Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCQXWH4T0DQ8Q7MRZNS8402

<nc-section data-title="Chapter 1, Version 1: The Knight at the Stables" data-color="red"> The gates groaned open before I reached them, and no one asked my name. That should have troubled me more than it did. I found the stables by smell before sight — warm straw, leather, the sweet rot of apples gone soft in a bucket. I had just begun loosening Thunder's girth when a shadow fell across the stall door, long and thin as a spear laid down. "He's a good animal," the man said. "Too good for a boy with no spurs." He was tall, and older than I expected a knight to be, with grey pushing through a beard that had once been red. His surcoat was faded almost white at the shoulders where a mantle had rubbed it for years. He carried no sword, only a currying brush, and he used it on the neck of a swaybacked mare with more tenderness than I had ever seen a man show anything. "My father sent him," I said. "Thunder, I mean. He said a squire arriving on a poor horse arrives poorly." "Your father is wrong, but he's wrong in a common way." He did not stop brushing. "I'm Roland. You'll be sleeping above these stalls, so you may as well learn which of these beasts kick." He nodded down the row. "That one. That one. And me, before breakfast." I laughed. He did not, but something moved at the corner of his mouth like a door left ajar. "Sir Roland," I said, and bowed too deeply, the way my mother had taught me to bow to bishops. "Frederick." He finally turned, and I saw that his left hand was missing its two smallest fingers, the stumps clean and old. "Don't do that again. Not here. In the yard, in front of the others, you'll call me sir and mean it. Here, with the horses, we're only two men who've come in out of the dark. It's a small mercy. You'll find you want it." He set the brush on the ledge and looked past me, out through the stable door, to where the last red light was draining off the western towers. "You've come at a strange hour of the world, boy," he said. "Did anyone tell you that?" "No, sir." "No," he agreed. "They wouldn't have." </nc-section> <nc-section data-title="Chapter 1, Version 2: A Loud Welcome" data-color="green"> I had not yet swung down from the saddle when a voice boomed out of the stable yard loud enough to startle pigeons from the eaves. "Ha! There he is! The lord's letter said a squire, and here I've been sent a scarecrow on a warhorse!" The man who came striding toward me was built like a barrel with legs, broad and cheerful and entirely too pleased with himself. He wore a mail shirt with no shame about the rust at its hem, and he had a chicken leg in one hand, which he waved at me like a baton. "Down, down, off with you. Let the poor brute breathe." He seized Thunder's bridle with his free hand, and Thunder — who had thrown two grooms and bitten a blacksmith — went gentle as a lamb. "Sir Roland, that's me. Knight of this house, master of the yard, and the only man within forty leagues who can tell you honestly whether you'll be any good with a sword." "Frederick, of Ashcombe," I managed. My legs had gone to water beneath me after nine hours in the saddle, and I clutched at the stirrup to keep from folding. "Ashcombe." He said it the way you'd say a word in a language you'd half forgotten. Then he grinned again, too quickly. "Cold country. Good apples. Come, you're grey as a fish. There's stew, and it's only three days old." He turned, and I followed, and it was only later — lying awake in the loft with the horses shifting below me — that I understood he had never once let go of my horse's bridle until the gate behind us was shut and barred. Nor had he asked me a single question about the road. As though he already knew what was on it. </nc-section> <nc-section data-title="Chapter 1, Version 3: Ash on the Wind" data-color="blue"> The stable yard was full of men who would not look at me. That was my first lesson at Duncairn, though I did not know it was a lesson: eleven grooms and hands and boys, all busy, all silent, all bent over some task that let them keep their eyes on the ground. A bucket was being filled that was already full. A harness was being oiled that shone already. They were listening to the sky. "Don't stare at them," said someone behind me. "They'll only be embarrassed, and then they'll be cruel to you for it." The knight was leaning in the doorway of the tack room with his arms folded. Young — younger than the songs make knights, no more than thirty — with a plain face and pale, patient eyes and a smear of ash across one cheekbone that he had not bothered to wipe away. "Sir Roland," he said. "You'd be Frederick. You're four days late." "The bridge at Marran is out, sir." "The bridge at Marran is not out." He said it without heat, the way a man corrects a child's arithmetic. "It's burned. There's a difference, and you'd do well to learn it, because from here on the difference is going to matter to you a great deal." He pushed off the doorframe and came to take Thunder's reins from my hand. His knuckles were scabbed. "Did you see it? The bridge?" "I saw — " My throat closed. I had been telling myself for four days that I had seen nothing. "The stones were melted, sir. Stone doesn't melt." "No," Sir Roland said quietly. "It doesn't." He ran his hand down Thunder's nose, and the great horse leaned into him, trembling, the way animals do when they have been frightened for a long time and are finally permitted to admit it. Above us the banners cracked in a wind that smelled, faintly and unmistakably, of forge-smoke. "Come inside, Frederick," he said. "There are things in this castle that no one has said out loud in eleven years. It seems we're going to have to start." </nc-section>