Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCPTQYKPKG6PX1J2SPJCYVH

<nc-section data-title="Chapter 2: The Knight at the Stables (Version 1)" data-color="red"> The stable yard smelled of hay and hot iron. I had barely swung down from Thunder's back when a shadow fell across the straw, and I turned to find a man watching me — broad as a door, greying at the temples, with a scar that ran from his left ear down into his beard like a dry riverbed. "You'll be the new one," he said. Not a question. He reached past me and laid a hand on Thunder's neck, and my stallion, who had bitten three grooms and a bishop, went still as a statue beneath it. "Sir Roland. I keep the swords here, and the boys who carry them." "Frederick, my lord. Frederick of Ashcombe." "My lord." He snorted. "Save that for men who own things. I own a horse, a hauberk, and a bad knee." He looked me over the way a farmer looks at a bullock at market — not unkindly, but with a clear eye for what would break first. "You rode hard. That's a fine animal you've half-ruined." Heat rose in my face. "I wanted to arrive before the gates closed." "You wanted to arrive looking like something out of a song." He turned away toward the stalls, and over his shoulder: "Walk him cool, rub him down, water him last. Then come find me. The kitchens will have gone cold by then, and that will be your first lesson." </nc-section> <nc-section data-title="Chapter 2: The Knight at the Stables (Version 2)" data-color="green"> He was mending a bridle when I found the stables — sitting on an upturned bucket with the leather across his knees, an awl in his teeth, sleeves rolled to the elbow. I might have taken him for a saddler if not for the sword propped against the wall beside him, a plain grey thing with a grip worn pale by use. "Mind the third stall," he said without looking up. "Mare in there hates strangers. Hates me too, but we've an arrangement." I led Thunder past it carefully. When I came back the man had risen, and he was taller than I had guessed, and he offered me his hand as though I were a man grown and not a boy of sixteen with road dust in his teeth. "Roland," he said. "Sir, if the steward's listening. Roland if he isn't." "Frederick." My voice came out smaller than I wanted it. "I'm to be a squire here." "I know it. Your father wrote me a letter. Three pages." He said this with the faintest lift at the corner of his mouth. "Three pages about your virtues, and not one line about whether you can sit a horse in the rain or hold your tongue when a lord insults your mother. Those being the two things a squire is actually for." The bell rang somewhere above us in the gathering dark. Sir Roland picked up his sword and tucked it under his arm like a bundle of kindling. "Come along, Frederick of the three pages. Let's see what you're actually for." </nc-section> <nc-section data-title="Chapter 2: The Knight at the Stables (Version 3)" data-color="blue"> I did not see him until he spoke, which I would learn was a habit of his. "That's a dead man's stall you've put him in." I spun. He stood in the doorway with the last of the red light behind him, so that for a moment he was only a shape — mail, and a cloak, and the long line of a scabbard. Then he stepped in and became a man: perhaps forty, weathered, one eye milky and the other very bright. "Sir?" "Godwin's horse had it. Godwin rode north with the levy in the spring." He crossed to Thunder and let the stallion smell his knuckles. "Neither of them came back. The lads won't use it. Superstition. I'm glad to see it filled." Something cold walked up my spine, and I hoped he did not see it. "I'm Frederick, sir. I've come to—" "To be a knight. Yes." He was still looking at the horse. "They all come to be knights. What they get is eleven years of polishing another man's harness and a great deal of learning about mud." At last he turned, and the bright eye found me, and held me. "Sir Roland. You'll answer to me, and only to me, whatever the steward tells you. Do you understand?" "I think so." "You don't, but you said it plainly, which is a start." He nodded once at the stall, at the empty peg where a dead man's tack had hung. "Finish with your horse. And Frederick — north of here, things have begun waking up that ought to have stayed asleep. So learn quickly." </nc-section>