scott street

17: CHADDICK

Less than ten minutes into the tournament feast, Tedros looked heartily as if he regretted letting this be on his schedule. The hall was rammed with knights, pages and squires from every kingdom, all jostling, arguing, and posturing along the long tables in the Great Hall. Several people had gotten up to fight mini duels or drill with swords in preparation, and there was a cluster of arrows in one of the pillars, which no one Camelot-employed looked very impressed with.

Chaddick, sequestered on Tedros's right in-between a long line of princes, was beginning to understand why the Evers tried so hard to find suitors within their school year. Dubious the School Master's selection methods might have been, but it was hard to deny that the School for Good seemed to have actually ended up with... well, the Good. Once they'd all deigned to behave that way, anyway. Chaddick had no difficulty understanding why Peeta of Putsi, for instance, hadn't been admitted into Good, and had been reduced to attempting to bribe his way in. Reena's betrothed was a foppish lout with a square head, who spat on the flagstones frequently, shouted at servants, and had shoved aside a younger prince to be able to sit himself next to Tedros. Or his two idiot friends, Alfred and Edmund, who were noblemen's sons from Hamelin and Kingdom Kyrigos, who scratched their armpits, shouted at their friends, and wound up and harassed the dogs when Tedros wasn't looking–

"Hey, Gremlaine! Oy! Gremlaine!"

And they had all adopted an irritating fascination with Chaddick, just on the right side of decorous to have plausible deniability about how well-meant it might actually be.

Muttering to himself, Chaddick leaned down to look at Peeta, who was snapping his fingers at him.

"Yeah?" he said, resisting the urge to snap what? at the heir to the Putsi throne. Agatha probably would have done it, but Agatha had the eerie gift of getting away with that sort of thing.

"Tedros, here–" Peeta clapped Tedros quite hard on the back, ignoring how every one of the Camelot attendants was staring askance at him for touching the King, and referring to him by his given name, "Says you're a hell of a trickshot with a bow."

Chaddick shot Tedros the look that his mother used on misbehaving small children. Tedros looked sheepish. It wasn't hard to surmise what had happened; Tedros had heard his liege pick criticised, made fun of, or otherwise doubted, and instantly tried to defend Chaddick by bragging about him, despite the fact Chaddick had told him not to do that. They had strategized Chaddick's introduction to Camelot within an inch of its life, but of course Tedros would be the one to veer out of the plan they'd set. The idea had been for Chaddick to be unobtrusive until the tournament, to not make any particular impression on anyone, until he could make one on everyone. This was now likely not to be the case. Tedros's problem was that he could never keep his damn mouth shut. He was lucky as hell that Kings couldn't be proper knights, because Chaddick knew in his bones that upon his first solo quest, Tedros would have run his mouth to an ogre and gotten himself impaled. He just had to interject. No one ever taught real royalty when it was prudent to be quiet, which meant it often fell to whoever was sitting next to Tedros to pick a foot and stamp down hard, before he got most of the sentence out. Or preferably stop him opening his mouth at all.

"S'pose I might be," said Chaddick, deciding to at least try to remain unexceptional.

"And you did it at the..." Peeta smiled widely. "School talent show?"

So this was going to be how it was. Great.

"Yeah," said Chaddick stoutly.

"Fascinating," said Peeta. His fascination was not something Chaddick was eager to have. "And this bow of yours, do you have it with you?"