But there was something else, too. Something in the set of those shoulders, the angle of that head, the sheer breadth of that childish grin. He was prideful but scared. Pride was his real armour, worn over some wound.
Alaric knew exactly what that was like.
The scribe was still at his desk when Alaric returned, though the ledger had been nudged aside to make room for an oozing meat pie that looked well on its way to rotting. Gods, the things these people allowed into their bodies.
Suppressing his gorge, Alaric nodded back towards the lists. “Tell me about the Upstart.”
The scribe glanced up, still chewing. “What’s to tell? Common-born. Born into servitude to some lord. Got hisspurs in a border skirmish—saved the lord’s son, supposedly. Story shifts, depending on who’s telling it.” He swallowed. “Been riding the circuit three seasons. Hasn’t lost in… eighteen months, give or take.”
“Eighteen months,” Alaric repeated.
“Could be more.” The scribe took another bite. “Hard to say. Point is, everyone bets on him. Odds are miserable, but he wins. Crowd eats that up. They like a nobody who keeps coming out on top.”
Yes, well, they would, wouldn’t they? Alaric suspected he already knew the next question, but he still asked, “Who trains him?”
“Himself, near as anyone can tell. He’s got a squire—skinny thing, been with him since the beginning. That’s it. No master-at-arms. His patron is some woman, House Kerran, I think. But they’re local and upstarts themselves. So it’s mostly just him and the boy and whatever coin he wins.”
Alaric let the picture settle. He had been right. This man had no lineage to lean on. No instruction to follow but what he’d learned himself. All alone—how had he got started? An image came to Alaric, then, of the Upstart as a boy, falling again and again off his horse, and not giving up. Now he was a man shaped by repetition and reward and awarded a knighthood for all his effort.
Yes, certainly, that kind of man would be rather protective of his title.
Alaric swallowed. So. He had wanted a challenge.
He turned back toward the lists. Through the crowd, he could see the Upstart dismounting, already surrounded by noise and motion. A smaller figure moved to meet him—slight, dark-haired, hands lifting instinctively toward the reins.
The squire from before. He really was a weak-bodied thing.
Alaric watched them.
The Upstart tossed his lance behind him without looking, and the squire’s hands were already waiting. The knight stripped his gauntlets and those, too, found their way into the young man’s careful grip, tucked under one arm while the other steadied the horse. They moved as one creature with two bodies—knight and squire, master and shadow.
He was too far away to hear, but when the Upstart scolded the squire, the youth’s face shuttered. But there was a practice to it that suggested years of such treatment; he took the knight’s frustration in stride.
Then the knight came to a sudden stop and turned. His hand fell heavy on the squire’s shoulder. To Alaric’s eyes, the motion was rough, dismissive even. Yet the squire straightened beneath it like a flower turning towards a harsh sun. Strangely, Alaric’s chest tightened at the sight. Here was loyalty in its purest form, the devotion of someone who’d been given purpose in a world that offered little. The squire looked at his knight the way. . . the way, what? Alaric lacked any comparison.
All that unabashed, shameless adoration, and the Upstart didn’t even notice. Or perhaps he’d grown so accustomed to that gaze that it had become as invisible as his own shadow.
Alaric swallowed against a sudden dryness in his mouth.
They fit together, those two. Years of shared dust and victory had forged something between them that Alaric couldn’t name but suddenly, fiercely wanted.
Brutish, he decided, focusing on the knight again.That was word for the Upstart. Brutish but brilliant. Someone who would fight Alaric to the last.
A worthy opponent indeed.
And there was the challenge.
Plenty of knights had fallen to him this season. Men clad in finer mail, schooled in loftier academies, born to grander names. They had charged with all the weight their noble houses could muster, and he had dispatched them all to the dust. It was not only objectively impressive, butinteresting.
He sought the purest test of mettle: skill against skill, unsullied by gilded pedigree or lavish retinue. He was curious, too, to observe how that boastful visage would crumble when confronted with true superiority.
What the proud, brutish face would look like when the Upstart lost.
He returned to the scribe.
“I wish to face the Upstart,” he declared.
The scribe set down his meat pie, a glob of glistening animal fat sliding down his chin to join the constellation of grease stains on his tunic. Alaric turned his eyes briefly heavenward as the scribe cleared his throat. “The Upstart?”
