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<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, and I had barely swung down from the saddle when a shadow fell across Thunder's flank. "You ride like a farmer chasing a runaway goat." The man who said it was broad as a doorway, his surcoat faded to the color of old blood, a stripe of grey running through his beard like a scar. He caught Thunder's bridle without asking and ran a thumb along the stallion's jaw. Thunder, who bit everyone, leaned into it. "Sir Roland," he said, before I could ask. "I keep the sword arm of this house, and its horses, and lately its patience. You are the Marchand boy." "Frederick, sir." I bowed too deeply. My knees announced their opinion of eleven hours in the saddle. "Frederick." He tested the name the way a smith tests a blade for cracks, tapping it, listening. Then he looked past me, east, toward the low hills where the light was bleeding out of the sky. Something in his face closed like a gate. "You made good time. Better than good. Did you see smoke on the road?" I hesitated. I had seen smoke — a thin grey column above the pines near midday, and I had told myself it was a charcoal burner's fire, because I had wanted very much for it to be a charcoal burner's fire. "Once," I said. "Beyond the tree line." Sir Roland let out a slow breath and handed me back my own reins. "Then you are not a day early, lad. You are a day late." </nc-section> <nc-section data-title="Chapter 2: The Knight at the Stables (Version 2)" data-color="green"> I found the stables by their sound before I found them by sight — the low mutter of horses settling, a boy's voice singing something tuneless and cheerful about a miller's wife. A knight was waiting in the doorway with two apples in his hand. He was younger than I expected, perhaps thirty, with a fighter's nose that had been broken and set by someone in a hurry, and he wore no armor at all — only a linen shirt with the sleeves shoved past his elbows and a rag tucked into his belt. He held out one apple to me and one to Thunder, and did not seem to mind which of us took which. "Sir Roland of the Ashford Gate," he said. "Which makes me the man who will teach you to hold a sword properly, and to fall off a horse without breaking your neck, and to lie convincingly to the steward about where the wine went. Not in that order." "Frederick, sir. Squire — that is, I hope to be—" "You are. It's written in a book and everything." He grinned, and it made him look about sixteen. "The book is very dull. Don't read it." Thunder took his apple with a delicacy he had never once shown me. Sir Roland watched him chew, and his grin faded a degree, though it never quite left. "He's a war horse," he said quietly. "Whoever sold him to your father lied about a great many things, but not about that. Look at the way he stands — he's waiting for a trumpet." He rubbed Thunder's nose. "You'll want to know what he's waiting for. Come inside first. Eat. Some questions go down easier after bread." </nc-section> <nc-section data-title="Chapter 2: The Knight at the Stables (Version 3)" data-color="blue"> The gate swallowed me, and the courtyard beyond was nothing like the songs. There were chickens. There was a woman shouting at a cart. There was a heap of broken shields stacked against a wall like firewood, and I was still staring at them when a voice behind me said, "Don't." I turned. A knight stood in the arch of the stables with one gauntlet off, holding it against his chest as though it hurt him to. "Don't look at those," he said. "Everyone looks at those on their first day and decides they know what it means. They don't." He tossed the gauntlet onto a barrel. "Roland. Sir, when the priest is listening. You'll be the squire." "Frederick, sir." "Frederick." He came forward into the last of the light, and I saw that his surcoat was scorched — not burned through, but darkened in a wide fan across the chest, the way cloth goes when something enormous and hot has passed very close to it and chosen, for reasons of its own, not to linger. I must have stared, because he glanced down at himself and gave a short, humorless laugh. "Ah," he said. "Yes. Well. They'll have told you the last one died in a border skirmish." "Yes, sir." "There is no border where he died." Sir Roland took Thunder's reins from my numb hands and led the stallion into the dark of the stable, and his voice came back to me flat and easy, as though he were discussing the weather. "Put your things in the east tower. Bolt the shutters, not for the wind. And Frederick — if you hear something over the hills tonight that sounds like thunder, don't come running out to see it." </nc-section>