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<nc-section data-title="Chapter 2: The Knight at the Stables (Version 1)" data-color="red"> Thunder's hooves clattered against the cobblestones of the outer yard, and the smell of hay and horse sweat rose to meet me like an old friend. I had barely swung down from the saddle when a shadow fell across the straw. "So. You are the one they sent." The man who stepped from the stable door was broad as a barn beam, his surcoat faded from blue to the color of a winter sky, the crest upon it worn nearly smooth. Grey salted his beard. A scar ran from his left ear down beneath his collar, and he made no attempt to hide it. "Frederick, my lord. Of Ashmere." I bowed, and in bowing nearly lost my grip on Thunder's reins. "Sir Roland will do. I stopped being anyone's lord a long while ago." He took the reins from my hand without asking, and Thunder — who bit everyone, who had bitten *me* twice that very morning — went quiet as a lamb beneath his palm. "Good horse. Better than the boy riding him, I'd wager. We'll see." "I mean to work hard, sir." "Everyone means to." Sir Roland ran his hand down Thunder's foreleg, feeling the tendon with a thumb. "Meaning is cheap. It's the cheapest thing in this castle, and we've a great deal of it lying about. Fetch a brush and start on the flank. You'll sleep in the loft above, and you'll rise when the bell rings, not after." I stared. "Tonight, sir? I've ridden since dawn—" "So has the horse." He looked at me then, properly, and his eyes were not unkind, which somehow was worse. "And he hasn't complained once. Brush, boy. Left-hand wall." </nc-section> <nc-section data-title="Chapter 2: The Knight at the Stables (Version 2)" data-color="green"> The stables stood at the eastern edge of the yard, low and long, their thatch gone silver with age. I led Thunder toward them slowly, letting him cool, and it was there — beneath a lantern already lit against the failing light — that I first saw Sir Roland of the Wold. He was mending a bridle. That was the thing I would remember, years afterward, when men spoke his name in the same breath as burning ships and broken sieges: that the greatest knight of the northern marches sat on an upturned bucket with an awl in his teeth, sewing leather like a saddler's apprentice. "Mind the puddle," he said, without looking up. "It's deeper than it pretends." I stepped around it. "Sir Roland?" "Mm." He drew the thread taut, bit it, and only then raised his head. His face was long and weathered and oddly gentle, the face of a man who had seen the worst of things and decided, deliberately, not to be ruined by them. "And you are Frederick. Your uncle wrote me three letters about you. Three. I have not received three letters about the *King*." Heat climbed my neck. "He is enthusiastic, sir." "He is a liar, but a fond one, which is the best sort." Sir Roland stood, unfolding to a height that put my chin at his shoulder, and offered me his hand — his hand, bare and calloused, as though I were a man and not a boy of fifteen with road dust in his teeth. "Welcome to Greyholt. You'll find it cold, dull, and full of people who resent you. Give it a month and you'll love it." "And the training, sir?" "Begins tomorrow." He picked up the lantern. "Tonight you eat, and you sleep, and you tell me nothing about yourself that isn't true. I'll know. I always know." </nc-section> <nc-section data-title="Chapter 2: The Knight at the Stables (Version 3)" data-color="blue"> The gate-guards passed me through with a grunt and a jerk of the thumb toward the stables, and so I came to the place where my life would change without any of the ceremony I had imagined on the road. There was a man in the straw-strewn aisle with his back to me, arguing with a mare. "—no, you don't. You *don't*, you great ungrateful heap of appetite. That's the third rope this week." He turned, saw me, and did not seem in the least embarrassed. "Do you ride, or do you merely sit on things and hope?" "I ride, sir. I think." "Excellent. Thinking is where it starts." He wiped his hands on his thighs and came forward. He was younger than I had expected — perhaps forty, no more — with a boxer's flattened nose and a knight's terrible stillness beneath all the noise of him. The spurs at his heels were gilt, though the gilt had worn through at the rowels. "Roland. I hold the keep for Lord Havisham, which means I hold the drains, the accounts, the hounds, and now, apparently, you." "Frederick, sir. I've come to be trained." "You've come to be *changed*," he said. "Training is only the shape it takes." He looked past me to Thunder, and something flickered in his face — recognition, or memory. "Where did you get that horse?" "He was my father's." "Ah." Sir Roland was quiet a moment, and the mare snorted into the silence. "Then I knew your father. Rub the beast down yourself; don't let the grooms do it. A man who lets others tend his horse will one day let others fight his battles." He turned back toward the mare, then paused. "And Frederick — don't tell anyone here whose son you are. Not yet. Not until I say." </nc-section>