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<nc-section data-title="Chapter 1: The Arrival — Version 1" data-color="red"> The gates groaned open before I reached them, and I guided Thunder through the arch and into a courtyard that smelled of hay, hot iron, and rain-damp stone. Grooms moved among the stables with buckets and brushes, and none of them looked up at me, which stung more than I expected. I had imagined trumpets. I had imagined, at the very least, someone taking my reins. Then a man stepped out from the shadow of the stable door, wiping his hands on a rag, and the whole courtyard seemed to arrange itself around him. He was broad as a doorframe, grey at the temples, with a nose that had been broken and badly set at least twice. He wore no armor — only a sweat-stained undertunic and a sword belt he plainly never took off — and yet I knew him at once. Every boy in the western villages knew the name Sir Roland of Ashvale, and every one of us had swung a stick at an imaginary enemy pretending to be him. "You'd be the Marlow boy," he said. "Frederick, my lord. Frederick Marlow, son of—" "I know whose son you are." He came forward and laid a hand flat on Thunder's neck, and Thunder, who had bitten three men that spring, went still as a statue. "Handsome animal. Too handsome. A horse like this makes a young man believe the world is watching him." Heat crawled up my throat. "He was my father's." "Then he's a good horse with a bad master, and we'll fix the second part." Sir Roland took the reins from my hands without asking, and I found myself sliding out of the saddle simply because his certainty left no other option. My boots hit the cobbles and my legs nearly folded beneath me after nine hours of riding. He watched me steady myself. Something that was almost a smile moved beneath his beard. "Stables first," he said. "Supper after, if there's any left. And Frederick — in this castle a squire greets his horse's needs before his own, his knight's before his horse's, and his king's before all. Forget the rest of it if you must. Remember that." He turned and walked Thunder into the dark of the stable, and I hurried after him, my saddlebags banging against my hip, absurdly, ridiculously happy. </nc-section> <nc-section data-title="Chapter 1: The Arrival — Version 2" data-color="green"> I had rehearsed my arrival a hundred times on the road. I would dismount cleanly, sweep my cloak back, and announce myself in a voice that suggested I had done this many times before. What happened was that Thunder shied at a cartload of squealing pigs, my foot caught in the stirrup, and I came down into the mud of the stableyard on my hands and knees like a man begging for his life. For a long moment there was no sound but the pigs. "Well," said someone above me, "that's the humility taken care of. Most boys it takes me a fortnight." I looked up. A knight stood in the stable doorway with his arms folded, tall and lean and long-jawed, his dark hair tied back with a strip of leather. There was mud on his boots too, I noticed, a great deal of it, which somehow made him more frightening rather than less. "Sir Roland," he said, before I could ask. "And you are late, and you are filthy, and you have dropped your letter of introduction in the muck. Pick it up. I've no intention of reading it, but the Chamberlain will want it, and the Chamberlain is a worse enemy than any man I've fought." I scrambled for the packet. The wax seal had gone soft and grey. "Frederick Marlow, sir," I said. "I've come to serve." "They all say that." He stepped down into the yard and caught Thunder's bridle in one hand, gentling him with a click of his tongue. "Nobody comes to *serve*, boy. They come to be knights. They come for the spurs and the songs and the girls at the harvest fair. Serving is the part they discover afterward, and about one in five can stomach it." "Which was I, sir? The one, or the four?" His eyes came up to mine then, sharp as a whetstone, and I understood that I had said something either very stupid or very useful and would not learn which for some time. "Ask me at midwinter," Sir Roland said. "Now get that horse rubbed down. And Marlow — when you're done, come to the west tower. There's a thing I want you to see before anyone tells you what it means." </nc-section> <nc-section data-title="Chapter 1: The Arrival — Version 3" data-color="blue"> I found the stables by their smell before I found them by sight, and I was still fumbling with Thunder's girth strap when I realized the man leaning against the post had been watching me for some while. He was old for a knight. That was the first thing. His shoulders were heavy with muscle gone to stone, and his left hand was wrapped in linen from knuckle to wrist, the wrappings dark where something had wept through. He held a lantern in his right hand, though the sky had not yet given up its last light, and he held it the way a man holds a weapon. "Boy," he said. "How long since you rode past the Wardstones?" It was not the greeting I had prepared for. "The— the standing stones, sir? On the ridge? An hour, perhaps two." "And did the birds sing?" I opened my mouth. Closed it. Thought back along that long grey stretch of road, the hedges, the wet gold of the barley, the sound of Thunder's hooves very loud in my ears, and nothing, nothing else at all. "No," I said slowly. "No, sir. They didn't." The knight let out a breath and set the lantern down on the mounting block, and only then did I see how tired he was — a tiredness that had nothing to do with the hour and everything to do with years. "Roland," he said. "Sir Roland, if the Chamberlain's listening, which he generally is. You'll be the squire they sent me. Marlow." "Frederick, sir." "Frederick." He said it as though weighing it, as though a name were a coin that might ring false. "You've come at a poor time, Frederick, and I'd send you home if home were still the safer place. Bring your horse inside. Bar the door behind you — not the latch, the bar, the iron one. And whatever you hear over the wall tonight, whatever it sounds like, you do not go up on the wall to look." "Sir—" My voice came out thin as thread. "What's over the wall?" Sir Roland picked up his lantern again, and in its light I saw that the linen on his hand was not stained with blood but with something darker, something that glistened green. "Nothing," he said, "for another three nights. Sleep while you can." </nc-section>