Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCQSHMD70ZZ5MA9M4Z354DN

<nc-section data-title="Version 1: The Iron Handshake" data-color="red"> The stables smelled of hay and horse sweat, a scent I had come to love more than any perfume of court. I had barely swung down from the saddle when a shadow fell across Thunder's flank. "So. You're the boy from Aldermere." He was broad as a doorway, this knight, with a beard the color of old rust and a nose that had clearly been broken and reset by someone who did not much care about symmetry. He wore no armor, only a leather jerkin darkened at the collar, but there was something in the way he stood — weight forward, hands loose — that told me he could kill me before I finished a sentence. "Frederick, my lord. Frederick of Aldermere." "Sir Roland. Not 'my lord.' I've no land, no title beyond the spurs, and I've buried better men than me who insisted on being called lord." He reached past me and took Thunder's bridle without asking, running a thumb along the stallion's jaw. Thunder, who had bitten three grooms and one bishop, stood still as stone. "Good horse. Better than the boy deserves, I'd wager." "He was my father's." Sir Roland's hand stopped moving. For a heartbeat something crossed his face — not pity, but recognition, the way one traveler nods to another on a lonely road. "Aye," he said quietly. "I know whose he was. Come. You'll eat, and then you'll muck out these stalls until your arms shake, and tomorrow we'll see what your father's son is made of." </nc-section> <nc-section data-title="Version 2: A Question of Dragons" data-color="green"> I found the stables by following the sound of a man singing badly. He stood in the doorway of the third stall, a currycomb in one hand and a wineskin in the other, murdering a ballad about a maiden of Thornvale. When he saw me he did not stop singing. He finished the verse, took a long pull from the skin, and only then looked me over from muddy boots to windblown hair. "You're late," he said. "The road washed out at the ford, sir. I had to go around by—" "I didn't say you were wrong. I said you were late. A knight is often both, and rarely at the same time as he'd prefer." He tossed me the currycomb; I caught it, barely. "Roland. Sir Roland, if there are lords listening, which there aren't, because lords don't come to stables. Your name I already know. Frederick. They wrote it in a letter and sealed it with too much wax, which is how you can tell a thing is unimportant." I did not know whether I had been insulted. I have since learned that with Sir Roland, one is almost always being insulted and educated in equal measure. "They told me you'd be my master-at-arms," I said. "They told you a great many things, I expect. Did they tell you why the castle keeps forty men-at-arms for a peaceful valley?" He tipped his head toward the eastern mountains, where the last light lay red along the ridges like a wound. "Did they tell you what comes down out of there, three times a century, and what it eats?" The wind shifted then, and Thunder screamed — a sound I had never heard him make, not in battle, not in fire. Sir Roland took another drink. "No," he said. "I thought not." </nc-section> <nc-section data-title="Version 3: What the Old Knight Saw" data-color="blue"> He was waiting for me. That was the first thing I understood, and it unsettled me more than any of the rest of it. The stable yard was empty of grooms, the buckets stacked, the gate already swung wide as though someone had counted the hours of my journey and set his watch by them. And there, seated on an overturned barrel with his sword across his knees like a sleeping child, was an old knight in a surcoat so faded I could not name its color. He rose when I dismounted. He did it slowly, the way men do when their knees have opinions. "Frederick," he said. "You have your mother's eyes and none of her sense, or you'd have turned back at the crossroads." "Sir?" "Roland." He offered his hand, and when I took it I felt the calluses, hard as bark, and the two fingers that did not close all the way. "I served your grandfather. I held his horse in the yard at Emberfall while the sky came down on us, and I have been holding horses in yards ever since, waiting for someone in your family to arrive at this gate." He looked at me for a long moment, and his eyes were grey and terribly tired. "There is a great deal I must tell you," Sir Roland said, "and the castle will spend the next year teaching you to hold a lance, which is the least useful thing you will ever learn. So let us begin with the true lesson while there's still light." He nodded at the mountains. "Tell me, boy. What do you know of dragons?" I laughed. I am not proud of that. He did not laugh with me, and slowly, like frost creeping across a windowpane, the sound died in my throat. </nc-section>