The fun parts of the tourney are over.

This is true even before the rumors and truths have reached Gwenaëlle; there are no more fights and demonstrations to watch, her private celebrations...thorough...and so she misses the prize-giving, sleeps through it wrapped in blankets and a borrowed shirt with teeth-marks in it and when those with obligations she doesn't share stir and rise she rolls into the warmth left behind, lets Hardie get into the blankets, and goes back to sleep a while longer. She's very proud of everyone, obviously, but what could possibly be so important she has to actually get up for it in the morning.

—and then her father comes.

“Felix is going home,” he's saying to her, he's been speaking, his hands are in her hair (tousled and tangled and there's a flower, incongruously, still there) trying to make some sense of her while she struggles with the knot to close her own robe as much as with what he's saying, jerking her face frustrated away from his fingers. “He's going to set everything in order for you, darling—if it's done, it's done, I'll make you a gift of it, it's all arranged—”

He holds her still with his hands on her shoulders and she says, “What the fuck are you talking about?” and he kisses her forehead, which is the point at which she gives into the impulse that's thrummed beneath her skin for all of this exchange and punches him in the stomach. It feels less satisfying than she'd imagined it would.

Emeric leans forward, heavily, catching himself against her shoulder and exhaling a breath. “Bless that woman,” he mutters, and he must mean Coupe, so—but this time he catches hold of her fist and holds it, firmly. As strong as she ever remembers him being. “Ma petit, I have a duty.”

“And you had rather run away to die than face it—”

He is fifty-eight. He is a wreck. He cannot go to the front.

His horse is already ready. The camp is being packed up around her. Hardie pushes his head beneath her hand, and Gwenaëlle is so angry she can't speak.

( at least everyone's been feeling warmer towards the inquisition? hit her up. )