Champion of the Ages
Copyright© 2026 by SummitMan
Chapter 12
The armory beneath the stair was cool and dim after the glare of the courtyard. Frances stood in the middle of it with her arms held out from her sides, like a child waiting to be undressed for bed, and let Haldor work.
He did it without speaking at first. The baldric came off, then the sword belt. He set the arming sword on the bench without wiping it. That told her something about his state of mind, because she had never once seen Haldor set down a blade that was not clean. He took the shield from her arm last of all and turned it to the light from the single high window. The bronze had gone black along the left side in a long tongue of soot, and where the fire had rolled over the rim, the rawhide beneath had shrunk and curled back from the edge like a lip drawn off a tooth.
“It held,” he said.
“It held,” Frances agreed.
He grunted, the sound a man makes when he is looking at the best thing he has ever made. Then he set the shield very gently against the wall and came back to her for the hauberk.
“Arms up, my lady.”
She raised them and the mail came over her head in a rush. The shoulder of the gambeson beneath was scorched brown where the rings had heated. Haldor ran his thumb along it and frowned.
“Did it burn you?”
“I don’t think so.” She rolled the shoulder. “Warm. Not burned.”
“Giovanni shall look at it regardless.” He began on the laces of the gambeson, then stopped with his thick fingers resting on the knot. His voice was low. “My lady. I have stood among the Guard of Ironwatch for thirty years. I have watched Sir Gareth fight since he was a boy in the squires’ yard, and I have never seen him so much as stagger. I have seen men grow faint in the yard from merely standing before him.” He shook his head slowly. “When he threw his first combination, I closed my eyes. I could not bear to watch it. And then the Guard went silent, and I opened them, and you were standing at his side while he stumbled past you.” He pulled the knot loose. “I have no words fit for it. It was the finest fighting I have seen in all my years, and I do not expect to see its like again.”
“I had about five seconds left,” Frances said slowly. Then, after a pause. “Maybe less.”
Frances sat down heavily on the bench beside the sword as her legs decided to start shaking. She pressed her palms flat on her thighs to make them stop.
“If he’d held his shield up through two more bashes, I’d have been the one dead in the square. My arm was gone.”
Haldor considered this for a long moment. Then, at last, he picked up the sword and began to wipe it down with a rag from his apron.
“Then Sir Gareth plainly could not hold,” he said. “For he is dead, my lady, and you are sitting upon my bench.”
“Fair point.” Frances laughed.
“It is the only point.” He sighted down the blade, found something he disliked near the tip, and set it aside for later. “The men who fight do not get to choose how much they have left. Only whether they have more than the man in front of them.”
She sat with that for a moment. It was about as close to philosophy as Haldor was ever going to come, she thought, and it was better than most of what she’d read.
“I need to talk to Prince Corin,” she said. “Today, and privately. About the Guard. Where’s the right place for that? I don’t want to summon him to my chambers like a kid in trouble, and I don’t want it anywhere the whole castle can watch us.”
Haldor’s beard moved. “The Captain of the Guard keeps a private chamber above the guardhouse, my lady, off the north wall. It is where he receives his sergeants and keeps his rolls. No one goes there who is not sent for.”
“Good. That’s perfect.” She thought for a second. “Can you have a message sent to him? Say that the Commander would like to meet with him in his chambers at the fourteenth bell. Say it exactly that way. Would like. Not requires.”
Haldor’s eyebrows rose a fraction, then came down again as he understood her. “It shall be done, my lady. I will send my own apprentice. He is a good lad and does not embroider.”
Several minutes later, the door at the top of the stair banged open and Marguerite came down at something very close to a run. She crossed the armory floor in five quick strides, threw both arms around Frances where she sat on the bench, sweat-soaked shirt and all, and held on.
“You are alive,” she said into Frances’s shoulder. Her voice was thick. “You are alive. After the fire I could not see. No one could. I thought...” She stopped, did not finish what she had thought, and simply held on harder.
After a startled second, Frances put her arms around her and held on back. She could not remember the last time anyone had hugged her like this. A hug from someone who had been afraid of losing her.
“I’m fine,” she said quietly. “I’m all right. I promise.”
At last Marguerite let go and stepped back, scrubbing at her eyes with the heel of one hand, and visibly gathered herself back into the shape of a First Lady-in-Waiting. Haldor had found something very interesting to examine on the far wall.
“Forgive me, my lady. That was not fitting.”
“It was fitting. And I needed it.”
Marguerite nodded, drew a breath, and became businesslike again. “I have had the noble bathhouse of the castle prepared for you, my lady. It is heated, there is no one in it, and there will be no one, for I have set a girl at the door. There are clean cloths laid ready, and your day wear, and fresh linen.” Her eyes went over Frances’s soaked shirt and the scorched gambeson on the bench, and her mouth tightened with something like professional disapproval. “You are not fit to be seen by a prince, my lady, and you have one to see.”
“I have one to see at the fourteenth bell,” Frances said. “Word travels fast.”
“The word passed through my hands, my lady. I know who Haldor’s apprentice is.” Marguerite held out a hand to help her up, and Frances, who did not need it, took it anyway. “After you have bathed, we shall take lunch. You have eaten nothing since dawn.”
Frances thanked Haldor, who grunted, and followed Marguerite up the stair and across a corner of the courtyard. Most of the crowd had gone. A handful of stewards were raking fresh sand over the dark place in the chalk square, and near the mages’ benches two men from the Guard were lifting something long and wrapped in canvas onto a litter. Frances looked at it for exactly as long as it took to understand what it was, and then looked away.
People stopped as she passed. A pair of kitchen boys froze mid-step with a basket between them. A guardsman at the gate arch straightened so hard his spear rattled. Nobody spoke to her. Nobody seemed able to look at her face.
“My lady,” Marguerite said as they turned under an arch into a quieter passage, “I should remind you that the Baron holds his dinner tomorrow evening. You are expected.”
“Right. The dinner.” Frances had not forgotten it so much as filed it away in her mind. “How big is it? Great hall, two hundred people, speeches? That kind of thing?”
“I do not believe so, my lady. As I understand it, it is to be the Baron and his family at table, his lady wife and their son, and perhaps one or two of his household. And afterward the Baron has asked for a private meeting with you.” Marguerite glanced at her sidelong. “I could not learn its purpose. The Baron’s steward is a close man.”
A private meeting. Frances turned that over. Baron Theron Ironwatch had read the precedent from Edmund’s scroll in front of eight hundred people when asked. That was important. He was unlikely to be part of Gregory’s scheme.
“Then I’ll wear the formal set,” she said. “The first one Edric delivered. If I’m meeting his family, I want to look like the Commander, not like someone who came straight from the forge.”
“I have already had it pressed, my lady.”
Marguerite looked straight ahead with the composed, faintly smug expression of a woman who had been several steps ahead of her employer all day and intended to stay that way.
The bathhouse was a low, vaulted room of pale stone, with steam lying along the surface of a sunken pool the size of a small classroom. Marguerite showed her the cloths and the soap and the clean clothes on a bench, then withdrew to stand outside the door with the girl she had posted there.
Frances peeled off the rest of her clothes and lowered herself into the water by degrees. When it reached her shoulders, she leaned back against the stone lip of the pool, closed her eyes, and let out a small sob she would not have made if anyone had been listening.
Two men, she thought. She had killed two men that day.
She had known there would be at least one. She had made her peace with it in the abstract, the way a soldier makes peace with things in the abstract. Sir Gareth had come into that square meaning to kill her, and men he trusted had told him it would be easy. She did not think she would lose sleep over Gareth. She thought she might, some night, remember the look of his knee going sideways.
Gregory was different. She had said she would kill Gregory, out loud, at a dinner table, in front of witnesses, and then she had gone and done it. She remembered a previous life, standing in a dark kitchen at 5:40 in the morning with bacon fat whispering in the skillet. That person would have been horrified. Lying in the warm water, Frances searched for that woman and found her. She was still there. But she was very far away, and very small, and she did not have a vote anymore.
He attacked a lawful commander in front of the Guard, she told herself. There was no other ending to that.
It was true. She let it be true, and stayed in the water until her fingers wrinkled. Then she got out, dressed, and went to lunch.
The Captain of the Guard’s chamber sat at the top of a narrow stair above the guardhouse. When the guardsman posted at the foot of it saw her, he came to attention so abruptly that he nearly fell down it.
Frances climbed the stair at the fourteenth bell exactly. She had eaten and bathed, and over lunch Giovanni had looked at her shoulder and pronounced it a mild scald that would trouble her for a day. She wore the plain dark day wear, the severe tunic with its single band of braid. She had thought about the formal set and decided against it. She did not want to look as though she had dressed for an occasion. She wanted to look as though this were an ordinary afternoon’s work, because she intended it to become one.
The door was open. Prince Corin Solmar stood behind a broad table covered in rolls and tallies. She suspected he had been standing for some minutes, because he had the slightly fixed posture of a man who has decided where he will be when the door opens and has not dared to move since.
“Commander,” he said.
“Prince Corin.” She came in and closed the door behind her. “Thank you for seeing me.”
He gestured to a chair. She took it. After a moment’s visible hesitation, he sat as well.
Up close, he looked younger than he had on the platform: thirty, perhaps, with his father’s long jaw and dark eyes that were working very hard to give nothing away. He had changed out of the morning’s finery into a plain captain’s tunic. She wondered whether he had thought about his clothes as carefully as she had thought about hers, and decided that he probably had.
She did not waste his time, or hers.
“I’m going to be direct with you,” she said, “because I think it’ll save us both a lot of trouble. I worked out the scheme Gregory built. The scroll, the requirements, the way he argued martial ability down to almost nothing and then called for a Trial he knew I’d lose. And I know you were part of it. You stood up this morning and made the challenge formal, and that’s the only thing that gave it legal teeth. Gregory couldn’t do it alone. He needed you.”
Corin did not move. His face went very still, like a man who had expected this conversation and had still hoped, somewhere, that it would not come.
“In my world,” Frances went on, “there’s a saying. Keep your friends close, and your enemies closer.” She folded her hands on the table. “So I’m keeping you close. What I want to know is which one you are. A friend? An enemy?” She tilted her head. “Or something in between?”
For a long moment the only sound was a sergeant’s voice drifting up from the yard below, calling a drill.
“I will not insult you by denying it,” Corin said at last. His voice was steady, but it had cost him something to keep it so. “Gregory came to me with the matter some months past. He laid it out much as you have, though he was considerably prouder of it. I did not devise it. I lifted no hand in the making of it. But I knew of it, and I did not stop it, and this morning I spoke the words he asked me to speak.” He met her eyes. “My part was a passive one, my lady, and I will own it as such. But I would have you know also that no law was broken in any of it, and no custom violated. Every step was within right.”
“I know,” Frances said. “Edmund and I went through it line by line. It was legal. It was customary. Nobody can lay a finger on you for it.” She let a beat pass. “Going forward, that isn’t good enough.”
He blinked.
“Here’s what I need you to understand,” she said. “There’s no version of the future where you succeed by pushing me aside. Not now. That door shut this morning when Sir Gareth went down. If you try to undermine me from here, you won’t get the army, because the army watched what happened in that courtyard. You saw their faces. I saw you see them. All you’ll get is a reputation as the prince who tried to knife the Champion in the back while the realm was in danger. And a reputation like that follows a man home to his father.”
Corin was quiet for some time. Then he slowly inclined his head. “Upon the evidence of this morning,” he said, “I cannot dispute it. That door is shut.”
“Good. Then let’s talk about the one that’s open.” Frances leaned back in her chair. “I want you to think about where you want to be when all this is over. Not tomorrow. Three years from now, four, when the war’s done. Where do you want to be standing?”
He did not answer. She had not really expected him to.
“Let me tell you where I’ll be,” she said. “Gone. When this is finished, I go back to my own world, and nobody in Valdoria ever sees me again. That’s the deal I made with the mages. I have no long-term plans here. I’m not trying to build a power base. I don’t want land, or a title, or a seat at your father’s table. My goal is to win the war. That’s the whole list.” She held his gaze. “So ask yourself this. At the end of it, will you be better placed for having supported me, or for having undermined me?”
“You put it very plainly, my lady.”
“I’ve been told I do that.” She spread her hands. “I’ve got no problem with you being seen. In fact, I want it. I want the realm to know that the prince who commanded the Guard at Ironwatch stood on the wall when the invasion came and helped break it. I’ll make sure of that personally. You could come out of this war in a far better position than the one you’re in now. Not a second son sent four hundred miles from home to count spears. Something else entirely.”
Something moved behind Corin’s eyes at that. He had not known that she knew. She watched him take it in, file it, and decide not to ask.
“That may well be true,” he said carefully.
“It is true. But I want you to consider something else first.” Frances sat forward again, and when she spoke she let some iron into her voice, the same iron she had used in the courtyard that morning. “I was summoned to this world against a set of criteria. You know that. Gregory made very sure of it. And the least of those criteria, the very last thing on the scroll, the afterthought, was martial ability.”
She let that sit.
“You saw what happened this morning. That was the least of what the spell was looking for. So I want you to think very hard about what my capabilities might be in the things the spell actually wanted. Knowledge of weapons and their history. Strategy. Tactics. Logistics. Leadership.” She held up a finger for each and watched his eyes follow them. “I come from a world that has been at war, in one place or another, for thousands of years. A world where war was taken to a high art. Where military theory is studied at universities and admired the way you’d admire poetry. Where men have written down in detail how a hundred thousand soldiers are fed and moved and commanded, and other men have argued about it for centuries. I’ve read most of it. And I intend to bring a great deal of it to bear here, in Valdoria.”
Corin had gone quite still, but it was a different stillness from before. Before, he had been a man bracing for a blow. Now he was a man who had looked over a wall he had assumed was the edge of the world and seen a great deal of country on the other side.
“I have a Council of Mages,” Frances said. “I’ve added Haldor, our armorer, and Edmund, our librarian, because they’ve earned it and because I need people at that table who think with their hands. But I don’t have a military staff, and everything I know is meant to be applied to the military. Without a staff, it’s just a woman in a room with a lot of books.” She looked at him directly. “And the person who’s going to be key to all of it is you.”
He opened his mouth, and closed it again.
“I need your active cooperation,” Frances said. “Not your neutrality. Not your silence. Your work. You’re still Captain of the Guard, and I need you in that role. But I need more than that, too. I need Prince Corin Solmar, second son of King Aldric the Fifth. I need the man who can write to the capital and be read. Who can sit across from a baron as an equal and be listened to by the Crown.”
She saw the flicker of alarm and answered it before he could voice it.
“I’m not plotting against your father. I want to be absolutely clear about that. I’m plotting to win this war. And to win it, we’re going to need money, a great deal of it. We’re going to need coordination between castles that have never coordinated in their lives. We’re going to need weapons that don’t exist yet, and an army trained in ways it’s never been trained. I can’t do that alone. And I can’t do it through the military alone either, because most of what wins a war isn’t fought on a battlefield at all.”
She stood, walked to the narrow window, and looked down at the yard, where the sergeant was still calling his drill.
“We’re about to enter a large war, Corin. A significant war. Not a skirmish settled in an afternoon. The Oracles think it might be a hundred times the size of the last invasion. It might end Valdoria’s autonomy. It might end Valdoria as a country.” She turned back to him. “My goal isn’t only to win it. It’s to make sure that when it’s over, Valdoria is in a position to thrive. And I’d very much like you to be standing beside me when that happens, rather than somewhere off to one side, wondering what might have been.”
The silence that followed lasted long enough for the drill in the yard below to end and a new one to begin.
Prince Corin Solmar stood up.
“My lady Commander,” he said. His voice was not quite steady now, and he did not seem to mind. “I have spent four years in this chamber counting spears and hearing complaints about salt beef, believing that this was the whole of what my life would ever ask of me. Gregory offered me a way out of it, and I took his offer because it was the only one I had ever been given.” He drew a breath. “You have offered me another. I find I like it a great deal better.” He bowed properly, from the waist. “I am with you.”
Frances held his gaze a moment longer, weighing it. It was not a promise that would stand up to everything. Nothing ever did. But it was a beginning, and it was more than she had walked in with.
“Thank you,” she said, and meant it. “Then I have two requests to start with. First, I’d like to review the Guard. All of them, formed up in the courtyard, at the sixteenth bell. I want to see what I’m working with, and I want them to see me standing in front of them instead of fighting.”
“It shall be done.”
“Second, I’d like you to join me for dinner this evening with my Council of Mages, in the mages’ dining hall, at the nineteenth bell. You’ll be meeting the rest of the people you’ll be working with.”
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