Champion of the Ages
Copyright© 2026 by SummitMan
Chapter 17
Frances was at the archway of the Training Pocket before the eighth bell, with a question she had been turning over half the night.
She did not go in straight away. Instead she stood in front of the squat stone arch in the cold morning air, feeling slightly ridiculous, and spoke to it.
“Training Pocket. Can you hear me?”
The answer came at once. It came from nowhere in particular, flat and toneless, as though the stones of the arch themselves were speaking.
“I hear you, Summoned Champion.”
Frances glanced around. The courtyard was empty except for a single guardsman at the far gate, who was looking resolutely in the other direction. She lowered her voice anyway.
“I have a question about archery. You’ve sent me goblins and orcs and knights to fight. But can you actually teach? Not just send attackers. Could you train me in a skill I don’t have yet?”
“Affirmative. Instruction is within my purpose. I may provide a tutor, targets, ranges and conditions as required. I may also provide weapons.”
“You can make weapons?”
“Within the pocket, yes. Bows, arrows, swords, spears, armor, of any pattern already known to this culture. They exist only within the pocket. They cannot be carried out of it.”
Frances stood very still for a moment.
“An unlimited supply of arrows,” she said slowly.
“Affirmative.”
“And a teacher who knows everything about archery.”
“Everything that is known within this culture, and the principles that govern it. Affirmative.”
Frances let out a long breath. Of course, she thought. Of course it can.
“Then I’d like to be trained in archery,” she said. “From the beginning. Assume I know nothing, because I very nearly don’t.”
“Enter when ready.”
She went in.
The forest was gone.
In its place was a long, open meadow of short grass under a mild grey sky, with a row of straw targets set out at measured distances: fifty feet, a hundred, two hundred, three hundred, four hundred. A single Dark Knight stood waiting beside a rack of bows. It wore no helmet. Its face, Frances saw with a small shock, was perfectly blank, smooth and featureless, like a mask that had never been finished.
It held out a bow.
“This bow draws forty pounds,” it said. “It is suitable for an adult beginner of your strength. We will begin with stance.”
They began with stance.
It was, Frances discovered within the first quarter of an hour, a great deal harder than it looked. The Dark Knight was an unnervingly good teacher. It never raised its voice, never grew impatient, and never let a single fault go unremarked. It corrected the angle of her feet. It corrected the set of her hips. It showed her how to grip the bow without strangling it, and how to draw the string with her back rather than her arm, and where to anchor her hand against her cheek. It showed her how to loose by simply relaxing her fingers, instead of plucking at the string. When she did it wrong, it told her exactly what she had done wrong and why. When she did it right, it said only, “Again.”
The arrows never ran out. Every time her quiver emptied, it was simply full again.
She shot, and shot, and shot. For a long while, she shot at fifty feet, until she could put three arrows in five somewhere on the straw. Then at a hundred, where they went everywhere except the middle. The Dark Knight moved her back to fifty, and then forward to a hundred again, and made her do it all again.
Her fingers blistered. Her shoulders began to burn, and then her upper back, in a deep, dragging ache she recognized from the first week of her sword training. These were muscles her body had never had to use before, and they were telling her so.
By the time the Dark Knight finally lowered its hand and said, “Enough. Your form is breaking down,” she had lost all track of time. Her arms were trembling. Her arrows had begun to fall short.
“How long was that?” she asked, flexing her stinging fingers.
“Approximately four hours.”
Frances nodded slowly. Four hours, and she had gone from hopeless to merely bad. Her technique was improving, steadily and noticeably. But the bow was already too much for her by the end. Technique would only take her so far.
I need strength, she thought. And there’s only one way to get it fast.
“I’ll be back,” she said. “Soon.”
“Acknowledged.”
She found Giovanni in the healing center, between patients, and held out her hands.
He took one look at the blisters and the shaking in her arms and raised his eyebrows. “Swordwork, my lady? I thought you had finished with that.”
“Archery,” Frances said. “And I’m terrible at it.”
Giovanni laughed, and murmured his short working over her, and the burning in her back and shoulders eased into a pleasant, mild ache. The blisters closed over and hardened into the beginnings of callus.
“The same as before, my lady,” he said. “I can calm the inflammation and hasten the mending. The strength will come, and come faster than it would otherwise. But you must still earn it.”
“I know.” Frances flexed her fingers, satisfied. “Thank you.”
She went straight back to the Training Pocket.
The second session was better. Not dramatically, but noticeably. Her form held together for longer. At a hundred feet, her arrows began to cluster, loosely, around the center of the target instead of scattering across the whole of it. At two hundred, the Dark Knight let her try a few, and she hit the straw twice in twenty arrows and felt absurdly pleased with herself.
But she tired quickly. Too quickly. By the end of the second session the bow was too much for her again, and her arrows were dropping into the grass in front of the target.
She needed more strength. A great deal more.
As she came out through the archway, she saw Prince Corin crossing the courtyard toward it at the head of a column of knights in full mail, with Sir Ulric beside him. Ulric looked grim and determined, like a man going back to finish a fight he had not won the day before. Prince Corin caught her eye across the yard, and nodded, and she nodded back.
She left them to it, and went to find Haldor.
He was in the forge, deep in conversation with one of his apprentices over a half-finished helmet that sat on the anvil between them. Frances recognized the shape at once from her own description: a rounded crown, a wide brim. They were arguing about rivets. She waited at the door until they had finished, and the apprentice had gone off with a scrap of iron and a new set of instructions.
“Haldor,” she said. “Do you have time to talk about mass production? I think it’s going to affect how you design the helmet.”
Haldor wiped his hands on his apron and gave her the look of a man who has been waiting for this conversation, and was not entirely sure he wanted it. “I do, my lady. Sit.”
She sat on an upturned crate. He sat on his anvil.
“Here’s the idea,” Frances said. “Right now, if you make a helmet, you make the whole thing. Start to finish, every step. And that’s how every smith in Valdoria works. It makes a beautiful helmet. But it makes one at a time, and only a master can do it.” She leaned forward. “Now imagine a line of people instead. Each one does only one part of the helmet. One person cuts the pieces. Another shapes them. Another rivets them together. Each one does the same step over and over, all day, and gets very fast at it. And at the end, the pieces come together into a finished helmet.”
Haldor frowned. “Every piece must fit every other piece, for that to work.”
“Exactly. That’s the key to all of it. Standardization. Every piece made to exactly the same pattern, the same size, every time. So that any crown piece fits any brim, and any brim fits any frame.” She held up three fingers. “And a few standard sizes. Small, medium and large, say. The padding inside takes care of the difference.”
Haldor sat with that for a while, turning it over. Then he began, slowly, to describe how he made a helmet now, step by step, from the raw iron to the finished piece. Frances listened. Every time he described a step, she asked the same question.
“Does one person have to do this step and the next one? Or can you separate them?”
And then, after he had answered: “Could an apprentice do just that one step? Someone without much experience, who’d only been taught that one thing?”
The first time she asked it, Haldor looked at her as though she were mad. The second time, he hesitated. By the fourth time, he had stopped hesitating, and was answering before she had finished asking. Somewhere in the middle of it, he got up off the anvil and found a board and a stub of charcoal and began writing.
They went back and forth for most of an hour. At the end of it, Haldor sat back down on the anvil and looked at what he had written.
“Six steps, my lady,” he said. “If I have understood you.”
He read them out.
“First, the plate cutters. They cut the pieces of the crown and the brim from the iron sheet, each one to a template, so that every piece is the same. Second, the shapers. They hammer each piece over a standard stake or form, so that every piece has exactly the same curve. Third, the riveters. They put the pieces together onto the frame, using a jig to hold them, so that the rivet holes always line up. Fourth, the finishers. They file the edges smooth, and oil the iron or blacken it against rust. Fifth, the liners. They fit the padded caps and the chin straps inside. That is leather and cloth work, not iron, and needs no smith at all. And sixth, the inspectors. They check every finished helmet for fit and strength against a standard sample, and send back any that fail.”
Frances was smiling. “That’s exactly what I’m talking about. Exactly.” She leaned forward. “Does any of those steps need a master? Someone with your experience?”
Haldor considered it. “Making the templates,” he said. “The forms, and the jigs. That needs a master. If the templates are wrong, every helmet made from them is wrong.”
“That’s fine,” Frances said. “That’s the whole point. You only need a few templates. One master makes them once, and then hundreds of people use them.”
Haldor nodded slowly. “And the iron sheet,” he said. “Making sheet of an even thickness, good enough for a helmet, takes some skill. Too thin and it fails. Too thick and it is too heavy to wear all day.” He frowned, and thought about it for a long moment. “But I suppose, if I set apprentices to doing that and nothing else, they would learn it soon enough. A man who makes nothing but iron sheet, every day, for a season, will make it well.”
“So you’d have the skill wherever you needed it.”
“Just so.”
“And then,” Frances said, “if you make a lot of copies of the templates and send them out to the castles in the rear, and ask them to make helmets exactly to those templates, the same six steps, the same sizes, the same sample to check against...” She spread her hands. “That’s how you get mass production. Not one forge making a thousand helmets. A hundred forges, all making them exactly the same way.”
Haldor looked at her for a long moment.
Then, slowly, a grin spread across his face beneath the iron-grey beard. It was the first real grin Frances had ever seen from him.
“That,” he said, “is shrewd, my lady. That is very shrewd.”
She had barely left the forge when Marguerite found her, slightly out of breath.
“My lady. There is a leatherworker asking for you at the gate. A saddler named Osbert. He says you will know what it concerns.”
Frances’s face lit up. “He’s finished it already? That’s excellent. Take me to him.”
Osbert was waiting just inside the outer gate. He was holding something large and curved in both arms, and he was holding it the way a man holds something he has not slept for. It was an oval of padded leather, thick and firm, stitched tight around a dense stuffing of straw, with two curved wooden arms bound to its sides and a tangle of straps hanging below. It looked, Frances thought, almost exactly like a horse collar. A drek collar, she corrected herself. A drek collar.
“I had Leofric shape the wooden arms, my lady,” Osbert said. “He stopped work on your wheel for an hour to do it, and was not pleased with me.” He hesitated. “I measured Wat’s drek last evening. I believe it will fit. But I will not know until it is on the beast.”
“Then let’s go and put it on the beast.”
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