Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCQXQR2YBS9S8A1B3D8W9B6

<nc-section data-title="Chapter 1, Version 1: The Iron Handshake" data-color="red"> The stables smelled of hay and warm leather, and I had barely swung down from Thunder's back when a shadow fell across the straw. "So you're the one." The voice was gravel dragged over stone. I turned and found a man built like a siege engine, his grey-streaked beard cropped close, a scar running from his left ear down beneath his collar. He wore no armor, only a padded gambeson stained dark at the shoulders where a breastplate had rested for too many years. "Frederick, sir. Of Aldemere." I bowed, and immediately felt foolish for it. "Sir Roland." He did not bow. He took my hand instead and crushed it in a grip that made my knuckles sing, and he watched my face the whole while to see what I would do with the pain. I did nothing. That seemed to satisfy him. "You brought a good horse. Better than you deserve, I'd wager. Did your father buy him?" "My uncle." "Hm." He ran a palm down Thunder's neck, and Thunder—who bit strangers as a matter of principle—leaned into it like a lamb. "Then your uncle has an eye. Come. You'll muck out three stalls before supper, and if you do it well, I'll tell you what happened to the last squire who arrived at sunset." He walked away without waiting. I looked at Thunder. Thunder looked at me, entirely unhelpful, and I picked up the shovel. </nc-section> <nc-section data-title="Chapter 1, Version 2: The Man Who Was Waiting" data-color="green"> He was waiting for me, and that unsettled me more than any greeting could have. The stable yard was empty of grooms, the buckets stacked, the doors already barred for the evening—except one, and in its lantern-light stood a knight with his arms folded, as though he had been standing there since noon and intended to stand there until I explained myself. "You're late by two days," Sir Roland said. "There was flooding on the Merrow road, sir. The bridge at—" "The bridge at Corran held. I had a rider through it yesterday morning." He tilted his head. He was younger than I had expected, perhaps forty, with a long, weathered face and eyes the pale colour of a winter sky. "Try again." My mouth went dry. Thunder shifted beneath me, sensing the change in my breathing the way he always did. "I stopped at Greywater," I admitted. "My mother is buried there. I hadn't seen the stone." Something in the knight's face moved—not softened, exactly, but shifted, like a door unlatching without opening. He stepped forward and took Thunder's bridle in one scarred hand. "Then you're late by two days," he said, "and I'll not hear of it again. Down you come, boy. There's stew, and there's a bed, and tomorrow there's the yard at dawn, and after that I doubt you'll have breath left for grieving." I dismounted. My legs nearly folded under me. "Frederick," he added, as we walked the horse in together. "I knew her. Your mother. Ask me another time." </nc-section> <nc-section data-title="Chapter 1, Version 3: A Bad Evening for Arrivals" data-color="blue"> Something was wrong in the stable yard. I knew it before I understood it—the way the men moved, quick and quiet, the way a hound whined somewhere behind the smithy and no one hushed it. Three horses stood lathered and blowing, still saddled, their reins looped hastily over a rail. Nobody had come to take them. A knight strode out of the dark of the stable doorway, pulling a gauntlet from his hand with his teeth. He stopped when he saw me, and for a moment he simply stared, as if I were a piece of furniture that had wandered into the wrong room. "Squire," he said at last. "Aldemere's boy." "Frederick, sir." "Roland." He spat the gauntlet into his palm. There was blood dried brown in the creases of his knuckles, and it was not, I thought, his own. "You have arrived on a poor evening, Frederick of Aldemere. I'd send you back down the road if the road were safe, and it is not." "What's happened?" He looked past me, out through the gate to the darkening fields, to the long line of the eastern ridge where the last light was bleeding away. "Something came down out of the hills," he said. "Took forty sheep from Halloran's fold and left the bones stacked. Stacked, boy. Like a man builds a cairn." He turned and clapped a hand on my shoulder, hard enough to buckle my knees. "Stable your horse. Eat. Sleep if you can manage it. And in the morning, you and I will ride out and look at what has come to our country, and you will keep your mouth shut and your eyes open, and you will not tell a soul what you see. Agreed?" I did not agree. I did not do anything at all. But he had already walked away, and Thunder was pulling at the reins, and above us the first stars were coming out over a kingdom that suddenly seemed much smaller than it had at noon. </nc-section>