard, he couldn’t get past a stilted recitation of a poem. There was no way he’d achieve, in just a few days, that polished ease with which someone born at court would elegantly maneuver through these social situations.

Obelaine is right. There’s practically no version of this story in which Benderast wins the Courtesy Trial against Gwilet. Although he’s gotten pretty good at dancing by now, not gonna lie.

“The dance lessons are over,” she said, stepping back from him.

Benderast, who had just been dancing with such verve and joy, looked genuinely disappointed. “Already? But I’m just starting to get better at this.”

“You’re good enough not to embarrass yourself on the dance floor, and that’s all we can hope for, at least not in the time we have left.” She nodded toward Grimbart. “You’d be better off using these days to go over all the tenets of the Faith with him for the Faith Trial. Obelaine said that faith isn’t exactly Gwilet’s strong suit. There’s something to be gained there. Not with dancing.”

Grimbart slammed the fist of his Chronosteel arm into his open hand. “I’ll teach you what a Forge Ring is and why those weird paladins with their vows of chastity are a bunch of-“

“Remember, they’re testing the version these weird paladins believe in, Grimbart,” Shaelith interrupted. “Make sure your theological disagreements don’t get in the way of the preparation.”

“That,” Grimbart grumbled, “is going to be tough.”

Shaelith gave him a stern look.

He sighed. “But I’ll do my best. Come with me, Benderast. They have a Forge here, even if it’s not a real one.”

Benderast sighed, gazed at their little outdoor dance floor for another moment, as if he already missed it, grabbed the pole with Honor, and followed Grimbart.

“And now that that’s taken care of,” said Shaelith, turning to Mirrsoss and Thaelon, “the three of us will figure out what we can do if Gwilet tries to cheat again.”