Champion of the Ages
Copyright© 2026 by SummitMan
Chapter 16
Frances lay in bed for a while after she woke, looking up at the carved wolves running their endless circle around the sun, and went through her list for the day.
It was a long list. It had been getting longer every day since the Trial, and she could feel the old familiar pull of it, the part of her that had spent sixteen years believing that if something needed doing, she was the one who had to do it. Chess club. Basketball practice. Robotics. Lunches. Two dinners, one vegetarian.
Don’t overload yourself, she told herself firmly. Delegate. You’re the commander, not the person who has to do everything. Let someone else take over when they can.
She laid the day out in her head.
First, bring Prince Corin into the Training Pocket. Show him what she and Lucien had found. Explain how the spearmen and the shield wall could work together, and then step back and let him run with it. It was his army. It needed to become his idea.
Second, the leatherworker, about a collar for the dreks. Third, a carpenter, about a spinning wheel. Get the prototypes started, hand them off, and then work out how to scale them up later.
A drek collar. She turned the thought over and found herself smiling at the ceiling. If it worked the way she thought it would, it might matter more than almost anything else she did here. More ploughing. More hauling. Carts that moved at the pace of a man instead of the pace of an angry lizard. Farmers who could work more land and still send a son to the levy.
And there was a second advantage, one she had only begun to see the night before. Everything she had planned so far would cost the Crown money: bows, arrows, helmets, gambesons, armies. To King Aldric she would arrive as an enormous bill. But the civilian improvements were different. A drek collar, a spinning wheel, a better loom: those meant more grain, more cloth, more trade. And more of everything meant more taxes.
She could frame them as investments. She wouldn’t just be a drain on the Crown’s resources. She could offer the King a kingdom that would be richer after the war than before it.
That, she thought, is a conversation a king might actually want to have.
She got up.
After breakfast, Frances made her way to the archway of the Training Pocket, where Lucien and Prince Corin were already waiting. Lucien looked like a man who had not slept much. Prince Corin looked curious and slightly wary, the expression of a man who has been asked to a meeting without being told what it is about.
Frances raised her hand to the entry symbol.
“Wait,” Prince Corin said. “My lady, I am neither armored nor armed.” He glanced at the archway, and then at her, and for a moment Frances saw the memory of a great many unpleasant deaths pass across his face. “I would rather not enter that place in my shirt.”
Lucien shook his head. “Prince Corin, the Lady Commander has discovered something that I can only call earth-shaking. There is no need for armor. None. You have my word as a mage.”
Prince Corin looked at him for a long moment. Then he gave a small shrug that said a prince did not let a mage of portals see him hesitate twice, and followed them through.
The forest closed around them. The same grey sky, the same loose trees, the same cool air. A Dark Knight stepped out from between the trees and walked toward them. It carried no shield and no sword. It stopped an arm’s length away and stood waiting, perfectly still.
Prince Corin had gone rigid beside her. His hand had gone to his hip, to a sword that was not there.
“It’s all right,” Frances said. “It won’t attack. Prince Corin, let me explain what we found yesterday.”
She told him. The Training Pocket was run by an intelligence, a mind made by the summoned mage Ithran, built to train warriors. It could take instructions from her, or from Lucien. They could set it up with one enemy or many, armed and armored however they wished. Anyone killed inside would still wake outside the archway, restored, exactly as before.
“But I want you to understand what that actually means,” she said. “We can build training for the heavy infantry. For the spearmen. For the archers. We can train them, and train them hard, against exactly the kind of enemy they’re going to face. And we can find out which weapons work and which don’t, without anyone dying for real.” She paused. “And I know exactly where to start.”
Prince Corin was listening with an intensity she had not seen from him before.
“Twenty of our heavy infantry go into the Training Pocket,” Frances said. “And they face twenty spearmen carrying the kind of spear I’ve been describing. The bill.”
She turned to the Dark Knight.
“Can you set up a scenario like that? Twenty skilled spearmen, carrying bills, as I’ve described them? Reasonably competent, not just sacks of straw? And they keep attacking until everyone on one side is dead, or until our men break their exit stones?” She hesitated. “You do know what a bill is? The spearhead with the hook?”
“Yes, to all your questions,” the Dark Knight said in its flat, strange voice. “The design has been described within the bounds of Ironwatch, by a Summoned Champion, to the craftsmen of this realm. It is no longer new to this culture. It may be fielded.”
Frances blinked. She had not thought of that, and was glad the thing had.
She turned back to Prince Corin.
“We don’t have to guess anymore about which weapons and armor our soldiers need,” she said. “We don’t have to argue about it in a council room. We build a training scenario, try the new weapon, and see. If the bill works against our knights, we’ll know. If it doesn’t, we’ll know that too.”
She looked at the Dark Knight again. “This is something you can support?”
“This is what I was made to support,” it said. “So, yes.”
Frances turned back to the prince.
“I don’t think we should tell people how this pocket works,” she said quietly. “Not yet. We just give our soldiers the scenario and tell them to win it. I’d like to start today, with the heavy infantry. Lucien can instruct the pocket to set up any scenario you want.” She held his gaze. “My suggestion is that you start with Sir Ulric’s knights against spearmen armed the way I’ve proposed. The pocket already understands what that means. And you can go in to watch. Lucien can tell it that you’re an observer, not a combatant, and nothing will touch you.”
Prince Corin looked at the Dark Knight for a long moment. Then he looked around at the grey forest, the place where Sir Gareth had died more than twenty times, and where countless knights before him had learned to fear the archway.
When he looked back at her, he was smiling. It was not a large smile, but it was a real one.
“I shall begin today, with the heavy infantry,” he said. “I think,” he added, “that they will learn something.”
Frances left Prince Corin and Lucien to their work and made her way out through the castle gate and down into the town, to the saddler’s shop.
It was a narrow building near the market, its front open to the street, smelling of leather and oil and beeswax. Bridles and straps hung in rows from pegs along one wall. The saddler was the same man Marguerite had brought to the focus group the day before, a lean, quiet man with a leather apron and hands stained brown to the wrist. His name was Osbert. When he looked up and saw who had come in, he set down his awl and stood, and stiffened, and bowed low.
“My Lady Champion.”
Frances waved it away. “Please. Frances will do, or my lady if you have to. I’ve got a commission for you, Osbert. An important one. It matters to the army, and I think it matters to the future of Valdoria.” She leaned against his workbench. “I’d like you to make a new kind of harness for a drek. I’ll describe it, and I think it’ll make a drek work a great deal better than it does now.”
Osbert’s wariness eased into something like interest. “Tell me of it, my lady.”
Frances looked around, found a patch of packed earth just outside his door, and crouched down to sketch in it with a stick.
“Right now,” she said, “the harness runs across the front of the drek’s neck. Here. Right over its throat. Every time it pulls, the strap presses into its windpipe, and it can’t breathe. That’s why it gets so angry. It’s being choked.”
Osbert crouched beside her, frowning at the drawing.
“So instead,” Frances went on, “we make a collar. A padded oval, like this, that goes over the drek’s head and sits down at the base of the neck, against the front of the shoulders.” She drew it in. “It goes around the neck in a ring, but it doesn’t touch the throat. The weight rests here, on the shoulders, where the drek is strongest. Then on each side of the collar, you fix two rigid arms, made of wood, and the traces from the cart or plough attach to those. When the drek leans forward and pulls, it pushes against the collar with its shoulders and chest. All the load goes where the muscle is. None of it goes on the throat.”
She added two more lines.
“Then a strap under the belly, to hold it steady, and one over the back, so it doesn’t ride up. You’ll have to work out exactly where it sits on a drek, and pad it well so it doesn’t rub. Straw inside, I’d guess, packed tight, with leather over it.”
Osbert studied the drawing in silence for a long time. Then he looked up at the sky, which Frances was beginning to recognize as what craftsmen in Valdoria did when they were thinking hard.
“I believe I understand what you want, my lady,” he said slowly. “But I should measure a drek first. The neck, the shoulders, the depth of the chest. I would not want to guess at the size of the oval.”
“Please do. How long would it take you to make one?”
He looked at the sky again. “If I set my other work aside, I could have it for you by tomorrow.” He glanced at her. “Is it so urgent?”
“Yes,” Frances said. “It is.” She stood up and brushed off her hands. “And if it works, Osbert, you’re going to be buried in orders. Every farmer and carter in Valdoria will want one. You’ll be able to charge very well for them, at least for a while, until other saddlers learn how to copy it.” She smiled. “Once it’s made, we’ll go out to Wat’s farm together and make sure it fits properly. And Wat will tell us the next day how it worked.”
Osbert nodded slowly, and Frances could see him beginning to understand what she was handing him. Then he frowned slightly, as though she had said something odd.
“Forgive me, my lady,” he said. “But we need have no fear of other saddlers copying it. We shall simply take the design to the Crown for letters patent.”
Frances blinked. “For what?”
“Letters patent, my lady.” Osbert said it slowly, the way one might explain something to a child, or to a foreigner. “The design is set down and sealed in the Patent Rolls at Aldricspire. Then the Crown decides which baronies may make it. Not every barony, mind. Only those the Crown names in the grant. Within those baronies, any saddler may make the collar under licence, and for every one sold, the Crown takes one part in twenty of the price, and the holder of the patent takes another part in twenty.” He shrugged. “A saddler in a barony the Crown has not named may not make it at all, on pain of a heavy fine. So you need have no fear of being copied, my lady. Only of being copied by those the King allows.”
Frances stared at him. “You have patents?”
“Of course, my lady.” Osbert looked faintly puzzled that anyone would ask. “The Patent Rolls were established by Aldric the Unifier himself, in the Charter of Aldric. They are kept by the Chancellor, under the Royal Seal.”
Frances opened her mouth, closed it again, and looked down at the drawing in the dirt.
A ban on slavery. Equality before the law. And now a patent system, the better part of a thousand years before her own world had thought of one.
Aldric the Unifier, she thought, is turning out to have been one very impressive man.
The carpenter was a broad, cheerful man named Leofric, the second of the two carpenters from the focus group, and he had a workshop behind the castle stables full of sawdust and half-finished chairs.
Frances sketched the spinning wheel for him on a smoothed board with a stub of charcoal: a large wheel on a frame, turned by hand, with a cord running from it to a small spindle mounted on its own stand. She explained how it worked as she drew. The spinner turned the big wheel, the cord spun the spindle very fast, and the fiber fed onto it and twisted into thread far faster than anyone could spin it by hand with a weighted stick.
Leofric didn’t understand at first. He couldn’t see what it was for, or why anyone would need such a contraption when every woman in Valdoria already knew how to spin. Frances explained how long it took to spin the thread for a single shirt, and how many shirts an army needed, and how Aldwin the weaver spent half his days waiting for thread.
She watched the understanding arrive in his face, all at once.
“The wheel turns the spindle,” he said slowly. “And one turn of the great wheel is many turns of the little one.” He tapped the drawing with a thick finger. “Many turns.”
“Exactly.”
He studied it a while longer, measuring the parts in his head. “It is not simple work, my lady. The wheel must be true, or the cord will slip. And the spindle must turn sweetly on its bearings. I should want several days to make it properly.”
“Take them,” Frances said. “Make it properly.”
It was nearly midday when Frances found herself back in the castle with the morning’s tasks handed off and a gap in her day. She thought about where to spend it.
The Baron had offered her a briefing on the politics of the capital. She had meant to take him up on it before she was summoned, and she had no idea how long that would be. It seemed a good use of an hour.
She made her way to the Baron’s residence and asked the bellman at the outer door when the Baron might be free to speak with her. The bellman invited her into the hall to wait, and disappeared. When he returned a few minutes later, he bowed.
“His lordship would be pleased if you would take your midday meal with him, my lady. If you so desire.”
Frances nodded. Lunch, and the conversation she wanted, in one sitting. Efficient, she thought.
The bellman led her to a small dining room overlooking the inner courtyard, where the Baron was already seated. He rose as she came in, and made her a short bow.
“Frances.”
“Theron,” she said, and bowed back, and smiled as she said it.
He drew out a chair for her, and they sat.
“I’d like to take you up on your offer,” Frances said, once the first dish had been set down and the servants had withdrawn. “To get your read on the political situation in Aldricspire.”
The Baron nodded, and then held up a hand. “Then allow me to send for the Lady Merilynne,” he said. “She has a better understanding of the court than I do. I know the barons. Merilynne knows their wives, and their envoys, and their envoys’ wives, and that is where the true business of the capital is done.”
They waited a short while, talking of small things. When Lady Merilynne arrived, she came in briskly, took her seat with a nod to Frances, helped herself to bread, and looked expectantly at her husband.
The Baron began.
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