Chapter 3

Frances woke to a hand on her shoulder and the mortified thought that she had slept through her alarm, and that there were lunches to pack. Then the ceiling swam into focus, high and vaulted and carved with a frieze of wolves running a circle around a sun, and her confusion disappeared as reality sank in.

The servant who had woken her was a slight woman of perhaps thirty, brown hair bound back under a linen cap, who withdrew her hand the instant Frances’s eyes opened and dropped into a quick, practiced curtsy.

“My Lady Champion. Forgive the intrusion upon your rest. I am bid to wake you and bring you to the robing room, that you might be dressed before you are called to council.”

“What time is it?”

“Past the seventh bell, my lady.” The servant hesitated, then added, as though it were a confession, “We have done what we could on short notice. I would have you know, before you see it, that it is not what it ought to be.”

The servant gave a running commentary as they walked. “We are in the Castle of Ironwatch, which holds the largest garrison in the country. We are also home to the Academy of Arcane Sciences, so expect to see both soldiers and mages throughout the castle, though they generally keep to themselves.”

Frances followed her down a corridor lined with tapestries gone soft with age into a smaller chamber where a trestle table had been laid out with what amounted to an entire haberdasher’s inventory of men’s wear in disarray. There were tunics, hose, doublets, a scattering of belts, boots in three different states of newness, all of it sorted into rough piles by what Frances guessed was size. In another pile sat what were obviously women’s clothing. She recognized a chemise, and several sizes of cotehardie (a fitted gown with long sleeves), and belts. She rejected the cotehardie at once. It was not the image of a warrior she intended to project.

“We keep a wardrobe here for visiting men of all manner of build,” the servant said, gesturing at the table with something between pride and apology. “Knights, scholars, ambassadors, the Academy has clothed them all, and clothed them well, over the years. But we have never yet had cause to clothe a woman, my lady, and so what you see of women’s clothes is what the household staff could spare or alter overnight. I will say plainly it is not fine work. It is what there was time for.”

She wore, in the end, a man’s shirt and one of the women’s belts, a pair of men’s hose taken in at the ankle, and a man’s long over-tunic clearly cut for someone both shorter and considerably less broad through the shoulder. The tunic strained visibly when Frances rolled her back. The servant laced her into it with quick, competent fingers and stepped back to survey the result with the critical eye of a woman who already suspected the verdict.

Frances flexed one arm and then the other, testing the give at the shoulder before rolling onto the balls of her feet to feel what the skirts of the tunic did to her stride. The answer was: nothing good. It was, in short, a cobbled-together set of ill-fitted clothing. At least it wasn’t a dress.

She said none of this. It wasn’t the servant’s fault, and there would be a better moment to fix it than while Frances was already running late for a council.

“It’ll do for this morning,” she said instead. “We’ll talk about the rest later.”

The servant looked faintly relieved, and considerably surprised, as though she had braced for complaint and received none.

The chamber they brought her to was smaller than the summoning hall, round, with a long table of dark wood at its center and tall windows letting in a grey, indifferent morning light. Magnus, Benjamin, and Lucien were already seated when she entered; a fourth chair at the far end sat conspicuously empty.

“Gregory isn’t coming,” Frances said, taking the chair offered her, because it seemed faster than waiting to be told.

“He is not, my lady,” Magnus said. He had the look of a man choosing each word with tongs. “Gregory holds it as settled that the Trial will see you removed from the office of Champion, and has said he sees no profit in attending a council to plan for a service he does not believe will occur.”

“Charming.” Frances folded her hands on the table in the posture she used for parent-teacher conferences that were about to go badly. “All right. Tell me about this Trial. What actually happens?”

Benjamin inclined his head. “The Trial of the Champion is a duel, my lady. The Champion is set against him whom the army judges its finest. The standard weapons of the army are used, that no man might say the contest was unfairly matched to favor the soldier’s own strength.”

“Okay. That’s something, at least.” She considered it a moment, realizing that she would need to spend some time to understand what the standard weapons of the army might be. “What are the rules of the duel itself? First blood, or something more serious?”

The silence that followed lasted several seconds. Magnus glanced at Benjamin; Benjamin glanced back, and something passed between the two of them that Frances recognized immediately, because she had seen it on the faces of colleagues delivering news about standardized test scores.

“To the death, my lady,” Benjamin said at last, gently, as though gentleness might soften the plain meaning of the words. “It has ever been so. The Trial exists to prove that a Champion may be trusted to end a man’s life without flinching from the cost of it. A Trial that could be survived without killing would prove nothing worth proving.”

Frances sat very still.

It was not, she found, the fear of her own death that struck her first, though that arrived close behind. It was the plainer, uglier fact that somewhere in this castle there was presumably a soldier, a man with a name and very possibly a family, who was going to be handed a sword in six days and told to fight her, and that if she did everything right, if she trained and prepared and fought as well as she possibly could, the reward for her competence would be his corpse.

“So either I die,” she said slowly, “or I kill some soldier I’ve never met who’s only here because somebody decided this was a good way to settle the question of whether I’m fit to lead an army. That’s — “ She stopped herself before the sentence went somewhere unhelpful, and took a breath instead. “I have some fencing background. I was good, once. But I’m thirty pounds overweight and I haven’t picked up a blade in anger in years, and I do not see how anyone expects me to get back into fighting shape in less than a week. That isn’t false modesty. That’s just being practical.”

“My lady,” Lucien said, leaning forward with the air of a man who had been waiting for precisely this objection, “on that count, we are not without recourse. We have devised a plan to see you readied in time, and I believe it will answer.”

“I’m listening.”

“There exists,” Lucien said, “a working known among the nobility as a Training Pocket. It is a pocket universe, folded apart from the flow of ordinary time, wherein one may train at arms without hazard to the world beyond it. Within such a pocket, time passes more than a thousandfold swifter than without. An hour spent there is but a few heartbeats here. You would have, in effect, all the time you might wish to ready your body and your blade.”

“That sounds almost too good to be true,” Frances said. “What’s the catch?”

Lucien’s expression, which had carried a certain eagerness up to that point, settled into something graver. “The cost, my lady, is that a Training Pocket is filled with orcs, goblins, ogres, trolls, and dark knights, which will assail you without cease, and without mercy. It is built to train a man to the very limit of what he can survive, and the manner of leaving it is death.”