Champion of the Ages
Copyright© 2026 by SummitMan
Chapter 9
Frances lay in the dark with her hands folded on her stomach and ran the problem.
It was the posture she had always taken the night before a tournament, back when there had been tournaments. She lay flat on her back, eyes open, the ceiling invisible above her, working the thing over the way you worked a knot loose rather than the way you yanked at it. Sleep would come when it came. It usually came faster once the knot was out.
The finest knight in living memory. Haldor had said it without drama, which was what made it land. Haldor did not deal in drama. He dealt in weights and tolerances and the number of hours it took to true a bent blade, and when a man like that told you that the person you were going to fight to the death had never lost, not in the lists, not in the yard, not in the field, you did not comfort yourself with the thought that he might be exaggerating.
She did the accounting instead, because accounting was what she had.
A year, subjectively. Certainly far past three hundred nights of sleep inside Lucien’s pocket, by Haldor’s count, and she had stopped counting the entries into the Training Pocket somewhere in the thousands. But raw calendar time was the wrong measure and she knew it. Back home, a serious athlete trained hard perhaps four days a week and spent the other three recovering, because muscle does not grow during the work, it grows during the mending, and the mending is slow. Giovanni had collapsed that. Every soreness erased within an hour of waking, every torn ligament knitted, every bruise and crack and strain simply handled, so that she had been able to train at ninety five percent of her limit every single day for a year without the accumulating debt that would have crippled anyone in her own world by the third week.
Call it three years of honest training, then. Maybe four. Against a man who had been swinging a sword since he was six.
Not enough. She wasn’t despairing, just being practical.
So: what was left? What could still be bought in a day that could not be bought in the year before it?
Not strength. She’d plateaued, and she knew what a plateau felt like. Not technique, not meaningfully — she had catalogued every attack the Dark Knights had shown her and had an answer for each, and the marginal return on another thousand bouts was going to be thin. Not equipment; Haldor had already given her the best in the castle.
What, then?
Her mind drifted, the way it did at this hour, and snagged on something old. A sports medicine seminar, of all things, at a coaching clinic in State College when she was twenty-two and still ranked. A thin man with a laser pointer and a slide full of graphs, talking about the Finnish cross-country skiers and the Kenyan distance runners and the whole murky grey-market business of altitude tents and hypoxic chambers, and the East Germans with their centrifuges, and the thing the UCI had spent twenty years failing to test for.
Blood doping. Aerobic capacity. Altitude training.
Frances sat bolt upright in the dark.
When she fought defensively, she rarely lost because she was outfought. She had lost, over and over, because at four minutes her legs filled with acid and her vision tunneled and her lungs could not keep up with what her body was asking of them, and the Dark Knight, who was just as tired as she was, seemed to have one more good exchange left in him than she did.
It wasn’t a sword problem. Not anymore.
It was an oxygen problem.
“Marguerite!” she shouted, and heard, from the outer room, the immediate scuffle of a woman who had been asleep three seconds ago and was now very much not.
Marguerite appeared in the doorway with a candle and her cap askew. “My lady — is something —”
“Nothing’s wrong. Everything’s fine.” Frances was already swinging her legs out of bed. “I need Giovanni and Lucien at breakfast. Both of them. As early as they can stand it. Tell them it’s about the Trial and tell them to come hungry, because I’m going to talk at them for a while.”
They arrived together just past the seventh bell, which told her that they had found each other first and walked over comparing notes, trying to work out in advance what she wanted. Giovanni looked like a man braced for an injury he had not been told about yet. Lucien looked merely curious, which was Lucien’s resting condition.
Frances had Marguerite put out bread, cheese, the dark honeyed porridge, and a jug of small beer, and she waited exactly as long as it took for both men to sit down before she started.
“Giovanni. Do you understand how a substance in the air is gathered by the blood in the lungs and carried through the body?”
Giovanni set down his cup with the faintly affronted air of a man who has been asked whether he knows his alphabet. “Of course, my lady. We are well familiar with it. There is a substance in the air which the blood takes up in the lungs and bears to the flesh, where it is spent in the making of vigor, and a second substance, which the blood carries back and the lungs expel. It is the first principle of the breath. Any apprentice could tell you as much.”
“Good. That’s further along than I expected.” Frances leaned forward on her elbows. “Call it oxygen, that’s our word for it. Now: are you aware that when a person trains hard over a long period, the body improves its ability to gather and carry that oxygen? Not just the muscle. The gathering itself.”
Giovanni slowed down. “I am aware of such an effect,” he said carefully. “A man long accustomed to running does not labor for breath as another would. I had taken it as a hardening of the chest, a thing of the muscle that works the lungs. I have not investigated more closely.” His eyes narrowed. “Why do you ask it?”
“Hold that thought. Next question, and this one’s for both of you.” She looked between them. “Are you aware that as you climb a mountain, the amount of oxygen in the air decreases?”
Both men shook their heads. Lucien’s eyebrows went up.
“It does. The air gets thinner the higher you go. It’s why men die on high mountains without ever being cold or injured. They simply cannot get enough oxygen out of the air to live. And people who are born high in the mountains, and live there their whole lives, have bodies that have adapted to it. Their blood carries more. Their lungs are more efficient. They’re built for thinner air.”
“I have heard,” Lucien said slowly, “that men of the high passes in Rathmere are said to be tireless walkers, and that lowlanders who go among them find themselves short of wind for a fortnight. It is held to be a thing of their constitution. Of breeding.”
“It isn’t breeding. It’s adaptation. And here’s the part that matters.” Frances put her finger on the table. “If a fighter lives in thin air, sleeps in it, rests in it, spends most of their hours in it, and then trains in normal air, something remarkable happens. The body builds itself for the thin air, and when you hand it thick air to work with, then it can do things it could never do before. More endurance. More capacity. The ability to push past a limit that used to be a wall.”
She sat back. “In my world, athletes spend fortunes doing this. They build houses with the air pumped thin. They move to the mountains for months at a stretch before a competition. It is one of the few honest edges available to a serious competitor, and it is worth every coin.”
Giovanni had gone very still. “No, my lady. I have never heard such a thing. Not in any text, not from any master.”
Frances turned to Lucien. “Which brings me to you. Your Study Pocket. Can you adjust the air inside it? Can you make it thin as if on a mountaintop?”
Lucien blinked at her, and then something happened behind his eyes that Frances had come to recognize over the past year, the shift of an academic who has just been handed a question that is both novel and trivially easy, which is the most delightful combination there is.
“The working allows for it, my lady. Yes.” He set down his bread entirely. “The air within a pocket is constituted at the making, and the constitution is held in the controls. We commonly adjust the warmth, or the amount of water borne in the air, for comfort’s sake. My study is set rather drier than Ironwatch, in truth, because damp spoils books. The amount of air is in the same set of controls.” He waved a hand. “It is trivial. A matter of minutes to change, and I may change it again as often as you like.”
“Then here’s what I propose.” Frances looked between them. “I train for one or more months the way I’ve been training. Hard, daily, into the Training Pocket and back out. But the Study Pocket gets set thin. I sleep in it. I eat in it. I read in it. I recover in it. Every hour I’m not actually fighting, I’m living on a mountaintop. And every hour I am fighting, I’m down at sea level with a body that’s been building itself for something harder.”
She let that sit a beat.
“I need every edge I can get. I’m not going to out-strength this man and I’m not going to out-skill him, not in the time I have spent. But I might be able to outlast him. If I can still be fighting properly at five minutes when he’s gone to pieces at four, then none of the rest of it matters.” She turned to Giovanni. “That’s where you come in, and it’s more than just patching me up. You told me, a year ago, that you could calm the inflammation in a torn muscle and hasten its mending, and that you could encourage a change the body was already trying to make. I want to know whether you can do the same thing here. Diagnose me each time I come back into the pocket. Find what’s changing. And then push it.”
Giovanni’s face had moved, over the course of the explanation, from offended, through confused, to something that was no longer remotely professional. He was leaning forward over the table with his porridge forgotten and both hands flat on the wood.
“My lady.” His voice had gone slightly hoarse. “You are describing a principle of the body, which, if it is true, has stood unremarked in every physician’s text ever written.” He shook his head sharply, as though clearing it. “I can see the blood, my lady. I can see it in the diagnostic, the state of it, the richness or the poverty of it. I have looked at ten thousand sick men’s blood and never once thought to ask what a well man’s blood might do under provocation. If the body does make this change, I will see it. And if I can see it, I can very likely encourage it, in the same manner as the muscle.” He sat back, breathing a little fast. “It should not be costly. The workings that merely encourage what the body already attempts are the cheapest there are. But I will bring support crystals regardless. If such a thing is possible, then we shall make it a reality.”
Lucien and Giovanni looked at each other then, and Frances watched the two of them exchange a grin that had nothing to do with her at all. It was, she realized, the look of two colleagues from different departments who have just discovered a joint paper sitting in front of them, fully formed, with their names already on it. Cross-disciplinary, novel, and better still, between friends.
God, academics are the same everywhere, she thought, and found she was unreasonably fond of both of them for it.
“Fourteen bells,” she said, “outside Lucien’s Study Pocket. Both of you.”
Assembling the rest of it took under an hour, which told her something about how far the whole operation had come since the first frantic morning.
Marguerite, told she would need to provision for another thirty days, simply nodded and went to find the head cook, who had long since given up trying to understand why the Champion’s woman kept asking for a month’s stores every few hours and had settled into the far more comfortable position of simply handing them over. Haldor, told to move the armor and the full sword rack back into the Study Pocket, grunted and started moving it. Edmund, told to bring whatever he had assembled on the governance of Rathmere and on the logistics of feeding a field army, arrived twenty minutes early with a satchel so full he had to carry it with both arms.
Nobody asked her to justify any of it. She noticed that.
She needed two months. The two months that followed went by in a blur, and were, in their particulars, the hardest stretch she had ever done.
The thin air was worse than she had expected, and she had expected it to be bad. The first time she stepped out of the Training Pocket and back into Lucien’s study, she got four paces across the floor before her vision greyed at the edges and she had to sit down on the floor with her back against the desk and simply breathe, shallow and fast, like a woman who had just been held underwater. Her head split. Her appetite vanished for three days and then came back ravenous. She slept badly for a week, waking every hour or two gasping at nothing, and Giovanni, who had warned her about precisely this, having found a reference to the symptoms in an account of a Rathmere expedition once she’d told him what to look for, simply nodded and said it would pass, and it did.
And then her team found their rhythm, and the machine began to run.
Marguerite managed the food, and managed it ruthlessly, hauling crate after crate in from kitchens across the castle and keeping a tally of what Frances ate against what she needed, until somewhere around the fourth subjective week she began simply putting a second helping in front of her without being asked. Haldor managed the steel. The swords were sharpened, the shield’s rim patched and then replaced, the gambeson taken in once more, the hauberk’s torn rings re-riveted. He did it with the quiet, obsessive thoroughness of a craftsman who had decided that nothing in this fight was going to be lost on account of his work. Edmund managed the hours she could not train, filling the recovery days with Rathmere’s succession laws and the arithmetic of forage and the long, patient, maddening question of how many wagons it takes to move ten thousand men across a river.
And Giovanni, every single time she came through the door, took her hand in both of his and went looking.
He became, over those two months, indecently excited. By the second week he had begun keeping records, a stack of wax tablets that became a stack of parchments that became a bound codex, every entry dated by subjective day, each one a column of figures on the state of her blood that only he could read. By the fourth week he had stopped merely measuring and started pushing, adding a second working to the morning’s routine, a long murmured thing that left her feeling briefly feverish and then unaccountably well. By the sixth he had taken to muttering to himself in the corner of the study while she ate, scratching out lines and rewriting them, and twice he forgot to say goodbye when he left.
Inside the Training Pocket, Frances went to war with her own clock.
She had made a decision early and she held to it: this stretch was not about learning new attacks. It was about defense, and about the fifth minute. She stopped trying to win fast. She let the Dark Knight come, and she made him work, and she made herself stay in it. It was footwork, shield, blade, footwork, shield, blade, continuing long past the point where her body had always previously quit on her.
The wall had always been at four minutes. She pushed it to four and a half. Then five. Five minutes of unbroken, maximum, life-or-death effort, her lungs tearing, her shield arm a dead weight she was moving by force of will alone, her vision narrowing to a tunnel the width of her opponent’s shoulders. And she still moved, because the single lesson she had carved into herself a thousand deaths ago held true: stopping is death. Especially when winded. Particularly when winded. The moment you stop to breathe is the moment the blade goes in.
And she learned the other half of it too, which was the half that mattered.
The Dark Knight tired. At first, he had tired a bit later than she did. Just after four minutes the quality of his attacks began to degrade. The cuts were a fraction slower, the shield a fraction lower, the recoveries a fraction late. And if she could simply be there at four minutes, still defending, still making him work, still threatening just enough that he could not disengage and gather himself, then at four and a half she could step forward into a man who had nothing left and put a foot of steel through his throat.
She did not need to beat Sir Gareth the Unbroken. She needed to still be fighting after he had stopped being able to.
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