Unlike the seating that Isabell had prepared for the common folk, the nobility had been arranged into individual seating areas with walls on three sides and a sloped, straw roof overhead. A warm fire burned in each seating area, and plush carpets had been spread on the ground while servants moved between boxes bearing skins of mulled wine and hot cider or trays of steaming sweet and savory hand pies fresh from the ovens of a small, stone building nearby.
It was an arrangement that would have been familiar to any summer tournament with only minor changes to accommodate fires for warmth and thin walls on the framing that supported the roofs. In the summer, no one wanted to block out a cooling wind while they took their ease in the shade, but now, that same cooling wind had become an enemy that had to be resisted.
