by Jocelyn Fox
The courtyard quieted, and the queen’s voice rang out.
“My Knights and Guards, you have filled my heart with joy at the beauty of your skill this fine day,” Queen Mab said, lifting her arms to encompass the entirety of the assembled men below her. She glowed luminously in the gathering dusk. “And now, as I crown our champion – who will wear my favor at the next tournament – I also request the Knights from the last three bouts to dine with me tonight at the high dais.”
Kieran punched Finn in the arm; Finn waved him off, his mind already whirling through all the preparations he would have to accomplish in such a short time. Dinner would be in barely two hours – hardly enough time to prepare Knight Arian and himself.
“I’ll help you,” whispered Kieran. “Don’t look so sour, Finn!”
As the Queen’s Vaelanseld escorted the champion up to the balcony to receive his golden crown of laurels from the hand of the Queen, Finnead couldn’t help but think that serving Knight Arian at the high dais meant that he would be very close to the princess. He clenched his jaw in frustration at his undisciplined thoughts. Then, with an effort, he relaxed, joining Kieran in his jubilant celebration. But the strange feel of the princess’s favor still tingled in his fingertips, and he glanced up to the balcony as the Queen crowned her champion. The princess smiled her half-smile as she watched the ceremony.
“All work and no play makes Finn a dull boy,” murmured Kieran with a wicked glint in his eye as he watched his training partner.
“Hush, or I’ll let you study on your own,” replied Finn, but the threat was half-hearted.
“Come on, then,” said Kieran as Knight Arian gave Finn a nod of dismissal. “We’ve a lot to do and not much time to do it in.”
They slid through the crowd of squires and pages, most of whom were still taking the rare opportunity to socialize with their peers. Finn maintained his outward calm, but he felt a tremor of something like excitement. He had been so focused for so long, first as a page and now for his years as a squire; he would endure the gauntlet and fight at the Solstice, and hopefully be named a Knight. Yet somehow, in the space of one day, a chance encounter with a young woman with piercing eyes and a sharp tongue had shaken him to the core. It was as if he could feel the earth shifting beneath his feet, setting him on a new path. He took a deep breath and swore to himself that whatever this new future held for him, he would strive to serve his queen – and his princess – with honor and loyalty. That much would never change.
Chapter 7
Ramel never spoke of the day that the crown princess healed him, not even to Murtagh. Sometimes at night, if he wasn’t so tired that he went to sleep at once, he thought about the gentle feel of the princess’s taebramh flowing through him. Her words echoed in his head: This will hurt, ma saell caethrair – “my little cousin.” The princess had called him her cousin, and she had healed him. Ramel knew that she didn’t really mean that he was her cousin, that it was just a term of endearment, like how the pages sometimes called each other “brother” in imitation of the squires and Knights. Yet somehow it made him feel special, remembering those words. He used the memory to bolster his spirits when he had a particularly bad training day. That and the memory of sparring with Squire Kieran, even though it had ended badly for him – but he thought it was worth it, because one had led to the other, and either one on its own would have been more than enough for him.
The year progressed slowly toward the Winter Solstice. At the Summer Solstice, Queen Mab received emissaries from the Seelie Court and sent ambassadors of her own bearing gifts to Queen Titania. Murtagh told Ramel that Queen Mab had sent a magnificent young faehal to Queen Titania, the son of the two best warhorses that the Unseelie Court had seen in a century. Somehow, despite his sire and dam’s dark coloring, the colt had come out pure white, which Mab took as a sign to give the young faehal to her crown-sister. Ramel thought longingly of the day when he would train his own warhorse as a Knight.
His training as a page continued unabated. The training master hadn’t even given the bruises under his eyes a second look, especially once Ramel kept up with the other pages during the morning’s drills. The only scar Ramel bore from that day was an invisible one: he shied away from taking hits to the face, until one evening just after midsummer he turned to Murtagh during their study time and said, “Punch me.”
“Excuse me?” Murtagh, arching an eyebrow as he looked up from his history work. In addition to staff work, physical conditioning, riding and strategy, the pages took classes in Court history, flora and fauna, healing, navigation and rudimentary runes. When they earned their squire’s vests, their studies continued for the first decade, but then beyond that, the squires directed their own studies. Some specialized in certain aspects of navigation or healing, but most continued to advance their knowledge in every area possible to prepare for the gauntlet.
Ramel took a breath and stood in the center of their barracks room, facing Murtagh. “Punch me. In the face.” He grimaced. “I’ve been avoiding it since the hit I took from Squire Kieran. I need to get over it.”
“I’m not going to just hit you for no reason,” protested Murtagh.
“It is for a reason. People will start to notice if I keep protecting my face too much and shying away from hits. They’ll start using it in training bouts, and if I let it become a habit it will become a weakness.” Ramel shook his head. “I can’t let that happen, not if I can help it.”
“I’m sure Owain would gladly hit you in the face,” pointed out Murtagh mildly as he carefully marked his place in the history text and stood from his chair. “Or Carrick, for that matter.”
“I don’t know how I’m going to react,” said Ramel truthfully. “If I start crying like a baby, I’d rather it be in front of you than them.”
“Fair enough,” conceded Murtagh. He stood opposite Ramel and rolled his shoulders. “So…do you want to, I don’t know, at least pretend like we’re in a sparring match or something?”
Ramel swallowed thickly past the strange nausea gripping his stomach and the dread winding tendrils around his spine. He could already feel his body tensing. “No,” he croaked, “because then I’ll actually fight you and you know you’ll lose. Just do…”
He staggered back as Murtagh punched him squarely in the nose. Murtagh didn’t leap to help him as he tried to regain his balance. Ramel put his hands on his knees and tried to breathe past the panic squeezing his chest. It didn’t make sense, this ridiculous fear, but he couldn’t stop his body’s response any more than he could stop breathing.
“You just got hit in the face,” he murmured to himself, “and the world didn’t end.”
“I didn’t even break your nose again,” said Murtagh.
Ramel gingerly prodded his nose and gave a little nod of concession. “Thanks for that.”
“Don’t be so sure that you’d win in a fight against me,” commented the smaller page as he padded silently back to his desk.
“Unless you have some ability to magically sprout a third arm, I’m pretty certain I’d win,” retorted Ramel. Finally, as the panic receded, the vise around his lungs loosened. See? He told himself silently. It’s not so bad after all, nothing worth being so frightened over.
Murtagh didn’t reply but smiled an odd, secret smile as he opened his history textbook again.
“So, there will be some new pages tomorrow at training, I hear,” Ramel said to fill the silence. Maybe if he kept talking, he could muscle through the rest of the nausea still churning in his gut.
“So I hear as well,” murmured Murtagh.
“I wonder how many.” Ramel paced the length of the room, paused and then sat on his bed.
“Probably as many as were introduced a sennight ago,” said Murtagh, exasperation beginning to color his voice. “Don’t you have any studying to do?”
“Completed all the work for this week last night,” replied Ramel absently. “I mean, the selection timing for pages doesn’t really make sense, doe
s it? You’d think that they would wait until after the Solstice, when they know how many squires make Knight and Guard and how many pages are chosen as squires.”
Murtagh sighed. “It makes perfect sense. This way they can give the lads a few months to make sure they don’t want to run away right from the start. And if they need to choose more pages after the Solstice, they can.” He shrugged. “They’d only be behind less than a year in training. But I don’t think that’s happened for a while.”
“Squire Finnead and Squire Kieran were chosen after the Solstice,” replied Ramel. “They were deemed too young for the initial choice of pages, but then that was the year a few squires gave up their vests and they raised more pages to squires than they expected…”
“Are you going to write a biography of your hero, hmm?” Murtagh asked, carefully turning the page of his history text.
“Only after I’m a Knight and he’s one of the Queen’s Three.” Ramel said it without thinking, a cheeky grin on his face, and then he froze. How careless of him, to let slip that truth that he held so tightly. He glanced at Murtagh, found his roommate still bent over his homework, and continued in the same vein. “And of course, he’ll venture into the mortal world and bring back only the most beautiful and talented mortals for the Queen’s pleasure…”
Murtagh groaned and shook his head. “Is it too much to ask for a little peace and quiet?”
Ramel grinned and fetched his staff from where it lay against the wall by his bed. He spent the rest of the night drilling the most advanced staff patterns he knew, until his muscles ached and he fell into bed at the chime of the lights-out bell. As he drifted into sleep, he heard the princess’s voice in his head again, except this time he heard her say, Until tomorrow, ma saell caethrair.
He wondered a bit at that, since he’d never imagined her saying anything else than what he’d heard in his head on the day that she healed him. But exhaustion rose and claimed him, lulling him into a deep and dreamless sleep.
The day when the new pages joined the older pages always proved to be an interesting one. Their training master usually separated them by year-group or sometimes, if he felt that certain older pages needed a lesson in humility, by ability. The first day of integrated training for the younger pages was their first taste of the unforgiving regimen that would be their existence for at least the next decade of their life. In the afternoon, the squires joined the training session, one of the handful of days every year that they shared the practice yard with the pages. It made for a very crowded yard, but Ramel always relished the festive atmosphere and camaraderie as the pages all evaluated the newcomers, and the squires had an opportunity to see the skills of the pages who might one day become their squires, if they made it past the gauntlet and were chosen by the Queen at the Solstice. Some newly baptized Knights and Guards took squires right away, and some waited a few years. A few, like Knight Carden, deigned not to take a squire at all. Ramel didn’t really understand why a Knight wouldn’t want a squire, but he also understood that he couldn’t see it from any perspective other than that of a page who desperately wanted to be chosen as a squire.
The pages stood in orderly rows by height, each row precisely ten pages across. One arm’s length separated each page in the row, measured by the front row. Each column was perfectly aligned. Any imperfection in their formation would be punished by a long run, push-ups or any number of other physical tasks. The senior page was tasked with inspecting the formation before the training master arrived, but their current senior page, Carrick, wasn’t exactly the fleetest faehal in the stable. As a result, a few of the other older pages also clandestinely inspected the formation, correcting a few of the younger pages in the back ranks before resuming their places. It was a lesson they’d learned the hard way after Carrick became senior page two years ago.
Most of the pages in the front row were almost as tall as the squires. Even the youngest pages didn’t look like children – because while they were still young, they were physically almost grown. Ramel had read in his studies that mortals took almost two decades to reach their adult height, which he thought utterly ridiculous, given the fact that most mortals didn’t even live to be a century old. So, the new pages weren’t physically that much smaller than the older ones, though they lacked the definite muscle tone that years of hard physical practice had bestowed on the more senior pages.
Ramel curtailed his wandering thoughts and snapped to attention as the training master entered the yard. Knight Balaron was nearly five centuries old and had a terrible scar across his face from being burned by dragon-flame when he was a young Knight hunting the beasts in the Edhyre Mountains. Balaron the Beautiful, they called him, and he grinned and hoisted his tankard at whatever Knight yelled it when the Knights and Guards were in their cups.
Balaron gave their ranks a cursory inspection, but the pages could tell he really wasn’t looking hard for an excuse to punish them, as he did on some days. He tapped the top of the sandglass he always wore in a specially made leather holster at his hip. The pages swore that Balaron knew exactly how many grains of sand filtered through the narrow neck of the sandglass every minute.
“Well, my lads,” said Balaron, his voice carrying without him yelling. “What day is it today?”
“First Training Day!” the formation roared back.
“Indeed, indeed. We have two dozen enthusiastic youngsters who think to join you in your quest to one day become a Knight. Or a Guard,” Balaron added grudgingly, raising his one grizzled eyebrow. A few of the pages that had older brothers or fathers who were Guards suppressed a smile at the good-natured rivalry. “They received their staffs just last week. They’ve been sleeping with them, eating with them, really growing to love them.”
Some pages sniggered at that: they remembered the hellish first weeks of their own training, when they essentially became convinced that this wooden staff was their only friend in the world. Keep your staff close, and you would invite much less attention and pain from the training master. Lose your staff, drop your staff, fail to show your staff the proper care it deserved, and the training master or one of his assistants would quickly cut you out from the rest of the bewildered new pages like a hunting wolf separating a weak deer from the herd. Their fury made it seem as if you had insulted their mother, their sisters and Queen Mab herself by dropping your staff, or forgetting it at table in your rush to get to the training hall. Ramel smiled slightly. He dropped his staff exactly once, and he was sore for days. The training master and his staff ensured that the young pages understood that their training was serious. If they couldn’t tend to a simple wooden staff, how would they be able to handle the responsibility of real weaponry, a mount and perhaps a squire?
“So, this morning you will separate into the practice rings. Six pages to each ring. I will send you your new pages.” Balaron pointed a stern finger at the formation of pages. “You all know the rules of engagement,” he growled, though his good eye still gleamed with amusement. Even Balaron couldn’t resist the festivity of First Training Day. “Teach them humility, but don’t draw blood. Use only your basic steps for the first hour. And make no mistake, I’ll still be watching all of you.”
“Yes, sir,” replied the pages in unison. They collectively trembled, like hunting dogs waiting for their master to give them the command to pursue some unfortunate small animal.
“Get to it, then,” barked Balaron, tapping the hourglass at his hip.
The pages quickly separated, forming little groups of two or three and then finding a practice ring with the liquid speed of oil dropped into water. Ramel seized Murtagh’s arm and steered them toward a practice ring at the other end of the training yard. It was neither on the outskirts of the yard, nor right at the center: just the place to escape most of the notice of the training master and his assistants. Or at least that’s what Ramel thought. He eyed the other four pages who’d slid over to their ring. They were all younger than he and Murtagh, and two of them even nodded respectfu
lly to Ramel when he looked them over.
“Come on then, lads, look lively! Pick up your feet, let’s move!” The exhortation from one of Balaron’s assistant training masters echoed against the walls of the courtyard. Ramel glanced at Murtagh and grinned. The other page merely smiled, but his mirth didn’t reach his sharp green eyes.
“You don’t look excited enough for First Training Day,” admonished Ramel.
Murtagh shrugged with one shoulder. “Maybe I just don’t want to expend my energy grinning from ear to ear.”
Ramel rolled his eyes. “Suit yourself, wet blanket.”
“Wonder which we’ll get first,” one of the younger pages mused aloud as they leaned on their staffs and watched the two dozen pages running almost at a dead sprint into the training yard. Or rather, the pages were running almost at a dead sprint and the assistant training master loped easily alongside them. It was like watching a wolf run alongside ungainly pups.
“Looks like a better crop than last year,” commented Ramel. He grinned at the young page that shot him an affronted look.
“I thought we’re supposed to be needling the new ones,” Murtagh commented mildly.
“Oh, I’m just warming up,” replied Ramel cheerily. “Besides, all the young ones can use some toughening up anyway.”
The affronted young page sighed and held his tongue. Murtagh smiled a little at that.
“The lad has more restraint than you do,” he murmured to his russet-haired training partner.
“That he does,” chuckled Ramel. “No harm meant.”
“No harm done,” replied the younger page easily.
“And what’s your name?” said Ramel. It was a small courtesy to let the lad know that his thick skin was a trait to be cultivated.
“Moryn,” the young page replied. He regarded Ramel with serious blue eyes.
