"Good morning, Your Highness. I wouldn't know how the accommodations are, seeing as I have not been making use of them."

He sounds like he's smiling.

Oooo, he's having fun being a mystery, isn't he.

"No? Well, they are there for all knights and their retainers regardless, though I do worry - does your horse have any special needs that it might need attended, should the worst come to pass?"

It helps to be sincerely concerned for the horse's welfare when asking these questions. Because: she is! Is the horse going to be okay???

He pauses for a moment, then says, "She does not have any special needs, Your Highness, but I thank you for your concern for her welfare. It speaks very highly of you, that you care so keenly for all those below your station."

... Hm.

She has a hunch. She can't quite explain why she has that hunch (and perhaps she is seeing dragons in shadows), but... she nonetheless has a hunch.

"Why thank you, sir. I think it's important for everyone to care about the length and quality of the lives of those within their reach. Human lives are too short to do otherwise."

"They so, so often are," he says, and the smile audible in his voice has morphed into something that's almost laughter.

Ahuh.

Mysterious knight: is actually a dragon. She thinks.

"Indeed. Good fortune at the tournament today, sir," and do please keep your mystery from shortening any human lives today, goes unsaid.

And then, so as not to hold up the line, on she walks.

"Thank you, Your Highness."

The other ladies and knights don't seem to get anywhere near as much information out of their conversations with the mystery knight as Svetlina (believes she) did, and given how he didn't seem to even be trying to pretend what was happening was normal, there is now active speculation and gossip about who he could possibly be. It is tacitly understood that whoever wins against him will get to ask, and this is filling the knights with a kind of excitement not often present in these tourneys. They want to win for themselves, not for their houses or for other nobles' favour, and this changes the energy considerably.

But after the inspection of the crests (no ladies have accused any knights of anything, but then again, in an event this small with only the best, it would be surprising for anything untoward to really happen), the nobles are to retire inside to have their midday meal. The jousts will begin in the afternoon.

Aaaaand she will be attending it with her husband-to-be. Hooray.

She does have a little glimmer of - something like hope, but possibly just self-delusion, that she will not have to be around these people much longer. There is a very real chance she will get to be elsewhere, with a decent conversationalist and an interesting library and the somewhat bitter promise that she will matter to someone.

She eats, but only lightly, because - look, it'd be terribly embarrassing to lose her dinner in the air mid-abduction.

At least the tournament itself will be interesting to watch, with a (possible) literal dragon competing and getting all of the best knights in the kingdom to joust him personally.

And eventually they must return to the stands to watch. Since the king is personally hosting, the jousts will not begin until he says so, so all the knights stand in waiting.

In the direct sunlight. In full armor.

It doesn't really help, that she's not the only one suffering here.

He looks over them with a critical eye, letting the moment stretch on perhaps longer than necessary. One knight in particular gets a bit of a cold glare. It's not a mystery who that knight is, at least in this sense.

"Courageous knights and noble lords and ladies of Anhalt..." And his voice can get very loud indeed. "Let the joust begin!!!"

And the joust begins.

If this were a story, the mystery knight would have unparalleled skill, easily besting the best knights despite being a total unknown, driving them to frustration with curiosity. He'd ride down the lists with grace and poise, and manage to outright unseat many opponents.

He is not quite that skilled. He only unseats some opponents. A minority of them.

But one by one, he wins each of his matches.

The judges announce the knights that are to joust by their houses, and their scores after their passes. The mystery knight gets called 'Black Shield', which both lends him an air of legitimacy and increases the murmuring whenever he appears. People are invested now, hoping someone will unseat him, someone will win and reveal his face to the crowd. No one does, and his score creeps up and up. If someone were to unseat him, those scores would not matter, because then they'd know, but no one does, and he continues to win.

At some point the tide turns, and people start rooting for him. After he's won so much, it would be incredibly anticlimactic if he lost. The strongest matches are left for last, so there's still a chance, but everyone's now hoping that he will choose to reveal himself at the end, when he inevitably wins. Perhaps he will name a Queen of Love and Beauty and then show his face for her, though he hasn't claimed any lady's favour.

She does not change with the mood of the crowd, of course. She always wanted the knight of the black shield to win, from the first.

It is deeply entertaining, how his victories annoy her father.

The afternoon wears on. A match is six passes, with breaks for readjusting armour and resetting, so they take some five to ten minutes each. The hours pass, the points accumulate, the mystery knight is in the lead, but young Lord Barinov, widely recognised as the most skilled knight in the kingdom, the (as-yet-unmarried) firstborn son of Anhalt's second richest vassal, is tailing him. From a distance it looks like whenever they pass by each other they trade good-natured jabs, but who knows how good-natured they actually are. In any event, the judges leave their match for last, to stoke the crowd's excitement. And as the sun settles and the time of their match arrives, the two aren't so close in points that the mystery knight could realistically lose without being unseated in at least three of the six passes and not unseating his foe in any of the other three. 

But Lord Barinov really is very good, and if anyone can do it, it's him, even in the flagging hours after a whole afternoon in the sun.

See, Barinov would have been a solid match for her betrothal, and now he's running around being all talented at knighthood and single and rich and causing half the kingdom's ladies to engage in self destructive shadow wars that will potentially cause massive schisms between vassals as they fight over him. This would not happen if you hand the rich and talented knight a princess, everyone would agree that this is very just and fair and problems would be solved before they started. All vassals that wanted him would go, "Oh well, he got a princess, that's pretty fair, maybe next time." Now everything's spiraling subtly out of control, and there's a grand narrative about the unmarried lord potentially ~overcoming a mysterious force of nature.~ Who even knows where it could go, now! She certainly doesn't, because all of her ability to steer has been handicapped.

Her father dismissed her argument for him as her being too hot-blooded and young, won over by a comparatively younger man or some nonsense, but frankly the man is an asshole and a bully. If he had been nearly denounced at the lineup, Svetlina would have supported the lady, but absolutely no one wants to upset him and lose a chance at his hand. So nothing happened.

She certainly couldn't have been the one to do it; any condemnation she makes now that she's been so obviously insulted and dismissed by her father would be an obvious product of bitterness, not a legitimate grievance.

It's not about the man, it's about the match, and the implications it has for the overall crown and kingdom.

Anyway, putting aside all of those dark thoughts about how the entire country is going to burn down under her father's bullheaded rule, she does silently root for Sir Black Shield on the basis that: fuck this guy in particular, unseat the prick so he can maybe get over himself a little.

They stop at opposite edges of the lists, staring at each other from a distance.

They wait.

The judge says go.

A single pass takes less than three seconds. From a distance, it's always hard to see what happens. 

But three seconds later, Sir Black Shield is on his ass on the dirt.

There is a moment of stunned silence from the crowd. 

Then they erupt in cheers, joined by Lord Barinov.

Well, it's the most exciting possible result, which seems to be in Sir Actually A Dragon's favor. She's - not actually surprised, now that she thinks about it? The better the dramatic story, the more knights he gets to fight, and the Violet Dragon of the West has said that is his ultimate goal.

She's just... not sure which makes the better story? If Sir Actually A Dragon loses and then steals the princess in a fit of pique, or wins and claims her as his prize. Hm....

He does not seem to need resetting or adjustment (actually... did he at any point need any of it during the earlier matches? has anyone seen his squire? they're usually meant to be unobtrusive but...), and instead cheerfully grabs another lance and mounts.

He only needs to unseat Lord Barinov once for the points difference to be impossible to make up for...