Champion of the Ages
Copyright© 2026 by SummitMan
Chapter 11
Sir Gareth the Unbroken came into the Main Courtyard through the gate beneath the armory stair, and he was smiling before he had taken four steps.
He had been smiling, on and off, for five days.
He was not the largest of men, and had long ago stopped caring, because size mattered to men who had to lean on it. He was quick. He was quicker than anyone he had ever met, and he hit with a ferocity that had, more than once, caused men to simply stop in the middle of an exchange and stare at him as though he had broken some unspoken rule of how hard something was permitted to be struck. He had a half-dozen attacks of his own devising, and they did not fail. They were fended off in the practice yard, now and then, because in the practice yard a man used a blunt and a man did not kill his fellow guardsmen, and everybody there had watched him throw the same combinations for eleven years and knew them the way they knew the sound of the dinner bell.
But in a real fight, even against a man who had memorized his attacks, they worked. They always worked. That was why he was called what he was called.
The Champion came in from the opposite gate, and Gareth’s smile widened into a smirk.
The sword caught the morning sun and threw it back in a long white line. The hauberk had been scoured and oiled until the whole of it glowed, every ring of it, so that she came out of the shadow of the gate arch looking like something out of a tapestry. And the kite shield! The kite shield had been faced in beaten bronze, burnished to a mirror, so bright he had to look away from it for a moment.
Of course, he thought.
A woman’s answer to a duel. Make it pretty. Make it so that eight hundred people would look at her and say what a magnificent thing she was, and never mind the two pounds of metal hung off the end of her left arm, which she clearly had no notion of at all. In the fourth minute of a hard bout, when your breath was coming in through a straw and your shield arm had turned to wet rope, two pounds was the difference between a guard that held and a guard that sagged, and a guard that sagged was a dead man.
Not that she would see the fourth minute. Not that she would see the first.
He had been briefed an hour ago, in the shade behind the stable block, by Gregory of Blackwood and by Sergeant Harn.
“She is soft through the middle,” Gregory had said. “A teacher of history, in her own world, by her own admission. She eats too much and she moves like it. You will find her slow.”
“The mages gave her the Training Pocket,” Harn had added, not quite a warning.
Gareth had snorted at that, and he snorted again now, remembering it.
The Training Pocket. As though two or three passages through that place would make a fighter out of anyone. The Pocket was a test of will, reserved for knights and nobility who had already trained for years before they were judged fit to enter, because it taught you by breaking you, and it kept breaking you until your will gave out. He had gone in more than twenty times before he could no longer stomach it. Twenty-one, in truth, and he said more than twenty because the exact number had a quality to it he did not care to examine.
He told men about the twenty. He did not tell them about the nights afterward. He did not tell them about what it had done to him, to die and die and die, to be a man who had never lost and to lose, over and over, to creatures that did not care who he was. He had not spoken of it to a living soul. He simply said, I have gone in over twenty times, and let men make of it what they would, and they made a great deal of it.
Three passages. A soft woman, three passages, against eleven years of training.
The courtyard was cleared. Gareth stood easy with his shield on his arm and watched them do it. The stewards walked the lines, the last of the civilians were pressed back against the far wall under the gatehouse, and the Guard formed up along the north side in ranks that went back six deep and spilled onto the steps. The mages had their benches on the east, under an awning. The Baron and the nobility sat on the raised platform beneath the keep, in the shade, with the Baron’s banner hanging slack in the still air.
Prince Corin Solmar rose from the platform, and the courtyard quieted.
“The Army challenges the summoned Champion to the Trial of the Champion.” His voice carried well; he had a good voice for it. “The Army asserts the following. That the working of the summoning was broken. That the summoning produced a woman who is not fit for the role. That the Champion has little martial ability. For these reasons the Army has called for the Trial of the Champion, that this error be corrected. And that when the summoned Champion falls, the Baron shall appoint a true Commander to lead the army.”
Gareth nodded along to it. It was a travesty, what the mages had done. After months of labor, and a fortune of the Crown’s coin, they had fetched up a schoolmistress. He bore her no ill will. She had not asked to be summoned, by all accounts, and a man did not hate the arrow for being badly loosed. But it had to be put right, and he was the instrument by which it would be put right, and there was a cleanness in it that he found satisfying.
Then Baron Theron Ironwatch stood up, and there was a ripple through the yard, because nobody had expected a second speech.
The Baron had a scroll in his hands. He read from it, which was itself unusual.
Gareth did not attend closely to the beginning. Something about the antiquity of the Trial, the weight of custom, the first such contest in more than five hundred years. The last, at least, was worth hearing, because it meant that whatever happened in the next minute would be spoken of for a hundred years, and his name would be in it.
Then the Baron came to a part that made him listen properly.
“—and it is held by custom and by law, without appeal and without confirmation, that should the summoned Champion prevail in the Trial, the Champion becomes in that moment the Commander of the Guard, and also Commander of the Armies of Valdoria.”
A noise went through the Guard. Not quite a murmur. Something lower.
“And should the summoned Champion fall,” the Baron continued, “the office stands vacant, and I shall appoint a Commander, to be confirmed by His Majesty the King.”
Gareth nodded. The last was only the Captain’s statement said again in older words. Lawyers’ work. It changed nothing.
He walked out to the marked ground.
The square was laid in the middle of the yard, perhaps twenty paces to a side, scratched into the packed earth with a hoe and then chalked. It was custom to fight within it. It was not required, and Gareth had gone outside it twice in his life, both times in pursuit.
He watched the Champion come to her mark.
She was larger than he had been led to expect. He had pictured a noblewoman of average build gone to fat, the sort you saw at a baron’s table, comfortable, soft-handed. This woman came across the chalk at his own height, give or take a finger’s width, and she was broad through the shoulders in a way the hauberk did not disguise. It hung on her without strain.
Gareth shrugged, inwardly. It made no difference. Size was what men leaned on when they had nothing else.
They faced one another from either end of the square. The herald stood off to one side with his staff, and waited for the Baron’s hand, and got it.
“Begin!”
Gareth did not move at once. He watched her instead, because he always watched, for a breath or two. The waiting cost nothing and it had told him a great deal over the years. Men came forward in a rush, or they came sideways with their shield crabbed out in front of them, or they stood rooted with their weight back on the heels, which was the tell of a man who had already lost.
The Champion took three steps into the square and stopped.
Her weight was forward. Her knees were soft. Her shield was not crabbed out and not hugged in; it simply sat where it ought to sit, and did not move at all.
Well, Gareth thought. Time to finish this.
He went at her in a quick walk, not a run, because a run spent breath and arrived unbalanced. And then, within three paces of her, he accelerated hard and planted his right foot.
This was it. This was the combination he had built in his nineteenth year. It was a combination that never failed when executed perfectly, and Sir Gareth the Unbroken never executed it any way but perfectly.
Shield high, to dominate the centerline and take her eyes. Weight driving forward behind it. And out of the shadow of that raised shield, a downward diagonal cut, vicious, fully committed, falling at the left collarbone and the open line of the neck beneath it.
She raised her shield to catch it, exactly as she should.
But the shield was not flat.
It was canted, steeply, deliberately, at an angle he had an instant to recognize and no instant at all to answer, and his blade, which should have hammered that shield down and left her arm sagging and her guard split, skidded. It skated off the bronze with a long shrieking scrape and went away down and outward into nothing, taking his arm and his shoulder and a good portion of his weight with it.
He stepped in anyway to drive the iron rim of his own shield into her face, because that was what came next and his body knew it better than his mind did.
But the missed cut had turned him a hand’s breadth off his line, and the shield bash went out late, a fraction late, no more, and she simply was not there. She had stepped off to his open side while he was still arriving, and he was thrusting his sword into the precise point in the air where her throat had been and no longer was.
Gareth stumbled forward into the absence of her.
He got his head down. He got his head down out of instinct, out of eleven years, and a sword hit the crown of his helm with a bright flat clang that rang through his skull and set his ears singing, and then he was three paces past her and hauling his shield back across his body and getting his feet under him again.
The Guard had begun to cheer. They had seen the shield go high and the right foot plant, and five hundred men who had watched him throw that combination in the yard for a decade had started to roar before the sword had finished falling.
The roar died in their throats.
It cut off, all at once, as though a hand had been clapped over the mouth of the entire north wall, and what replaced it was a silence of a kind Gareth had never heard in that courtyard. It was the silence of many hundreds of men who have just watched something happen that they could not understand.
He turned, and shook his head once to clear it, and reset.
Unexpected, he thought.
But not impossible. Not even unlikely, when he considered it. He had thrown that combination in the practice yard ten thousand times in front of every guardsman in the garrison. Any one of them could have described it to her. Any one of them could have worked out the counter, which was a canted shield and a step off the line and drilled it into her over five days. It was not sorcery. Clever, that. Clever of somebody, and he would find out who, afterward, and have words.
So: she had been given one answer. Very well. He had more than one question.
He gave her the next one almost lazily.
It was the move he threw at squires. A descending cut at the shoulder, at three-quarters speed, telegraphed a half-beat early and falling with no real weight behind it. An invitation, and an insult. A man who could not fight saw it coming and panicked and threw his whole shield up at it, over-committing, and Gareth killed him under the rising shield in the next half-second. A man who could fight recognized it as the contempt it was, ignored it entirely, and came forward at him in a fury, which was its own kind of mistake and he had answers for that too.
She did neither.
She angled the shield, canted, the same economy, no more motion than was required, and let the blade skid harmlessly away. And then she did nothing. She neither countered nor advanced. She reset her feet, and her shield returned to where it had been, and she gave him absolutely nothing back.
Gareth found, to his considerable annoyance, that he had learned not one thing about her.
Enough.
Strength, then. He had been going light and going clever, and clever was apparently not getting him anywhere this morning, so he would simply take the shield away from her.
He stepped in and brought the full overhand down.
This was not a killing cut. This was the cut that made killing cuts possible and everything in his repertoire ran downstream of it. All of his weight, all of his hips, the blade coming down onto the face of a kite shield like a maul onto a wedge. He had split shields with it. More often he split the man behind it, because an arm that has taken that blow sags for a full second afterward, and the second cut comes down into the gap the sag makes.
She did not take it on the face of the shield.
She canted it, steeply, again, always the same answer, as though she had only the one and it happened to be enough, and she stepped into the line as the blade fell, closing the distance so that it skated down the bronze and past her and buried its edge in the packed dirt a hand’s width beside her foot.
The whole of his committed weight went into the ground.
And then she attacked for the first time.
She hammered the boss of her shield into his. Once, a short, brutal, percussive thing with no wind-up at all, delivered from a foot away with her hips behind it and two pounds of bronze on the front of it. Twice. A third time, each strike driving straight through the wood and the boss and the strap and into the meat of his shield arm, and his whole left side rang like a struck anvil.
Crude, Gareth thought, giving ground. Peasant work.
He had seen it in the levies. A man with no blade-craft hammering away with his shield, hoping to batter through by main force, and the answer was simply to step back and let him exhaust himself against air, because nobody could sustain it and nobody ever broke through.
He gave ground, and the hammering stopped.
He had a half-second of satisfaction at how easily it had been dealt with.
Then he noticed that his shield arm was still ringing, a deep, unpleasant hum from the elbow up into the shoulder, and that she had stopped on her own, after three, at no cost to herself and with her wind barely touched, and had already reset.
She had not been trying to break through.
Gareth felt uncertainty. Or maybe fear. But it was not fear. He knew fear; he had met it twice in the Training Pocket and recognized it both times. It was something colder and smaller and more insulting than fear.
She had been buying his shoulder.