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<nc-section data-title="Version 1: The Knight at the Stable Door" data-color="red"> The gates groaned open, and Thunder carried me into a courtyard that smelled of straw, smoke, and horse sweat — the honest perfume of every castle I had ever dreamed of. I dismounted badly, catching my heel in the stirrup, and would have measured my length in the mud had a hand not closed around my arm and held me upright as easily as a man steadies a leaning broom. "Steady, lad. The stones here are older than your grandfather and twice as unforgiving." He was not what I expected. I had imagined knights the way the ballads promised them: tall as doorframes, jaw like an anvil, eyes full of distant battles. Sir Roland was broad rather than tall, his beard shot through with grey, and he wore no armour at all — only a stained leather jerkin and a pair of gauntlets tucked through his belt like a farmer's gloves. There was a curry-comb in his other hand. "Frederick, son of Alric," he said, and let me go. "You have your father's chin and, God help you, his horse." "Thunder is mine, sir." "Thunder is borrowed, and Thunder is lame in the near hind, and you've ridden him three leagues too far today because you wanted to arrive before dark and look splendid doing it." He said it without cruelty, which somehow made it worse. He ran his palm down Thunder's flank, and my stallion — who bit everyone — leaned into him like a cat. "Vanity, boy. First lesson, and I've not even learned your voice yet. Come. You'll walk him cool, and rub him down, and when the beast is fed you may consider the possibility of your own supper." I stared at him. "I am to sleep in the stables?" "You are to sleep where the horses sleep, and rise when the horses rise, until you understand that a knight is nothing but a man his horse consents to carry." He turned toward the stable door, then glanced back, and for the first time something like warmth crossed that weathered face. "Welcome to Ravensmoor, Frederick. You'll hate me by Sunday. Most do." </nc-section> <nc-section data-title="Version 2: A Greeting Sharp as Steel" data-color="green"> I had barely swung down from the saddle when a voice came out of the shadow of the stables, easy and unhurried, the way a man speaks who has never once needed to raise his voice to be obeyed. "Late." I turned. He stepped out into the last of the light: a knight in half-armour, the pauldrons scuffed silver-grey, a sword at his hip with a grip worn dark and smooth by years of a particular hand. His hair was cropped soldier-short. A long white scar ran from his left ear into his collar, and he made no attempt to hide it. "Sir Roland Thane," he said. "Master-at-arms, and for my sins, keeper of squires. You were expected at midday." "There was a river, sir. The bridge at Weller's Ford was out, and I had to go round by—" "There was a river." He nodded gravely, as though I had reported something of enormous strategic importance. "And when the Marcher raiders come and there is a river, will you tell the villagers of Hollowbeck that you went round by the long way? They will be very understanding. Ashes are famously patient." My face burned. I opened my mouth and found nothing in it. "Good," Sir Roland said. "That silence is the first useful thing you've done. Most boys argue." He held out his hand — not to shake, but palm up, waiting. I gave him Thunder's reins, and he ran a thumb along the leather, checking, and made a small sound of grudging approval at the state of the tack. "You keep your gear well. That's something. A squire who cares for leather may one day be trusted with lives." Somewhere above us a bell began to toll for the evening meal, and the courtyard filled with the noise of men and dogs. "Come along, Frederick," he said, and the sharpness went out of him all at once, like a blade sheathed. "There's bread and there's mutton and there's a bed with a straw mattress that will be the worst thing you have ever slept on. Tomorrow I will begin the long and disappointing work of turning you into something. Tonight you're only a tired boy at the end of a road, and even here we allow a man that much." </nc-section> <nc-section data-title="Version 3: The Man Who Waited at the Gate" data-color="blue"> He was waiting for me. That was the thing I would remember years later, when the world had burned and been remade and there was almost nobody left who remembered my name: that on the first evening of my new life, someone had been standing at the stable door, watching the road, waiting for me. "You'll be Frederick," said the knight. He was old. Not ancient — but old for a fighting man, sixty if he was a day, with hands knotted like oak roots and a stoop in one shoulder that spoke of a wound badly set long ago. He carried a lantern, unlit, and he had the patient stillness of a heron in shallow water. "Sir Roland?" "Aye." He looked past me, down the darkening road, and something moved behind his eyes. "You came alone." "My father's man turned back at the crossroads. He said the last miles were safe enough." "Did he." The old knight was quiet a moment. Then he took Thunder's bridle and led us both in beneath the low beams, and the warm animal dark closed around us, and I heard the other horses shifting in their stalls. "There is nothing safe in the north this year, boy, whatever men tell their sons. The shepherds in the high pasture have lost eleven ewes and found no bones. The wells at Cairn Etric taste of iron. Three nights ago something passed over this castle so high we saw only the stars go out, one after another, in a long line — and then come back." I laughed, because I was fifteen and it seemed the thing to do. Sir Roland did not laugh. He hung the unlit lantern on its hook and turned to me, and in the gloom his face was perfectly grave and perfectly kind, and that frightened me more than anything he had said. "Sleep well tonight, Frederick," he said. "Truly. Sleep as long and as sweetly as you can manage. I have a notion that in the years to come you and I will look back on this hour as the last quiet one." He clapped my shoulder. "Now fetch water. The stallion first, then yourself. That's the order of it, always." </nc-section>