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<nc-section data-title="Chapter 1, Version 1: The Knight at the Stables" data-color="red"> The gates groaned open before I could announce myself, and I guided Thunder through the archway into a courtyard that smelled of hay, hot iron, and horse sweat. A man was waiting near the stables, one boot propped on an overturned bucket, working a rag over the blade of a sword that had clearly seen more use than ceremony. He looked up. He was perhaps forty, broad as a door, with a beard the color of wet ash and a scar that ran from his left ear down into his collar. "You'd be the boy from Ellsmere," he said. Not a question. "Frederick, my lord. Frederick Ayle." I slid from the saddle too quickly and had to catch myself on the stirrup. My legs had gone to wood somewhere around midday. "I'm no lord. Sir Roland will do, and Roland will do better once you've earned it." He set the sword aside without sheathing it and came to take Thunder's bridle, running a practiced hand down the stallion's neck. "You rode him hard." "I didn't want to arrive after dark." "He doesn't care what you wanted." Roland's mouth moved into something that was not quite a smile. "First lesson, and it's free: the horse eats before you do. The horse drinks before you do. The horse sleeps before you do. A knight who forgets that is a man walking, and a man walking is a man dead." He pressed the reins back into my hands. "Third stall. Rub him down, water him slow. Then come find me and I'll show you where you'll be sleeping, which I warn you is not so fine as the third stall." I stood there a moment, saddle-sore and starving and stupid with exhaustion, and found that I was grinning. "Yes, Sir Roland." </nc-section> <nc-section data-title="Chapter 1, Version 2: An Unwelcoming Welcome" data-color="green"> No one came to meet me at the gate. I led Thunder in on foot, my boots ringing on the flagstones, past a smith's shed gone cold and a well with a broken windlass. The banners I had admired from the road looked different up close — frayed at the hems, the gold thread dulled to brown. This was a castle that had been grand within living memory, and knew it, and resented the knowing. I found the stables by smell and followed the sound of a whetstone. The man inside was sharpening a spearhead by lamplight, though the spear itself was nowhere in sight. He did not stop when I entered. He did not stop when I cleared my throat. "They sent another one," he said at last, to the spearhead. "Frederick, sir. Of Ellsmere. My father—" "I know your father." The whetstone paused. "He wrote me four letters. Four. A man who writes four letters about his son either loves him a great deal or wants him a great distance away." He looked up then, and his eyes were pale and tired and much too attentive. "Which is it?" I opened my mouth. Closed it. In eleven days of riding I had rehearsed a dozen fine speeches about honor and service, and not one of them was any use to me now. "Both, I think," I said. Sir Roland set the whetstone down. Something in his face loosened, very slightly, like a fist deciding not to close. "Good," he said. "Lies I'd have had to beat out of you, and I'm too old and it's too late in the day. Put your horse in the second stall — the third has a nail I keep meaning to see to. Then sit. You look like a scarecrow that's lost an argument with a crow." </nc-section> <nc-section data-title="Chapter 1, Version 3: Wolves in the North" data-color="blue"> The courtyard was in an uproar when I rode in. Men were saddling horses in the failing light, shouting over one another; a woman ran past with an armful of bandages; somewhere a dog was barking itself hoarse. No one so much as glanced at me until a hand closed on Thunder's bridle and brought us both up short. "You're either very well timed or very poorly," said the man holding us. He wore a mail hauberk with the links blackened, and he had the look of someone who had been awake for two days and intended to make it three. "Which are you?" "Frederick, sir. The new squire." "Ah." He let go of the bridle. "Poorly, then. Roland. Sir Roland, if there's anyone watching, and there never is." He was already turning away, already moving toward the stables. "Come on. Bring him. Don't unsaddle him." I followed, my heart going quick. "Sir — what's happened?" "Smoke over the north ridge. Third time this month." He ducked into the stable and came out with a saddlebag over one shoulder, tossing me a waterskin without looking. "Everyone will tell you it's wolves. Write that down, remember it, and remember also that wolves don't set fires." "Then what—" "That," said Sir Roland, "is a question I have been asking for eleven years, and tonight I've a mind to stop asking it politely." He swung up onto a grey mare that had appeared as if summoned. "Your father said you could sit a horse. Was he lying?" I found, somehow, that I had already put my foot in the stirrup. "No, sir." "Then we'll find out. Stay behind me. Speak to no one on the road. And Frederick—" the grey wheeled toward the open gate, and the last of the sunlight caught the scar along his jaw, "—whatever you see up there, you will keep your mouth shut about it until I say otherwise. Swear it." I swore it. It was the first oath I ever gave in that place, and I did not yet understand that it would cost me more than any of the ones that came after. </nc-section>