Champion of the Ages: Book 2
Copyright© 2026 by SummitMan
Chapter 3
King Aldric the Fifth of Valdoria was looking forward to the open court at the tenth bell with an eagerness he had not felt in years.
He had arranged matters with the Chancellor beforehand. The Champion would be announced last of all the petitioners. That way, if he wished for further words with her once the open court was done, and he fully expected that he would, she could be brought straight to his own chambers for a closed session with the Officers of State, without the whole court watching her go.
He sat for a while before the fire in his private study, a lean, grey-bearded man with the long Solmar jaw his son had inherited, and went over it all once more.
Aldric was known throughout the realm for preparing carefully for anything of consequence. For this court, he had prepared as never before.
It was the Crown that had paid for the summoning. When Magnus and the Oracles had first laid the Foretelling of the invasion before him, it had made for such sober hearing that Aldric had not hesitated for a moment. He had given the mages everything they asked: a fortune in coin, and the greater part of the Crown’s store of mana crystals, all of it to be spent on a single working of enormous cost. He had thought it cheap at the price.
And then the word had come from Ironwatch that the summoning was broken. That the working had failed, and fetched up a woman. A schoolmistress.
He remembered the bleakness that had settled over him when he read it. If the Foretelling was true, he might very well be the last of the line of Solmar. The house that Aldric the Unifier had founded twelve hundred years ago would end with him, and Valdoria would go down beneath the yoke of Eldrenmark. Aldric knew very well what that would mean for his people. The reports of how Eldrenmark treated the lands it conquered, and how many of their people it took into slavery, made for chilling reading. Every one of them broke the First Prohibition a thousand times over.
So when he had heard that the Champion had been challenged to the Trial, he had not been able to bring himself to disapprove. At the very least, the preparation for war would then fall to his son, Corin, who whatever his other failings had real ability at arms. And in a year, perhaps, the Crown could assemble enough crystals for another summoning.
But then the world had changed.
The word had come from the Baron of Ironwatch by fast messenger, under fire seal. The Summoned Champion had won the Trial. She had defeated Sir Gareth the Unbroken, the finest knight in living memory. Aldric had read the message three times over before he was entirely certain that he had understood it.
And there was more. She had declared herself Commander of the Guard and Commander of the Armies, there in the courtyard, without waiting for anyone’s leave. At that point, Gregory of Blackwood had attacked her with fire, and the Champion had defended herself and killed him where he stood.
Aldric had frowned at that for a long while. It was only when he read the Baron’s account of the Law and Custom of the Trial that the frown began to ease. Even so, he had called for the Master of the Rolls, who kept the records of the realm, and had him search them through. The answer had been the same. The Champion had acted in every particular according to Law and Custom. She was Commander, by right, and she required no confirmation from the Crown.
Aldric was honest enough with himself to admit that this irked him. It felt as though something had been quietly taken from his office: the right to confirm a Champion, which every king before him had exercised. But the Master of the Rolls had been firm. The ruling existed precisely for a day such as this one. Gregory’s attack upon a lawful Commander before the assembled Guard had been mutiny, plain and simple, and the Champion had been entirely within her rights to execute him on the field.
Aldric had spent several days afterward considering how he should proceed. In the end, he had decided to do exactly what he would have done had the Champion never had a Trial at all. He would summon her to Aldricspire. But he would not call her Commander. He would call her only the Summoned Champion, so that both she and the court might suppose that her standing still awaited his confirmation. Let her come to him, and let him see what she made of that.
So the summons had gone up the river road, addressed to the Summoned Champion. He knew it would be many days before she could arrive, and that suited him well. It gave him time to take counsel.
It was only a day or two after the summons had gone that the Chamberlain had come to him with a curious piece of news. The Chamberlain kept the King’s household, and also, very quietly, a great many eyes and ears throughout the city.
There was a ballad, it seemed. It was being sung in the inns of Aldricspire: The Ballad of the Champion of Ages, who had won the Trial of the Champion at Ironwatch.
“It is most popular among the women of the city, Your Majesty,” the Chamberlain had said dryly. “Indeed, I am told that the number of women to be found in the common rooms of an evening, wherever a bard is singing it, has increased remarkably.” He had paused. “I would counsel Your Majesty to treat the Champion with great respect when she comes. She is already held in very high regard in the city. And by a great many people who have never once set eyes upon her.”
Aldric had found that very interesting indeed.
The day before the Champion arrived, three letters came to him from Ironwatch together: one from the Baron, one from Magnus von Schatten, and one from Prince Corin.
The letter from Magnus bore a fire seal, which meant that it was for the eyes of the King alone. Aldric opened that one first. He set his Crown token against the seal, as only he could, and the seal unwound itself harmlessly from the parchment rather than consuming it.
The message was short, and very much to the point.
The Champion, Magnus wrote, was a true Champion. Every Foretelling that the Oracles had cast agreed on one thing above all others: that the Champion was the only hope Valdoria had of winning the war to come. He was careful to say that this did not mean the Champion would succeed. The road ahead of her was full of trials, and success was by no means certain. But if the Champion fell, Valdoria would not survive.
And Magnus had added, at the very end, that this must be told to no one, and the message destroyed. If the knowledge were spread abroad, he wrote, it would itself bring about the Champion’s fall.
Aldric read the letter through one last time. Then he fed it to the fire and watched it burn. Even a King did not disregard a Foretelling from a mage of Magnus von Schatten’s stature.
The Baron’s letter was longer, and in its own way more surprising.
It laid out, in the Baron’s plain and orderly hand, the whole of how Gregory of Blackwood had gone about it. He had worked for two months upon Benjamin Steelweave, the Magineer, so that martial ability became the least of all the requirements in the summoning. And all of it had been done to one end: that the Champion would fall in a Trial Gregory meant to demand from the start, leaving the way clear for Prince Corin, Captain of the Guard, to be named Commander in her place.
The Baron wrote that he had learned of the plot only a few days before the Trial, and that he had judged there was nothing he could lawfully do. Every step Gregory had taken had followed Law and Custom.
And then he warned the King not to underestimate the Champion.
She is the most formidable person I have ever met, Your Majesty, he wrote, in her skill at arms, in her intelligence, and in her planning alike. She is not hot-headed. On the contrary, she is considered in all that she does. He had spoken, he wrote, with the men of the Guard and with his own servants. All of them said that the Champion had gathered about her a team who served her with a loyalty he had seldom seen. Even the mages of the Academy, who were loyal to no one but their own disciplines, had become fiercely devoted to her.
And in one thing, the Baron finished, every person I spoke with agreed. The Champion has a will of iron. The Guard, the mages, her Lady-in-Waiting, even Prince Corin. All of them hold her to be unbreakable.
Aldric set the Baron’s letter down, and sat for some while looking at the third.
Then, with a sigh, he broke the seal on his son’s.
He had sent Corin to Ironwatch four years ago, believing him to be plotting against the Crown. It had been only in the last year, after long and careful talks with the Chamberlain, that Aldric had come to understand how badly he had been mistaken. Corin had never been scheming against his father. He had only ever been scheming for his father’s regard. Aldric regretted it now more than he could easily say, and above all because of the distance it had put between himself and his second child. He was no longer certain it could ever be closed.
The letter was the most interesting of the three.
Corin made no attempt to hide anything. He admitted, plainly, that he had known of Gregory’s scheming, and that though he had taken no active part in it, he had done nothing to stop it. And when the Champion had been summoned, Gregory had persuaded him, as he had persuaded so many others, that the summoning was broken.
The letter went on.
Father, after the Trial of the Champion, I understood at once that this had been no broken summoning. But it has taken me many days of working beside the Champion to understand that it is the truest summoning that could ever have been made.
She has asked questions of the army that I never once thought to ask. She is helping to build weapons that will let us fight a war unlike any that has ever been fought. She is shaping strategies and tactics that I have come to believe are our only hope of survival. She has found ways to use the Training Pocket that neither the portal mages nor the army have discovered in hundreds of years.
The Champion destroyed Sir Gareth the Unbroken, the most accomplished knight in living memory. And her skill at arms is the least of her abilities.
I have come to believe that Valdoria will survive only if we follow the Champion. I mean to support her to the very utmost of my ability. I can only encourage you, Father, to do the same.
Your son,
Corin
Aldric read it twice. Then he folded it carefully, and did not put it in the fire. He put it inside his doublet instead, over his heart, and left it there.
And then this very morning, there had been one more report from the Chamberlain.
The Summoned Champion had competed at the butts against Lord Aylward, held by common consent to be the finest archer in all of Valdoria. And she had beaten him handily. Every one of her arrows had found its mark, at four hundred feet and closer, before the finest bowman in the kingdom had even finished loosing his own.
Aldric sat back in his chair, and thought again of his son’s words.
And her skill at arms is the least of her abilities.
He rose, and straightened his robes, and went to the door.
It was time for court.
The great hall was full, as it always was on a day of open court.
The Officers of State stood in their places at either side of the dais. Below them, the Voices of the baronies were ranged along the floor, and here and there among them stood a baron who had come to court in person. Above it all, along the length of the hall, ran the public gallery. By long custom, every petitioner and every Voice might bring four people into it as their delegation. One of the four was usually a clerk, set to write down every word for his master. The other places were given out to friends, kinsmen and those to whom a favor was owed, and so the gallery was always crowded, and always attentive, and always ready to carry the news of the day out into the city the moment the doors were opened.
Aldric had seen the Champion’s delegation take their places before the court began. Sir Godwin, grey and upright, whom he had not seen at court in years. A slight young woman in a new and very fine gown, sitting with her back as straight as a spear, who could only be the Lady-in-Waiting. A thin monk with a satchel clutched on his knees. And a knight of the Ironwatch Guard, standing at the end of their bench with his eyes on the floor of the hall.
He had also seen the Champion herself pause on her way in, and let her gaze travel along the gallery, and stop for a moment on a sharp-featured woman sitting near the far end. Something like recognition had crossed her face. Then she had moved on.
Aldric did not know who the woman was. He made a note to ask the Chamberlain.
He found it uncommonly difficult to attend to the first two petitioners.
It was ordinary business, the kind he had heard a thousand times. The Voices of two coastal baronies were at odds over fishing rights in the waters between their lands, each claiming the shoals as his own by ancient custom. Aldric heard them both out, and then ruled that the shoals belonged to neither and to both, and that their fishermen might fish them alike. Neither Voice looked pleased. That, in Aldric’s experience, was generally the sign of a just ruling.
The second petitioner was a stout, anxious townsman from the barony of Brightwater, who had come to beg the Crown for funds to build a dam. The river above his town flooded every spring, he said, and every spring it carried away a little more of the town.
Aldric heard him with genuine sympathy, and then explained, as gently as he could, that the Crown’s coffers held only what came to it from the Ringwall Tithe, and that the Tithe was for the defense of the realm. There was no purse in Aldricspire for works that were properly the charge of a barony.
“Then why,” Aldric asked, “has your own Baron not built it?”
The townsman twisted his cap in his hands. “My lord Baron does not much concern himself with such things, Your Majesty.”
Aldric looked past him to the Voice of Brightwater, who had gone very still among the envoys.
“Then I should like to understand,” Aldric said, “why a matter of Brightwater’s own should need to come before the Crown at all. The Voice of Brightwater will attend me in private court tomorrow.”
The Voice bowed, rather stiffly. The townsman went away looking, for the first time that morning, faintly hopeful.
And then the usher stepped forward with the Champion, and Aldric found that he was sitting up a little straighter.
The usher led her the length of the hall to the bar. She walked without hurrying and without hesitating, and when she reached the bar, she bowed from the waist: a single, precise bow, exactly as deep as custom required for the King, and not a hair deeper.
Well briefed, Aldric thought, and his eyes went briefly to Sir Godwin in the gallery. Very well briefed indeed.
“Frances Andersen,” the usher announced, “the Summoned Champion.”
Aldric studied her for a long moment before he spoke.
She was taller than he had expected, and a good deal larger. She was broad through the shoulders, and even beneath the cloth he could see the muscle in her arms. She was dressed formally, as custom required, but in clothes unlike anything he had ever seen a woman wear at court. It was a tunic and trousers of fine charcoal wool, cut close and severe, with a single narrow band of black braid at the collar and cuffs and nowhere else. The cloth was plainly costly and the cut was perfect, but there was not a single flourish anywhere upon it. It was the dress of a soldier, an officer, and nothing about it spoke of a lady of the court.
She means us to see a soldier, Aldric thought. And so we do.
It was time to test her mettle.
He chose his words carefully, and let a little coolness into his voice.
“You stand before me as the Summoned Champion,” he said. “Yet I am told that you name yourself Commander, without my seal upon it. By what right do you do so?”
The hall went very quiet.
The Champion did not hesitate.
“Your Majesty,” she said, “within moments of my summoning, I was challenged to the Trial of the Champion, to be fought within seven days. The Trial was formally declared by Prince Corin, as Captain of the Guard, before the assembled Guard of Ironwatch, and I was set against Sir Gareth the Unbroken. I defeated Sir Gareth in the Trial.”
She paused, only for a breath.
“Seven hundred and forty-two years ago, a Champion was challenged to the Trial, and won it. A senior sergeant of the army refused to accept the outcome, and attacked the Champion upon the field. The Champion declared it mutiny, and executed him. King Baldred the Just upheld that act. He ruled that when a summoned Champion wins the Trial of the Champion, the Champion becomes Commander of the Guard and Commander of the Armies, without need of the King’s confirmation. That ruling has never been set aside.” She held his eyes. “And so, Your Majesty, by Custom and by Law, I am Commander of the Guard of Ironwatch, and Commander of the Armies of Valdoria.”
It was said clearly, and with complete assurance, and without the smallest trace of arrogance. Aldric had heard a great many men try to say such things before his throne, and he could count on one hand the number who had managed it so well. He was impressed, in spite of himself.
He could not have known that Frances had learned to speak in exactly that manner standing before the state board of education, defending her choice of history textbooks to people who were quite certain they knew better.
Aldric let his gaze drift across the hall, and it came to rest on Baron Oakshield.
Oakshield had come to court in person this season, and he was the most rigid traditionalist Aldric had ever had the misfortune to sit in council with. He was visibly struggling to keep his tongue behind his teeth. Aldric gave him the smallest of nods.
Baron Oakshield stepped forward, and he did not trouble to hide his contempt.
“You were a schoolmistress, I am told, in your own world,” he said. “And a schoolmistress would teach the knights of Valdoria how to make war?”
The Champion turned and studied him for a moment, the way a fencer might study a man who had just stepped onto the strip. When she answered, she chose every word with great precision.
“I am a teacher of history, my lord Baron,” she said. “My study is war. Weapons, strategy and tactics, logistics, organization, espionage, across the whole of the period my world calls the medieval age. Hundreds of years. Years in which war grew from small quarrels between cities into great wars fought by hundreds of thousands of men.” She let that settle. “In my world, the study of war is held to be a high art, for my world is very seldom at peace. Less than a hundred years ago, it fought a war in which twenty-five million soldiers died.”
There was a stir among the envoys at that number, and a murmur ran along the gallery. Aldric saw more than one of them blanch.
“And I am held to have some small skill at arms,” the Champion went on, more mildly. “I did, after all, succeed in the Trial of the Champion.” She looked Oakshield in the eye. “So yes, my lord Baron. I will teach the knights of Valdoria how to make war. That is what I do. That is who I am.”
For several moments no one in the hall said anything at all. Baron Oakshield’s mouth opened, and closed again, and he stepped back among the envoys and said nothing more.
Then the Voice of Greyhold stepped forward.
Aldric’s attention sharpened. Greyhold was one of the Ringwall castles, a keystone of the defense of the realm. Of all the baronies in the hall, it had the most to gain from the Champion’s success.
“The court deserves to know the Commander’s plans,” the Voice of Greyhold said. His tone was reasonable, even friendly. “Which passes will she defend? With how many men? And what are these new weapons we hear spoken of?”
Aldric frowned. It was not a question for open court, and every man in the hall ought to have known it. He drew breath to say so.
But the Champion was already answering.
“Matters of the defense of the realm,” she said, “should not be spoken of in open court. I decline to answer that question.”
Aldric had to stop himself from nodding. Exactly so.
Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the Chamberlain, in his usual place by the pillar to the left of the throne, turn his head very slightly and look at the Voice of Greyhold for a long moment. Then the Chamberlain looked away again, as though nothing at all had happened.
But the Champion was not finished.
“I will say only this,” she went on, and her voice carried to the farthest corner of the gallery. “We face an army of a size Valdoria has never seen. Not in all its twelve hundred years. And one of our greatest weapons against it will be the women of Valdoria.”
A ripple went through the hall. Aldric saw heads turn in the gallery.
“The free women of Valdoria know how women are treated in Eldrenmark,” the Champion said. “They are treated as slaves. And so the women of Valdoria will help to fight this war. They will fight it because they know what will become of their husbands, and their brothers, and their sisters, if we lose. And most of all, because they know what will become of their children.” She paused. “They will do it for their children. And for their children’s children.”
There was a long silence. Up in the gallery, Aldric noticed, the sharp-featured woman at the far end had leaned forward, very still, with her eyes fixed upon the Champion.
Aldric found it a strange thing to have said before the court. Of all the arguments she might have made, of all the things she might have chosen to say in that moment, she had chosen that. He turned it over in his mind for a moment, and could not quite see where it led.
He filed it away, carefully, to ask her about later.
Then he gave leave for one last question.
It came from the Voice of a barony whose house had been quietly hostile to the line of Solmar for three generations, and who had plainly been waiting all morning for his moment.
“As the women of this city now sing,” the envoy said, with a thin smile, “even the Prince himself cried the Trial against you. How can the Commander hope to work with the royal house, given such hostility?”
Aldric felt himself go tense in his chair.
It was the very question that had kept him awake. He had asked it himself, in the dark, more nights than he cared to count.
The Champion did not seem in the least troubled by it.
“The army of Valdoria has always been made up of men,” she said. “And when the mages worked their summoning, I believe they expected to bring forth a man. Presumably one with very broad shoulders and a fine head of wavy hair.”
There were a few chuckles around the hall, quickly stifled, and rather more than a few from the gallery.
“The mages themselves were taken aback,” she went on. “I was not at all what they had expected. So when the Prince cried the Trial, he was following an old and lawful custom: one the Captain of the Guard may take when he fears the Champion is not equal to the task. The Prince followed Law and Custom when he did so.” She paused. “But when I won the Trial, before the Guard of Ironwatch, and when I put down the mutiny of the foul mage Gregory, it was the Prince himself who stood up, before the Baron of Ironwatch and before the whole of the Guard, and named me Commander. And it was the Prince who ordered the Guard to salute me.”
Her voice was steady, and it carried to every corner of the hall.
“Today, the Prince stands at Ironwatch, readying the Guard for the coming invasion, with plans that he and I have made together. It is the Prince who will hold Ironwatch. And Ironwatch is the core of the defense of this realm.” She looked straight at the envoy. “So not only do I bear no hostility toward the Prince. I can assure you, my lord, that he bears none toward me.”
And then her voice rose, strong and clear, and it filled the great hall.
“There is no world in which the Commander of the Armies and the line of Solmar stand at odds. I stand with the King. And I stand with the Prince.”
The court fell utterly silent.
Aldric sat very still upon his throne. He could feel Corin’s letter, folded inside his doublet, pressed against his chest. And for the first time in more years than he could easily remember, he felt something toward his second son that he had almost forgotten he was capable of feeling.
He felt proud of him.
He rose to his feet.
The whole hall rose with him.
“This court is ended,” King Aldric said. “But before it ends, I will make a declaration, so that no one here may be in any doubt.” He looked out over the envoys, the barons, the courtiers and the crowded gallery, and let his gaze rest, very briefly, on Baron Oakshield. “The ruling of King Baldred the Just has held for seven hundred years, and it holds today. The Summoned Champion was the victor in the Trial of the Champion, and in that moment became Commander of the Guard and Commander of the Armies.” He paused. “Let there be no doubt in any mind. She requires no confirmation from me.”
Then his voice rose, and rang out across the hall.
“Guard! Attention!”
All along the walls of the great hall, the King’s Guard came to attention as one, with a single sharp crack of boots on stone.
“Salute your Commander!”
Every hand came up, and struck flat against every chest, over the heart.
For a long moment, no one in the hall moved.
Then King Aldric announced that open court was ended for the day, and that the Commander and the Officers of State would attend him in private court.
The envoys and the gallery filed out of the great hall in complete silence. Not one of them spoke until the doors had closed behind them.
But by nightfall, Aldric had no doubt, every word of it would be all over the city.
When Frances turned from the bar and walked back to her delegation, Sir Godwin and Sir Ranulf were both looking at her with quiet approval. Edmund was not. He was clutching his satchel to his chest with both arms and looking rather pale, and Frances suspected his mind was already in the private court, wondering whether his documents would be equal to it.
But Marguerite.
Marguerite came to her side as the gallery emptied, and her eyes were glistening. She leaned in close, so that only Frances could hear.
“For our children,” she whispered.
Then she wiped away a tear with the back of her hand, and straightened, and was the First Lady-in-Waiting again.
The usher came for her a few minutes later. Frances asked that Edmund come with her, since he carried the documents she meant to present, and after a moment’s hesitation the usher agreed.
He led them through a side door and down a short corridor to a smaller room. It was richly furnished, with ornaments on every wall, the wood oiled to a deep shine, and heavy, ornate curtains drawn back from the windows. In the center stood a long table surrounded by high-backed chairs. Take away the ornaments and the curtains, Frances thought, and it could have been a corporate boardroom in a twenty-first-century office tower.
The King sat at the head of the table. Around him sat his Officers of State.
The usher murmured that, this being a private court, Brother Edmund should leave the documents and wait outside. Edmund bowed, but asked whether he might first set out a map. The usher glanced at the King. The King nodded.
So Edmund opened his long map case, and drew out four sheets of parchment, each about six feet long and a foot wide. He laid them side by side down the length of the table, weighting the corners with small bags of sand, until the whole of Valdoria lay spread out across the polished wood. It was a copy, in ink and color, of his great clay map in the Study Pocket: the mountains and the passes, the rivers and the forests and the fens, every castle and every road. Then he bowed deeply to the King, and the usher led him out.
By the time the door had closed behind him, the King and every one of his Officers of State were on their feet, bending over the map.
Frances watched them. None of them, she was quite sure, had ever seen anything like it. They traced the line of the Silverrun with their fingers. They found their own lands, and the passes, and Ironwatch, and Aldricspire at the river mouth. The Marshal was frowning at the northern border as though it had personally offended him.
It was a full minute before the King seemed to remember that she was still standing just inside the door. He turned, and nodded to her.
“Commander.”
Frances inclined her head. “Your Majesty.”
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