Run: 2026-07-25-01KYCRNDP8M6V8092TPJG1SJX1

<nc-section data-title="Chapter 1: Version 1 — The Weight of a Hand" data-color="red"> The stables smelled of hay and iron, of leather oiled a hundred times over. I had barely swung down from Thunder's back when a shadow fell across the straw at my feet. "So. You're the one they sent me." He was a wall of a man, broad through the shoulders, his surcoat still dusted with the pale grit of the practice yard. Grey threaded his beard like frost on a hedgerow, and there was a long white seam running from his left temple down into it, the kind of scar a man earns rather than boasts about. "Frederick, my lord. Of Ashvale." I bowed too deeply. I knew it even as I did it. "Sir Roland will do. I'm no lord, and I'd not thank you for the promotion." He took Thunder's bridle from my hands without asking, and the stallion — who had bitten two grooms and one bishop — went soft as a lamb under his palm. "You've ridden him hard." "I wanted to arrive before dark." "You wanted to arrive *grandly*." He said it without unkindness, which somehow made it worse. "Every squire does. They come thundering up the road like the last rider out of a burning city, and then they spend a week learning that the first thing a knight owes the world is his horse's legs." Heat climbed my neck. "Yes, Sir Roland." He looked at me properly then — a long, unhurried appraisal, the way a smith looks at ore. Whatever he found, he kept to himself. "Rub him down. Water him slow. Then find me in the armoury and I'll show you where you sleep." He turned, then paused. "And Frederick. Whatever you were told about this place before you came — forget the half of it that was pleasant." </nc-section> <nc-section data-title="Chapter 1: Version 2 — The Man Who Laughed First" data-color="green"> I found the stables by the noise of them: the stamp and snort of forty horses settling for the night, and above it all, someone laughing. He was sitting on an upturned bucket beside the door, a knight in a shirt that had once been white, eating an apple with a knife and sharing every third slice with a swaybacked grey mare who leaned over her stall to receive it like a duchess accepting tribute. "There he is!" he called, as though we'd known one another for years. "The boy on the black horse. Half the household's been at the windows since you crested the hill. Bellamy the cook wagered you'd come off in the ford. He's out sixpence and in a foul temper, so I'd avoid the kitchens tonight." I did not know what to say to that, so I dismounted and said nothing at all. "Roland," he offered, wiping the knife on his thigh and standing. He was taller than I'd expected, and younger, though not by much. "Sir, if there are visitors. Roland if there aren't." "Frederick." My voice came out thinner than I liked. "Frederick." He tested it, nodded, apparently found it acceptable. He put the last of the apple in Thunder's mouth before I could warn him, and Thunder, traitor that he was, took it gently. "Well, Frederick, here is the truth of your new life, and I'll give it to you free of charge because tomorrow it costs blood. Nobody in this castle will remember your name for a fortnight. They'll remember your horse. Feed him first, always, and they'll decide you're worth speaking to." He clapped my shoulder hard enough to rock me on my heels, and turned toward the yard. "Also," he added over his shoulder, "there's a story going round about a dragon in the northern hills. Don't repeat it to the chaplain. He's been trying to have it whipped out of the garrison since midsummer, and it keeps growing back." </nc-section> <nc-section data-title="Chapter 1: Version 3 — The Quiet Greeting" data-color="blue"> He was already waiting for me. That was the first thing I understood about Sir Roland, and I think perhaps the truest: that he was a man who arrived before the moment did, and stood in it, and waited for the rest of us to catch up. He stood in the mouth of the stable with a lantern hooked over one finger, the light swinging slow, and he did not call out or wave or come to meet me. He simply watched me ride the last hundred yards, and let me feel every one of them. "Frederick of Ashvale," he said, when I had halted. It was not a question. "Your father wrote three months ago. He wrote a great deal about your temperament and very little about your riding, which I now understand." "The road was—" "The road was the same road it has been for two hundred years." He raised the lantern, and I saw his face for the first time: narrow, weathered, unreadable, with pale eyes that seemed to be counting something. "Come down. Not that way — mind his shoulder. He's favouring the near fore and he's been favouring it since the bridge, and you didn't notice, which is the first thing we'll cure." I came down. My legs did not entirely agree to hold me. "There." He set the lantern on a post and pressed two fingers to Thunder's foreleg, and the stallion shivered but stood. "Heat. Not ruined. A week's rest and he'll forgive you, though he won't forget. Horses don't. Neither do I; it's most of what I'm paid for." The last of the sun went out behind the wall, and somewhere above us a bell began to toll for the evening watch — six strokes, then a seventh, oddly late, oddly heavy. Sir Roland's hand stilled on the horse's leg. He looked north, past the stables, past the wall, to where the hills lay black against a blacker sky. "Seven," he said quietly, to no one. Then, briskly: "Bring your saddle. And Frederick — inside the walls, you sleep with your boots on. Don't ask why yet. Ask me in a month, if you're still here." </nc-section>