The morning dawns bright and cruel, the sky over Harrowgate scrubbed a hard, clean blue.

You haven’t slept. You’ve lain awake until the candles guttered, listening to the silence outside your door and knowing – knowing – he was there. Deep in the small hours you’ve heard the creak of leather as he shifted his weight, and you’ve pressed your palm flat to the mattress and haven’t moved, haven’t breathed, haven’t got up to open it. But you’ve thought about it. You’ve thought about it until your skin feels too tight and the sheets too hot, and the ache he left in you has curled tighter with every hour.

Now your maids fuss over you, lacing you into dove-grey silk, pinning your hair high. One of them clicks her tongue at the mark beneath your ear – small and plum-dark against your skin – and you tell her you must have caught it on a hairpin. She doesn’t believe you. She doesn’t argue, either. She simply teases down a curl to hide it, and the brush of her fingers there sends a shiver through you that has nothing to do with her.

“Your blue ribbon, my lady?” another asks, rummaging through your things. “I can’t find it anywhere.”

“Leave it,” you say, too quickly.

By midmorning the tournament field below the castle walls is a riot of colour – pavilions striped crimson and gold and green, pennants snapping in the wind, the air thick with horse and trampled grass and the smoke of roasting meat from the vendors’ stalls. Your father’s box sits at the centre of the stands, hung with Carrow banners, and you take your seat beside Violet beneath them.

She is radiant in rose, a ribbon of matching silk wound about her wrist, ready to be given. She squeezes your hand.

“Isn’t it wonderful?” she whispers. “Ser Tobias rides today.”

“Does he.”

“He’ll ask for my favour, I think.” A pretty flush climbs her cheeks. “After what Father said last night.”

You look out at the field so you don’t have to look at her.

One by one the knights ride up to the rail of the box, helms beneath their arms, to beg their tokens. Violet smiles and blushes and turns them all away, her rose ribbon kept close. Some of them ask you, too – more than you expected – and to each you give the same answer: you have nothing to give. The words taste strange. Not a lie, exactly.

Then Lord Fairleigh. He comes on foot, a bruise darkening along one cheekbone, his smile careful at the edges.

“My lady.” He bows. “I would be honoured to carry your favour today.”

“I have none to give, my lord.”

His eyes flick past you – over his shoulder, to the far end of the lists, where a knight in plain, unadorned steel sits his horse and does not move. Fairleigh’s throat works.

“Of course,” he says. “Forgive me.” And he goes, a little too quickly, a little too pale.

Ser Tobias is the last to approach. He doesn’t dismount. He doesn’t stop. He only inclines his head to your father as he passes – and Violet half rises, her ribbon already slipping from her wrist – and then he rides on, and you see it.

Pale blue silk, knotted around his left arm above the steel.

A murmur ripples through the stands. Violet sinks slowly back into her seat, the rose ribbon crumpled in her fist.

“Whose favour is that?” she whispers.

Behind you, your maids have gone very quiet. Your father frowns at the field. And beneath your sleeve, the inside of your wrist throbs where his mouth was, as if he has only just lifted it away.

The jousting begins. Ser Tobias rides as though the lists were made for him – brutal and precise, unseating knight after knight with an ease that draws roars from the crowd. Every time his lance strikes home, the crack of it echoes off the castle walls, and every time, you feel it. Not in your ears. Lower. A jolt through the base of your spine, a pulse between your thighs, as if each blow lands somewhere inside you. You grip the arms of your chair and keep your face very still.

By late afternoon, the shadows of the pavilions stretch long across the churned field, and the herald calls the final pass of the day.

Ser Tobias of Harrowgate. Lord Fairleigh.

Fairleigh’s hands are not steady as his squire fastens his helm. You can see it from here.

The first pass is clean – both lances glancing, both men keeping their seats. On the second, Fairleigh’s lance shatters against Tobias’s shield in a burst of splinters, and the crowd cheers, and Tobias barely sways. He wheels his horse at the end of the lists and sits there a moment, perfectly still, the blue ribbon stirring in the wind.

Then the third pass.

The horses thunder together. Tobias’s lance comes in high – too high, at the join of helm and gorget, the kind of strike any master-at-arms would call poor aim – and it does not shatter as a lance should. There is a crack, short and wet and wrong. Fairleigh’s head snaps back. His body follows, slow as a dream, sliding from the saddle to land in the dirt with a sound you will hear for the rest of your life.

He doesn’t get up.

For one heartbeat, the field is silent. Then the screaming starts.

Violet’s hands fly to her mouth. Your father is on his feet, shouting for the physicians, and men are running from every direction, and somewhere a horse is shrieking. The marshal of the lists snatches up the broken lance and turns it over in his hands, and you watch his face change – and then settle.

“The coronel,” he calls up to the box, holding up the splintered tip. “Cracked clean through, Your Grace. It sheared on the strike.” He shakes his head, grim. “A terrible accident. It happens. God rest him.”

An accident. The word moves through the stands like a prayer, and you watch every face in Brennholt accept it.

Ser Tobias has dismounted. He stands over Fairleigh’s body with his helm beneath his arm, head bowed, the very picture of a knight grieving a fallen opponent. The sun catches his hair. The wind lifts the ribbon on his arm, and now there are dark flecks across the pale blue silk that were not there this morning.

Then he lifts his head and looks at your box. At you.

He did this for you.

You should stand. You should speak. You should tell your father about a moonlit gallery and a man’s quiet voice saying nothing he didn’t deserve – yet. Tell him the captain of his guard made a threat and kept it, in front of half the realm.

Your mouth stays closed.

And beneath the horror – beneath the cold sweat at your nape and the sick lurch of your stomach – something else uncurls. Something hot and shameful and alive. He said he would not have a trace of Fairleigh on you. He said it with his mouth on your wrist. And now there is nothing left of Fairleigh at all.

Your silence is the first thing you have ever given him freely. He knows it. You can see that he knows it, even from here.

The tournament must be closed. It is tradition, and your father is a man of tradition, even grey-faced and shaking. So the herald calls the champion forward, and Ser Tobias mounts once more, and a page runs out with a crown of white roses for the Queen of Love and Beauty, to be chosen by the champion’s hand.

Violet straightens. She dabs her eyes and smooths her skirts and lifts her chin, because everyone knows who he will choose. Your father said as much last night, in front of the whole hall.

Tobias rides to the box at a slow walk. He takes the crown on the tip of his lance. He lowers it, carefully, over the rail.

The white roses land in your lap.

The gasp that goes through the stands is louder than any scream. Violet makes a small sound beside you, as if she has been struck. Your father’s hand closes on the rail until his knuckles go white.

Tobias doesn’t look at any of them. He sits his horse below you, close enough that you can see the sweat darkening his hair and the blood on his ribbon and the terrible, patient hunger in his eyes.

“My lady,” he says. Nothing more.

The roses are cool and heavy in your hands. Their scent is very sweet. Every eye in Brennholt is on you, waiting for you to refuse – to hand the crown to your sister, to make this right.

You lift the roses from your lap, and you set them on your head.