Page 135 of The Champion

The hair on the back of her neck rose. Rowena turned her head, expecting to find Stryder staring at her.

He wasn’t. Damien sat below on the back of his large, white destrier. Both of them were covered in golden mail armor. She couldn’t see Damien’s eyes or his face, but she could feel his cold gaze on her body.

She quickly averted her eyes.

It seemed she waited for an eternity before Stryder finally rode.

He unhorsed his first challenger with no effort at all. A cheer went up through the crowd.

Reaching the end of this list, he turned his black horse about. It reared, pawing at the air while Stryder dropped the broken lance.

He righted his horse and inclined his head to her.

Rowena bit her lip, thrilled, even though she shouldn’t be. Before she could stop herself, she blew a kiss at her champion.

“What is it you do?” her uncle asked.

“Nothing.” She looked down and plucked at her sleeve.

“Did you just...” He looked at Stryder then back at her. “Did you just blow a kiss at the Earl of Blackmoor?”

“You’re seeing things, uncle.”

“Aye, she did,” Bridget said from beside her. “She loves the earl, milord.”

Rowena scowled at her friend.

“Is this true?” he asked her.

There was no need in denying it. “Aye, uncle, ‘twould seem so.”

His face turned deadly earnest. “Then, I pray for your sake, Rowena, that he doesn’t lose.”

“He won’t,” she said with conviction. He had to win this. More than just her future depended on his success.

Once the matches were finished and the nobles had gone to sup, Stryder had expected Rowena to come to his tent that night. He’d made all the preparations, including sending Alexander to sleep with Raven.

But she never showed, and when he went to the hall to ask after her, he was met by her friend Joanna who told him Rowena was ill that night and unable to attend the festivities.

When he tried to go to her room to check on her, her uncle kept him away.

“We can’t have anyone think we are favoring any one knight over any other, now can we?”

Angry over the truth, Stryder made his way back to his tent where he spent a lonely night dreaming of a woman dressed as a goose making love to him.

By the time he took the field in the morning, he was exhausted.

As before, Rowena was in the stands, dressed in another goose gown. But she looked rather pale this day.

Concerned, he again tried to see her and was denied access to her by her uncle and the king.

So, he sent Alexander to her instead. His son rushed through the crowd, dodging bodies until he made his way through the stands to Rowena’s side.

His heart pounded with pride as she took the boy and sat him in her lap so that he could watch the matches. She still looked wan, but there was a little more color in her cheeks now that she was chatting with Alexander and pointing things out to him.

A few minutes later, when it was Stryder’s turn to joust, Raven grabbed his reins and held him in place when he would have ridden out to meet his opponent.

“What are you doing?”