THE JOUST BEGAN WITH TRUMPETED fanfare, scripted taunts, and genuinely impressive feats of fancy horsemanship. Mounted knights galloped back and forth in front of the queen’s pavilion. They speared apples and rings held up by squires. Her Majesty sat in finery and politely applauded. She waved at Jasper. Jasper waved back. Hi Mom. Then he juggled a set of five rings for Sir Dad’s fancy, climactic feat before the real jousting began.
Sir Morien took his place at the far end of the field. He rode Fiore, a seventeen-hand gray Percheron and his favorite. They would come galloping down and spear all five rings in a single pass—provided that Jasper tossed them up into a single line. This was a new trick, one that they had never performed in public before, but they had it down cold in rehearsal.
Jasper slipped and almost dropped a ring.
It mattered that Rosa was here, in the audience, watching. Weird. This was an unfamiliar sort of feeling. Jasper never thought of himself as theatrical. He didn’t like spotlights or standing onstage. He didn’t like school presentations at the front of the classroom. He didn’t enjoy bluster or posturing. He didn’t like to put on a show. That was Sir Dad’s thing. Jasper was backup. The assistant. The assist. Don’t look at me. Watch my father in all his glory while he thunders across the field.
But he still wanted Rosa to notice how well he juggled. And he also didn’t, because juggling rings seemed suddenly trivial. Rosa had a much more interesting set of skills. Jasper didn’t know how to handle moving statues and bodiless bird wings.
Focus, he thought. Right now the only thing you need to know how to do is juggle.
Sir Morien spurred his steed into a gallop. He stood up in the stirrups and steadied himself.
A strong wind came galloping down from the mountains in that same moment.
Rosa felt the temperature suddenly drop. She also felt her sense of time fracture and fragment into isolated moments. Clouds darkened the sky and peered down as if interested in the outcome of the tournament.
She knew what sorts of things could make time stutter alongside sudden gusts of cold air.
Something big, she thought. That squiggly circle we drew isn’t going to help. I should have—
A broken tree burst through the fairgrounds and knocked over half the pavilion before Rosa could finish the thought.
The tree had flipped itself upside-down. It ran on thick branches that pretended to be legs. Leaves covered the lower half like a long, green gown. Inside that gown the branches snapped and broke, unjointed, unable to bend but bending anyway. Shattered wood scraped against itself as it splintered into knees.
You remember a time when you had knees, Rosa noted, but you’ve put on new clothes that don’t fit.
Mud-soaked roots reached up to the sky, and in their center roared the head of a mountain lion. Light burned red inside its gaping mouth.
Oh, Rosa thought. That’s where the head ended up.
The haunted thing screamed through its stolen head. The crowd scattered, but not very quickly. Crowds do not move fast.
Royal spectators scrambled away from the ruined pavilion, Jasper’s mother among them. She seemed to be limping.
Sir Dad and another knight—Sir Agravain, who owned the local hardware store—tried to hold their ground against the angry tree. But Agravain had never won a joust. He usually tumbled off his horse with excellent comedic timing. His slapstick horsemanship wasn’t up to this sort of challenge, so his steed decided to bolt in a sensible panic instead. Sir Agravain fell off and rolled aside—which was what he was best at doing anyway.
Sir Dad kept Fiore from panicking, probably by singing to her. His voice could convince horses to trot calmly through a burning barn.
He called out a challenge, still in character and also very much himself. He was trying to defend the realm, and to distract a dangerous thing before it trampled people beneath all of those branches that it used for legs. Sir Dad charged, raised his lance (the pointy kind, meant to spear apples and juggling rings, and not the blunt kind used for whacking against another knight’s shield), and stabbed the tree beast in the center of its trunk.
The lance broke. The haunted thing did not seem to notice or care. It ignored both knights as it lurched across the field.
Jasper didn’t have his quarterstaff readily at hand. But he did have five juggling rings, and realized that they might be more useful, so he tossed them into the tree beast’s charging path.
It stumbled and slowed to avoid stepping inside those small circles, but it did not stop.
The crowd scattered like a flock of startled pigeons. A tree with the head of a lion bore down on them, and they got out of the way.
Rosa did not get out of the way.
She dropped to a crouch, clicked the pocketknife open, and gouged a deep ring in the dirt around her. The knife blade broke just as she finished drawing her protective geometry. She tossed the hilt aside and stayed put, perfectly still, while the tree thundered in her direction.
It stopped outside the circle.
Wood creaked, shrieked, and shattered as it bent down. Roots writhed like grasping worms, but they all remained outside the boundary. The open mouth of the mountain lion shone its red lantern glow into Rosa’s face.
“Speak to me,” she said.
The lion’s mouth screamed.
Rosa winced. She looked down and away. A single strand of copper wire caught her attention. It lay embedded in the bark of a leg-branch. Scorched wood smoked around the metal.