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<nc-section data-title="Chapter 1: The Arrival — Version 1" data-color="red"> The gates groaned open, and Thunder carried me into a courtyard that smelled of hay, smoke, and horse sweat. I had scarcely swung down from the saddle when a shadow fell across the cobbles. "So you're the boy from Ashvale." He was broad as a doorway, this knight, his surcoat faded from red to something closer to rust, his beard shot through with grey. A saddle hung over one shoulder as though it weighed nothing at all. "Frederick, my lord," I said, and bowed too deeply, the way my mother had taught me, and felt the heat climb my neck when I straightened. "Roland. Not *my lord*." He set the saddle on a rail and looked past me at Thunder, and something in his face softened. "Now *that* is a horse. Better than his rider deserves, I'd wager." He ran a hand down Thunder's neck, and Thunder — who bit everyone — stood as still as a statue. "Rub him down before you eat, before you sleep, before you do anything else. A squire who cares for his mount before himself will make a knight. The rest make corpses." He walked away three paces, then stopped. "Welcome to Greywater, lad. Try not to die in the first month. It's bad for morale." </nc-section> <nc-section data-title="Chapter 1: The Arrival — Version 2" data-color="green"> I led Thunder toward the stables, where the lamplight spilled gold across the straw, and found a man there already waiting — as if he had been waiting a long while, and did not mind. He was younger than I expected of a knight, though there was a stiffness to the way he held his left arm that spoke of old damage. He wore no armour. Only a linen shirt, sleeves rolled, and hands black to the wrist with harness grease. "You're early," he said. "Three days early." "The roads were dry, sir." "The roads are never dry." He wiped his palms on a rag and offered one anyway. "Sir Roland. I'll be teaching you, or trying to. Your father wrote me a letter about you. Four pages." He let that sit a moment. "It was mostly about the horse." I did not know whether to laugh, so I said nothing, which I would learn was often the wisest thing to do around Sir Roland. "Come," he said, taking Thunder's bridle from my hand with a gentleness that surprised me. "There's a stall at the end with a cracked door. It's yours now. Both of you." "Both of us?" "You'll sleep in the loft above him for a season. Everyone does." He glanced back, and I caught the ghost of a smile in the lamplight. "A man who cannot bear the smell of horses has no business swearing oaths on horseback." </nc-section> <nc-section data-title="Chapter 1: The Arrival — Version 3" data-color="blue"> It was the sound I noticed first: steel on stone, a slow and patient rasp, coming from the dark mouth of the stables. Thunder's ears pricked forward. I put a hand on his neck and went in. A knight sat on an overturned bucket, honing a sword across his knees. He did not look up. "Stand there," he said. "Let me hear you breathe." I stood. I breathed. It seemed a strange sort of greeting, and I wondered if I had come to the wrong castle entirely. "Fast and shallow," he said at last. "You're afraid. Good. The ones who arrive unafraid are the ones I have to bury." Now he did look up, and his eyes were a pale grey, one of them clouded near the edge like water with milk stirred into it. "Sir Roland Wake. You'll be Ashvale's third son." "Frederick, sir." "You'll be Ashvale's third son until you earn something better." He rose — slowly, an old man's rising in a body that was not yet old — and sheathed the blade. "There's a bucket, a brush, and a well through that arch. Your horse first. Then find the kitchen and tell Maud I sent you; she'll feed you and complain about it." I turned to go, then hesitated. "Sir — is it true? What they say about the north road? About the burnings?" The rasp of stone on steel had stopped, and in the silence I heard the wind come off the hills, and Sir Roland did not answer me for a long moment. "Your horse first," he said. </nc-section>