Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCQZB5V7GRYF24C9GWJBF59

<nc-section data-title="Version 1: The Iron Hand" data-color="red"> The stable yard smelled of hay and hot iron, and I had barely swung down from Thunder's back before a shadow fell across the straw at my feet. "So. You're the one they sent me." He was broader than any man I had ever seen, and his surcoat — once white, I think — bore the red hawk of the border marches beneath a season's worth of road grime. A scar ran from his left eyebrow into his hairline, silver as a fish's belly. He did not offer his hand. He offered instead a long, unhurried study of me, the way a farrier studies a hoof before he decides whether the horse is worth the shoe. "Frederick of Ashcombe, my lord. Sir Roland?" "Sir Roland." He said it flatly, as though the title were a coat he wore only because the weather demanded it. Then he reached past me, ran two fingers down Thunder's foreleg, and grunted. "You rode him hard over the last league." "The gates were closing." "The gates close every night, boy. Your horse has one set of legs." He straightened. "Walk him cool. Water him when he stops blowing and not before. Then find me at the armoury, and we'll see whether you've been taught anything worth unlearning." He turned and walked away across the yard, and I noticed then that he favoured his right leg, just slightly, as if the ground there were a half-inch lower than everywhere else. I stood holding the reins in the dying light, my ears burning, and understood that my training had already begun. </nc-section> <nc-section data-title="Version 2: An Unexpected Welcome" data-color="green"> I led Thunder beneath the arch of the stable block, where the last of the daylight came down in dusty bars through the gaps in the roof slates, and a voice from the gloom said cheerfully, "Late, wet, and on a horse too good for you. You must be Frederick." A man came out from behind a stall door with a currycomb in one hand and an apple in the other. He was perhaps forty, sandy-haired, sleeves rolled past his elbows, and he wore no mail at all — only a jerkin with the stitching split under one arm. Had he not been wearing the spurs, I would have taken him for a groom. "Sir Roland Fenwick," he said, tossing me the apple. "Don't look so stricken, lad, everyone makes that mistake. It's why I keep the spurs on." I caught the apple against my chest. "For me, sir?" "For him." He nodded at Thunder. "You get supper. Better bargain, though he'd argue." He stepped closer and laid a palm on Thunder's neck, and I watched my stallion — who had bitten two stablehands in Ashcombe and once thrown my father's steward into a hedge — lower his great head and lean into the man's hand like a cat. "Thunder," I said, a little helplessly. "His name is Thunder." "Course it is." Sir Roland's eyes crinkled. "You named him at twelve, didn't you." "Eleven, sir." "Worse." He took the reins from me with a gentleness that made me feel, absurdly, as if I had been carrying something heavy for a very long time. "Come on. There's bread and cold mutton in the guardroom and a bed with only one other lad in it, which in this castle counts as luxury. The Marshal will shout at you in the morning. Tonight you may simply be tired." And because I was seventeen, and had ridden eleven days, and no one had spoken kindly to me in nine of them, I very nearly wept in front of a knight of the realm. </nc-section> <nc-section data-title="Version 3: The Sign in the Sky" data-color="blue"> He was already waiting by the stables, and I had the strange feeling he had been waiting a long while — longer, perhaps, than my arrival could account for. "You made good time," Sir Roland said. I dismounted, my legs unsteady beneath me. "You knew I was coming, sir?" "The gatewatch saw you an hour out." He said it too quickly, and did not look at me while he said it. He was looking east, where the sky above the mountains had gone the colour of a bruise, and where — though I had told myself for three nights it was only weather — a thin seam of red still smouldered along the ridgeline. He was not a young man. Grey at the temples, a nose broken and badly set, and hands that had clearly held a sword longer than I had been alive. But it was the stillness of him that unsettled me. Men that large are rarely so quiet. "You've seen it, then," he said. "The light in the east." "I thought it was a forest burning, sir." "Six weeks it's been burning, and no smoke." At last he turned, and his eyes found mine, and they were not unkind — only very tired. "How old are you, Frederick?" "Seventeen this spring." Something moved behind his face; I could not name it. Grief, perhaps, or apology. "Then you've come at an interesting time," Sir Roland said, and took Thunder's bridle from my hand. "Stable your horse. Eat. Sleep while you can, and sleep deeply — I mean that as instruction, not courtesy. Tomorrow you begin, and I'll not have the luxury of being gentle with you." He led Thunder into the dark of the stalls. From the doorway, without turning, he added: "And whatever you hear from the north tower tonight — whatever you hear, lad — you stay in your bed." Then the door shut, and I was alone in the yard with the red seam burning quietly in the east. </nc-section>