The smith's stall was not hard to find. The clang of hammer on iron carried through the noise of the meadow clearly enough. His setup was larger than the other smiths' on the grounds, a broad canopy stretched over an open forge, with racks of pre-made pieces arranged along the sides. Helms, pauldrons, vambraces. Finn ducked under the canopy. Ciri followed.
The heat hit them immediately.
The smith was a squat, weathered man. He was working the bellows when they approached, and he didn't look up.
"Give me a moment."
They gave him a moment.
When the smith finally set the bellows aside and turned, he looked them over. His gaze passed from Finn's foreign coat to Ciri, taking in the sword on her back, then returned to Finn.
"Name's Pate. What do you need?"
"Armour," Finn said. "Pre-made. I'm buying it for my nephew. He's not here right now, but—" He nodded toward Ciri. "—she's about the same size as him. Same height, same build across the chest and shoulders— well, not the chest but you get what I mean. If the pieces fit her, they'll fit him."
Pate looked at Ciri. Then at Finn. The expression on his face didn't shift much, but something behind his eyes very much doubted that explanation.
"Right," he said.
He turned to the racks without further comment and began pulling pieces. He set a breastplate on the fitting stand and held it out.
Ciri took it. She pulled it over her head and settled it against her chest, checking the fit. The length was good. The shoulders ran slightly wide.
"Pad it," Pate said simply, already reaching for the next piece.
They went through it methodically. Gorget, pauldrons, vambraces, gauntlets. Ciri moved through each one efficiently, rolling her wrists, flexing her fingers inside the steel, checking the joints. Pate adjusted the lacing on one vambrace.
The helm came last. A closed helm, the visor locking at the chin. Ciri lowered it over her head and brought the visor down.
She turned her head slowly. Vision through the visor slot was narrow but workable.
She lifted it again.
"Well?" Finn said.
"It'll do," she said.
Finn turned back to Pate. "The full set. What do you want for it?"
Pate named his price. Finn paid without haggling. Pate watched this with the mild surprise of a man not used to it, then stacked the pieces without ceremony.
Ciri began handing them back one by one. Pate put the armor into a sack, to which Finn took it.
Finn nodded. "Appreciate it."
Pate grunted. His eyes drifted to Ciri once more, then back to Finn. "Hope your nephew fights well," he said.
They left the canopy and stepped back into the road of the market.
Ciri walked beside Finn in silence for a moment. Then: "He didn't believe you."
"No," Finn agreed pleasantly.
"You didn't even try very hard."
"It was convincing enough for him to sell me the armour," Finn said. "That's all it needed to be."
Ciri glanced at him sideways. Then she let it go.
"What's next?" she asked.
"A few more things," Finn said, giving the sack of armour to Ciri. "Go back to the tent. Keep the armour out of sight."
She took the sack from him without argument. It was heavier than it looked, but she managed it. She glanced once more at the crowd around them, then turned and made her way back through the lanes toward the edge of the grounds where they'd made camp.
Finn watched her go for a moment, then turned back into the market.
—
The first thing he found was a woman selling herbs from a low wooden cart. Bundles of dried thyme and rosemary hung from the cart's frame, alongside other things he recognised well enough. He bought a few bundles, paid in copper, and tucked them into his own bag.
When he was further into the market, he spotted what he'd actually come here for.
A craftsman's stall. The man sold decorative shields for tourney use, painted heraldry to order, the samples hanging along the front in bright colour. But beside the shields sat a modest row of supplies. Pigments in small clay pots. Brushes. And a few cheap pots of paint, already mixed and ready to use.
Finn picked up the white one and turned it over in his hand.
"How much?"
The painter named a price. Finn paid for it and slipped the closed pot into his bag. Then he turned his eyes to the shields hanging along the front of the stall. Plain ones, undecorated, sat stacked at the end of the display. The kind sold to knights who needed a fresh surface for a new heraldry.
"One of those as well," Finn said, nodding at them. "Plain. Unpainted."
The painter pulled one from the stack and handed it over. Finn checked the weight, knocked his knuckle against the face of it. Solid enough.
He paid, tucked the shield under his arm, and stepped back into the crowd.
He stood a moment, running through the list in his head. Armour. Herbs. Paint. Shield.
One more thing.
—
When Finn returned to the tent leading a grey rounsey by the rope, Ciri looked up from where she'd been sitting with the armour pieces laid out around her, and her expression shifted into a surprise.
"You bought a horse," she said.
"Naturally," Finn said, tying the lead to one of the tent stakes, away from prying eyes. "How else were you going to ride on the tourney?"
Ciri looked at the horse. Then at Finn. Then she smiled, and it was an honest one.
"Thank you," she said.
Finn waved it off and crouched beside his bag, pulling out the small pot of white paint and the plain shield, setting both on the ground beside the fire. He turned the shield over in his hands once, checking the surface, then set it face up across his knees.
"We still need two things," he said. "A moniker. And a sigil."
Ciri didn't hesitate. "The Knight of the Swallow."
Finn looked up at her, chuckling, as if already anticipating that answer.
"The swallow," she said again, more simply. "It's what they called me. Back home. As you know… It fits."
Finn held her gaze for a moment, then nodded once. He uncapped the paint and picked up the brush.
He worked slowly, bent over the shield with the firelight doing its best to lit up the surface. He started with the circle first, a thin incomplete ring that swept across the lower half of the shield. Then the bird inside it, wings thrown back, the tail feathers cutting downward in sharp narrow points. It was not a bird at rest. But a bird mid-dive. He flicked small dots of white around it where the brush lifted, specks that caught the light like scattered stars.
He sat back and looked at it.
He set it down to dry and looked at Ciri.
Ciri met his eyes.
"Something is going to happen here," Finn said. "Something that matters for this world. I've told you this. I don't know if joining in the jousts changes anything, I hope it doesn't. But I need you to be careful. Don't draw attention beyond what the joust already brings. Don't get involved in anything outside of the lists. Don't linger anywhere you don't need to be." He paused. "I don't want to change the course of things in this world. That's not why we're here."
Ciri looked at the drying paint on the shield. "Mm," she said.
Finn looked at her. "Ciri."
"I heard you," she said.
It was not the most reassuring response he had ever received. But she picked up the shield and turned it carefully in her hands, and he chose to let it rest for now.
—
The Master of Games kept his table near the centre of the grounds, beneath a canopy marked with the sigil of the tourney's host. He was a thin, efficient-looking man with ink-stained fingers and a ledger open in front of him, and he was speaking to a knight in half-armour when Finn and Ciri arrived.
They waited.
When the knight moved on, the Master of Games looked up. His gaze passed over Finn and settled on Ciri, fully armoured head to toe and the painted swallow visible on her shield.
"Name?" he said, pen already poised.
"The Knight of the Swallow," Ciri said, making her voice as heavy as possible.
The Master of Games wrote it down without blinking. He had seen stranger things than an unknown knight at a tourney. That was, in some ways, the whole tradition.
"House? Seat?"
"None declared," Finn said, from beside her, passing over a pouch to the table. "But you'll do well to assume my knight is a highborn."
The Master of Games glanced at the pouch, took it, and nodded.
"The first round of the joust for today is this afternoon, ser." the Master of Games said, already writing. "Be at the lists before the horn or forfeit your place."
"Understood," Ciri said.
They walked away from the table and back into the open meadow. Ciri looked straight ahead, but there was something in the set of her shoulders, a tension that wasn't quite nerves.
Finn glanced at her sideways. "How do you feel?"
She was quiet for a beat.
"It feels like I can have fun for a little while," she said, no doubt with a smile underneath that helmet. "Thank you again."
Finn said nothing to that.