†
Training began early the next morning. Before dawn had broken, Jael was up fetching water for the captain’s bath. Her first lesson—true knights carry an air of nobility; the people should know a knight without need for arms nor armaments nor armour. That meant keeping groomed, but for her it meant lugging two dozen buckets of water from the duct behind the lodge to the kitchen to boil, then to the great cauldron in the basement. Trey would wait for her there each morning, send her with his soiled clothes to the Religious Sisterhood for cleaning, then to his wardrobe to retrieve fresh silks and linens, hose, stockings and shoes, and whatever else he might want. She was to wash herself once those duties were done. If she was quick, the water would still be hot, and she’d have a few moments to relax before the grueling start of the day. If she wasn’t, she’d return to him standing naked outside the iron tub, and she would have to cross the basement with her eyes to the floor to deliver his clothes. This occurred her first morning, and she spent that evening alone in the cloister of the Temple Rock, praying to forget his lean, wiry frame, his golden-blonde mane wet and glistening.
After bathing, they broke their fast in the lodge common room to fresh bread and eggs and steaming blood sausage. The new squires were seated with the old, at the far end of the great table, separate from their presiding paladins. From them Jael learned her second lesson, the routine burdens of a squire of the Cross. There was feeding, grooming, and saddling of horses; oiling and sharpening of one’s presiding knight’s steel—his weapons and plate harness, or if he wore maille there’d be scouring in sacks of sand and vinegar. Then there was the training regimen. Each knight’s was different, and it was a squire’s duty to ensure the correct tools were ready when demanded. Tourney lances and swords would need to be racked, the tilts set, horses barded, and the knight himself would want help donning his harness. Then all of that would want taking down, but not before the squires themselves got in their own practice under the watchful eyes of their masters.
By the end of her first day, Jael was overwhelmed. Some skills she’d learned working with her father out in the fields—maintenance of equipment, handling horses—but never had she been held to such a strict schedule. Never had she been brought to the edge of exhaustion and not given reprieve for even a moment. This was far and apart from a farmer’s life, she realized. They expected more from her than she thought possible, to become a noble worthy of the title. She doubted herself those initial days, as did others, though not all.
Her third lesson: who to trust and who to serve—rank, heraldry, and church politics. She learned from her fellows that the Cross had bled thin, that aside from the seven paladins, there remained but one retaining knight and three confirmed squires. There had been a sickness the previous spring which killed off more than half of the Cross’s men, and since then, only a few aspirants endured till their Confirmation.
Among the confirmed were those whom Jael named the Black Brothers. They were squires “Dark Finger” Willas and Normand Armstrong, and quick to join them was Harold of Duskhall. Blackheart was the one who brought them against her. Though he was new, his lynching tree sigil was already well known. Moreover, the westerner stood taller than the bald-cheeked Willas and three stone heavier than the scrawny Armstrong. With them, his words carried influence, and those words were of the fate of Brandon Harpe. He blamed Jael for the aspirant’s failure—claimed she seduced Gildmane to earn her place. His friends were fast to agree. Normand inherited the attitude of his Paladin, Oswald King of the three pointed crown, who it seemed shared the views of his brother, Captain Holland, and of Willas’s paladin, John “Dark Arm” Fischer, who mocked Leonhardt openly her first evening at supper—as did Harold and his paladin, Godfrey Westheart.
“Some men are true,” Trey told Jael that very night after tracking her down to the Temple Rock cloister, “and others are florns in the Devil’s purse. The clergy owns half the Cross, the other half serves God, blood, and soil. You’ve seen what the church has to offer here in Pareo, bishops like Whitehand, and worse. Endure, Leonhardt, at least until it comes time for your Confirmation. Till I know what you’re made of.”
Four weeks passed after the captain said that to her, a month of constant training, jeering, evading Sylvertre’s attention, and savoring the cheers of paladins Troy Schirmer, Mathew Gardner, and brothers Sir Buckley and Squire Royce Armstrong. Their praise kept Jael’s spirit strong, and by the end, even the cool glare of silent Paladin Corvin was welcome compared to the hateful tongue of the Black Brothers.
Then the day of Confirmation arrived. It was time for the new squires to swear their final oaths, to decide if they truly wanted a life in the Cross, a life of endless duty and celibacy, forfeit of legacy, lineage, and promises. Leonhardt could think of nothing else but Zach as she, Sylvertre, and Blackheart knelt together in the great sanctuary of the Temple Rock. She saw him in every face on the fresco of the Messaii patriarchs and the red robed saint drawing Æturnum from the Holy Rock. She saw Zach in the mosaic of Saint Constance inlaid on the open floor; and in the tapestries, the high windows beaming, the seven travertine steps of the grand transept, and in the marbled stone of the high holy altar. His image haunted her—robbed the sanctuary of its beauty, the sacrament of its sanctity. The moment passed as if an unpleasant dream: Gildmane spoke. A vicar showered them with blessed water.
