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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 I reached them, and a stablehand took Thunder's reins without a word, as though my arrival had been expected for weeks. I had barely found my footing on the cobbles when a shadow fell across me. "You must be the boy from Harrowmere." Sir Roland stood in the mouth of the stables, a leather bridle looped over one shoulder and straw clinging to his boots. He was not what I had imagined. I had pictured polished steel and a plumed helm; instead I found a broad-shouldered man in a sweat-stained tunic, his beard gone grey at the edges, a scar cutting a pale line from his ear to the corner of his jaw. "Frederick, my lord," I said, and bowed too deeply. "Roland will do. My lord is what they call me when they want something." He looked me over the way a farrier looks at a hoof. "You sit a horse well enough. I watched you come across the field. You rode him hard at the end. Why?" Heat rose in my cheeks. "I did not wish to arrive after dark." "And so you spent the last of a good animal's strength on your pride." He said it without cruelty, which somehow made it worse. Then he tossed me the bridle. "Rub him down. All of him, hooves to withers, and walk him until his breathing settles. When you have finished, come find me in the yard and we will see whether you can hold a sword as well as you hold a rein." He turned away, then paused. "Frederick. Welcome to Greyholt. It is a colder place than the songs make it out to be." </nc-section> <nc-section data-title="Chapter 2: The Knight at the Stables (Version 2)" data-color="green"> The stables smelled of hay and warm horse and old leather, and after three days of open road it smelled like a homecoming for a home I had never had. I was loosening Thunder's girth when I heard a low, amused voice behind me. "Well. He told me you'd be tall. He never said you'd be *thin*." I turned. The man leaning against the post was a knight — I knew it before I saw the ring on his finger or the sword propped in the corner — because he stood the way the statues in my father's hall stood, easy in a body that had been taught to be dangerous. He was eating an apple. He offered the other half to my horse rather than to me. "Sir Roland?" "The last one, anyway. There were three of us once." He watched Thunder take the apple with a kind of fond patience. "Your father wrote to me. Two pages. One of them was about you and the other was about how much he paid for that saddle." I did not know whether to laugh, so I said nothing. "That was a joke, lad. You'll need to learn when I'm making them, or these next years will be very long for you." He straightened, dusted his palms on his thighs, and for the first time looked at me properly — and something in his face went still and careful, as though he had seen something over my shoulder that I could not. "Three days on the north road and nothing troubled you?" "Nothing, sir." "Hm." He picked up his sword. "Then you're either lucky or important, and in my experience it's never luck. Bring your things. You'll sleep above the smithy, where it's warm, and tomorrow we begin." </nc-section> <nc-section data-title="Chapter 2: The Knight at the Stables (Version 3)" data-color="blue"> He was waiting for me in the long blue dusk beside the stables, and he had been waiting some time, judging by the pile of shavings at his feet where he had been whittling. He put the knife away when he saw me. "You are late," said Sir Roland. "The bridge at Callow Ford was out, my lord. I went round by the mill road." "Then you are not late. You are merely later than I hoped." He came forward and took Thunder's bridle himself, which no knight should have done for a squire, and which told me more about him in that moment than a year of talk could have. His hands were enormous and very gentle. "A good horse. Better than the boy who rides him deserves, most likely, but that is true of every squire I have ever known, myself included." Up close I saw that he was old. Not ancient — his back was straight and his arms were thick as fence rails — but there was a weariness in him that had settled deep, the way damp settles into stone. And there was something else: two fingers missing from his left hand, the stumps long healed, and a burn that ran up his forearm and disappeared beneath his sleeve. Not a sword scar. I had seen sword scars. This was something that had been *made* by heat. He caught me looking. He did not hide his arm, but he did not explain it either. "They told you why you were sent here?" he asked. "To be trained, sir." "Yes," said Sir Roland, and led my horse into the dark of the stable. "That is what they told me as well." </nc-section>