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<nc-section data-title="Chapter 2: The Knight at the Stables (Version 1)" data-color="red"> The gates groaned open before me, and I guided Thunder through the archway into a courtyard smelling of hay, iron, and woodsmoke. A stable boy scurried to take my reins, but before I could dismount, a shadow fell across the cobblestones. He was a broad man, taller than my father had been, with a beard the color of old rust and a scar that split his left eyebrow into two halves. His mail was unpolished — not from neglect, I would learn, but from use. He rested one hand on the pommel of a sword that looked older than the castle itself. "You'll be Frederick," he said. It was not a question. "Yes, my lord. Frederick of Ashmere. I have letters—" "I don't read letters. I read hands." He caught my wrist before I understood what was happening and turned my palm upward, studying the calluses there as a merchant studies coin. "Plow work. Some rope. No blade." He released me. "Good. Blade calluses on a boy your age mean someone taught you wrong, and I'd have to break the habit before I could build anything." "You are Sir Roland," I said. "I am." He turned toward the stables and gestured with two fingers, the way a man calls a dog he expects to be obedient. "Bring your horse. Rub him down yourself. If you ever hand your mount to another man's care before your own hands have proved him sound, I'll send you home on foot." I hurried after him, my satchel banging against my hip. "Sir Roland — is it true what they say? About what sleeps beneath the north tower?" He stopped. For a long moment he did not turn around, and the courtyard seemed to hold its breath with me. "Rub down your horse, boy," he said quietly. "There'll be time enough for questions you shouldn't ask." </nc-section> <nc-section data-title="Chapter 2: The Knight at the Stables (Version 2)" data-color="green"> I found the stables by smell before I found them by sight — that good warm reek of horse and dung and dry grass that had always meant home to me, even here, three hundred miles from anything I knew. Thunder pulled toward the water trough, and I let him have it. That was when I heard the laughter. "He's got you well trained, that one." The man leaning in the stable doorway had a currying brush in his hand and straw in his hair, and I took him for a groom until I saw the spurs. He was perhaps forty, sun-browned, with the kind of easy face that made you want to tell it things. There was a jug at his feet and a grey mare behind him who kept nosing at his shoulder as though impatient for him to finish talking. "Sir?" I ventured. "Roland." He tossed the brush to me, and I caught it — barely. "And you're the squire they wrote about. Ashmere's second son. They said you'd arrive Thursday." "It is Thursday, sir." "Is it?" He considered this with real interest, then shrugged and reached for the jug. "Then you're punctual, which is more than can be said for me. Sit down, boy. No — see to the horse first, then sit down. In that order, always. Men who forget the order are the ones the songs are never written about." I did as he said. He watched me work without offering advice, which I have since come to understand was the greatest kindness he could have shown me that first evening. "They'll tell you I'm the best sword in the northern march," he said, when I finally sat on the overturned pail beside him. "That's true, and it's also nothing to be proud of. There used to be better. There used to be many better." He drank. Out past the walls, the last light was going out of the hills. "Do you know what happened to them, Frederick?" I shook my head. "Neither do I," he said. "That's the trouble." </nc-section> <nc-section data-title="Chapter 2: The Knight at the Stables (Version 3)" data-color="blue"> No one came to meet me. I had imagined it a hundred times on the road — trumpets, perhaps, or at the very least a steward with a list. Instead the courtyard was empty save for a cat, and the great hall's windows were dark, and I stood beside my horse feeling every inch the fool my brothers had promised I would be. So I walked Thunder to the stables myself, and there, in the third stall, I found a knight kneeling in the straw with his gauntlets off, doing something I did not at first understand. He was praying. Not to any god I recognized — there was no shrine, no icon, nothing but a horse lying on its side with its ribs shuddering, and the knight's bare hands pressed flat against its neck, and his lips moving in a low unbroken murmur. I stood very still. I had been raised to know when a man should not be interrupted. It took a long time. When at last the shuddering stopped and the animal's great dark eye went still, the knight sat back on his heels and let out a breath, and the sound of it was more tired than any battle-cry I have ever heard. "Twenty-two years," he said, without turning. "She carried me at Greywater Ford. She carried me out of it, too, which was harder." He wiped his face with the back of his wrist, leaving a smear of straw dust. "You've been standing there four minutes. Most boys would have coughed." "I didn't want to intrude, my lord." "Sir Roland. 'My lord' is for men with land." He rose, and he was not so tall as I had expected, but there was something in the set of his shoulders that made the stall feel small. He looked at me properly then — at my travel-stained cloak, at my father's sword too long for my hip, at Thunder standing patient behind me — and something in his expression shifted. "Ashmere's boy." "Frederick, sir." "Frederick." He said it slowly, as though checking the name against something written elsewhere. Then, quieter: "You have your mother's eyes. That's unfortunate. There are people in this castle who knew her." Before I could ask what he meant, he had picked up his gauntlets and walked past me into the dark. </nc-section>