Champion of the Ages
Copyright© 2026 by SummitMan
Chapter 10
Frances was standing in the Study Pocket at the eleventh bell, dressed and waiting, when Haldor came through the door with the shield under his arm.
He had wrapped it in sacking, which was either craftsman’s care for the finish or a small, unadmitted piece of theater, and she suspected she knew which. He set it on the long table and peeled the cloth back without a word.
The bronze had been beaten thin and burnished until it threw the mana-light back at her in a single soft sheet, and beneath its edge she could see the dull, dark line of the rawhide where it lapped over the rim. It did not look like a decorated thing. It looked like a tool that had been given one more job.
“Both are finished,” Haldor said. “This, and its twin. The hide took the brine better than I had any right to expect.”
Frances laced into the gambeson, took the hauberk over her head with the practiced shrug that had replaced a year of struggling, and let Haldor settle the straps. Then she picked up the shield.
She hardly noticed the weight at all.
Which proves nothing, she thought, running it through a slow figure-eight and watching the bronze swing. Nobody ever lost a fight in the first ten seconds. The question was not what an extra two pounds felt like now. The question was what two pounds felt like in the fifth minute, at the end of a dead arm, with a man who had never lost coming forward through her guard. Weight was a liar at the start of a bout and told the truth at the end of one.
“It’s good work,” she said, and meant it, and went out to the arch.
The next thirty days, which turned into sixty days, were brutal.
The weight made a difference, exactly as she had suspected it would, and the difference ran in both directions at once.
The bash was the gift. The first time she drove the boss into a Dark Knight’s shield with the bronze behind it, the man went back a full step instead of a half step, and his sword arm came out of line for a quarter-second longer than it ever had, and she put a foot of steel through the gap before she had consciously decided to. She sat on the forest floor afterward with her back against her tree and thought about that quarter-second for a long time. Two pounds, correctly placed, had bought her an opening that a year of technique had not.
The inertia was the cost. The shield wanted to keep going wherever she had last sent it. Lateral recoveries, the sharp, flat, side-to-side corrections that had kept her alive against a knight who worked the angles, came back slower now, a hair late, and a hair late was how you died.
So she stopped trying to stop things.
She had been absorbing blows square on the face of the shield for a year, taking the full shock into her arm and her shoulder and the long muscles of her back, because a square block was certain and a deflection was not. Now she angled instead and always presented the shield canted, so a descending cut found a sloped surface and skidded off down and away, the bronze doing its own part by giving the steel nothing to bite into. The first dozen times she misjudged it and ate a blade. The next dozen she overcorrected and opened her centerline. And then, somewhere in the third week, it stopped being a decision and started being a property of her left arm.
It was better. It was unambiguously better: a deflected cut cost her a fraction of what an absorbed one did, and over four minutes those fractions were the entire argument. But it was slower side to side, and no amount of training was going to make bronze weigh less.
The real problem arrived on schedule, every time.
At just over four minutes her shield arm was beaten. Not just tired, but rather beaten, the deltoid gone to a hot liquid weight that she was raising by force of will and nothing else, the shield drifting down two inches, then four, then enough. She had spent two months and a mountain’s worth of thin air buying herself the fifth minute, and Haldor’s bronze had quietly repossessed most of it on the first day.
Frances did not take this personally. She wrote it down, in her head, in block capitals, and went to work.
The training changed shape. She was no longer building the whole body; she was building one side of it. Left shoulder, left arm, the lat and the oblique and the long column of muscle down the left of her spine that actually paid for every raised shield, and her legs, both legs, because the legs were what kept the shoulder from having to do the work alone, and a shield held up by the arm was a shield that fell at four minutes while a shield held up by the floor could last all day.
She invented a drill: hold the shield in guard and simply walk the perimeter of the clearing until the arm failed, then rest, then do it again. It was stupid and boring and it worked. She did it in the Study Pocket’s thin air until her vision swam. She took the heavier backup sword in her right hand purely to load the other side and keep herself square. She fought with her feet wider, dropped lower, let the ground carry what the shoulder had been carrying.
And Giovanni, every time she came through the door, took her hand in both of his and went looking.
He had become, over the past two months, something other than a healer who attended her. He had become a man running an experiment who happened to have an unlimited supply of the one subject he needed. He kept the codex. He measured. He mended the microscopic tearing in the shoulder the same hour it happened and then, with a second working, encouraged the rebuilding of it, and the rebuilding went on through her sleep and was finished by breakfast, and she woke each morning fractionally stronger on one side than she had been the night before.
Four minutes became four and a quarter. Four and a quarter became four and a half. The grind of it was unglamorous in a way she had come to find almost restful: there was no cleverness left to apply, no insight waiting to be had, only the rep, and the mending, and the rep again.
In the fourth week she held a Dark Knight for four minutes and fifty seconds, with the shield still where it belonged, and killed him in the fifty-first second with a thrust he was too tired to answer.
She lay on her back in the leaf litter afterward, breathing like a bellows, and did the arithmetic she had been doing every day since Haldor first said the words finest knight in living memory.
The Dark Knights never lasted long past four minutes. Not once, in thousands of bouts, had one of them still been fighting properly at four and a quarter. By this time, the cuts had slowed, the shield sank, the recoveries came late, exactly as hers once had. Whatever intelligence ran this place had built them to match her, and it had evidently decided that four minutes was what a man of that caliber had in him.
She had between four and a half and five.
Call it a thirty-second window. A minute, if everything broke her way and nothing broke his.
She would have liked more. She had spent a year learning that more was not something anyone was going to hand her.
And God help me if Sir Gareth is better conditioned than the Dark Knight who was used to train me, she thought.
She kept at it until Giovanni stopped her.
He had never done that before. He took her hand at the door after a bout she had won, held it a long moment, and then set it down.
“You are finished, my lady.”
“I’ve got another two cycles in me today.”
“You have, and they will cost you more than they return.” He had gone professional in a way she rarely saw from him anymore. “The arm, the shoulder, the back and the leg upon your shield side have reached a limit. The limit is not of your will, which I think has no limit at all, but of the tissue. There is nothing further I can encourage there that the body is willing to build in the time we have. From here, more work is simply damage, and damage I would then have to mend, and the mending takes from the same account. You have reached the top of this particular hill.”
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