Elle and Anna looked at each other, and Anna nodded to Elle. “The Queen suggested us, and I don’t know about Anna, but I couldn’t agree fast enough.”
Anna bobbed her head. “I’ve been envying all the interesting things you’ve been getting to do, Miri, and this? I’ve wanted to be a lady knight since I was little.”
I glanced at the boys. “I went straight to Delacar and told him I wanted in,” said Giles. “I couldn’t let my best friend go into this without someone to have her back!”
“Nat and I are best friends too,” said Robert. “Sir Delacar came to a bunch of us who were beginning squires and asked for volunteers. We both thought that this would be a whole lot better ’cause we get archery and some interesting stuff from Sir Delacar in the afternoons instead of squire chores.”
Oh, that made a lot of sense now. While I was getting lessons in magic, they were getting lessons in things knights absolutely would not be caught dead doing—archery was for women and peasants to their way of thinking. It’s a bit of snobbery. Anyone could afford a bow and arrows—you could make them yourself if you had to—but swords and armor cost real money. And it’s a bit of masculine preening.
But before I could ask anything else, Sir Delacar got us up and moving again.
I was right. The weaponry lessons did get “easier” in the sense of feeling good at the end of them and not so tired and sore that I wanted to give up. I got better at it too, enough better that Sir Delacar had me measured for my own set of riveted chain mail. Giles had gotten measured for his right away, and not long after I got my armor, so did the other four, although beyond making sure it fit, we weren’t using it yet. Soon we were practicing with bows and swords as well as quarterstaffs, though when I asked about jousting, Sir Delacar snorted with contempt.
“Jousting is for knights playing games of honor,” he said, making sure his voice carried to all six of us. “You can’t afford to play games—and you can’t afford honor, either. If an enemy comes for Princess Aurora, he won’t come riding in on a high-bred warhorse to issue a challenge. He’ll come sneaking up a back stair with a knife. Or he’ll ambush her in the garden when she’s playing. Or—well, I have the other possibilities covered with the plans I am discussing with the captain of the Royal Guard.” He coughed. “I’m counting on the six of you to be her bodyguards against more direct threats.”
Now I saw why Delacar had Papa’s respect. There was so much more to him that I was beginning to think that the “fat, lazy knight” persona was all a ruse to cover up his clever, even devious, mind.
We all nodded and went back to practicing in the yard we shared with the other squires. I couldn’t help but notice how different the style the other squires were being taught was from ours. Theirs was full of rules. Disarmed meant defeated. No low blows. No dirty tricks, like maneuvering your opponent so the sun was in his eyes, or kicking dust into his face, or even getting him to face into the wind so his eyes dried out.
These rules were exactly what had brought my father down. I wasn’t supposed to know the whole story, but I’d overheard people talking about it when the King brought us to Court.
The whole story is this: In war, knights are supposed to be a solid line of force meant to shock the enemy. The heavy armor protecting them, the war-trained horses, all these are supposed to strike the front line of an enemy’s forces and break it apart. And in the event that the enemy also has knights, your knights are supposed to break them apart so they can’t do the same thing to your foot troops. Not every kingdom has knights; not every kingdom can afford them. Knights are expensive to train and equip. Warhorses need special training and are heavier than ordinary horses. Full armor is extremely expensive to make and has to be fitted to each knight individually along with the weapons they have proficiencies with. They and their horses also have to be trained, housed, and fed even when they aren’t fighting. Then you have to add to all that the squires with their own training, feeding, and housing.
And the knights are often nobles, which means you have noble families to answer to, so they’re valuable to another kingdom. If they are unhorsed and surrender, you’re supposed to ransom them back.
One of Tirendell’s knights got cut off from the rest. He tried to surrender, but the enemy foot troops swarmed him and clearly intended to kill him instead. Father saw this happening, went to his rescue, and also got swarmed and cut down along with his fellow knight.
Delacar knew that we could absolutely count on the enemy being ruthless, so he was training us for that. Tripping. Rushing and headbutting. Grappling. Shield bashing, aiming for the hands or wrists, finding all the weak points in your opponent’s armor. It was a good thing that we were practicing with wooden swords, the edges padded with wool, or we’d probably have killed one another a dozen times each day. And you might have thought that when the grappling and headbutting and all that came into play, he’d have had the girls practicing against the girls and the boys against the boys. Not a bit of it. It was boys against girls, and Delacar showed us girls tricks we could use to make the boys’ weight and reach work against them. Which was fair, since he taught the boys not to hold back against us girls.
I’d gone into this driven purely by the determination to protect my baby sister. But I was discovering that I liked all this for itself. I liked feeling strong enough to take care of both of us. I liked having skills that could keep both of us safe. I loved the pride in Papa’s eyes when he came down to review my progress with Delacar and the relief in Mama’s when she understood everything that Delacar was teaching me. So what if some members of the Court looked at me with pursed lips and disapproving expressions? There were others who approved, tacitly and openly; and there were at least as many girls my age who looked on Anna, Elle, and me with envy as there were ones who watched us with contempt or puzzlement. Sure, there were female knights—but there weren’t any at Papa’s Court, and some people just didn’t understand why any girl would aspire to the white belt of a knight. And there were not that many girls here in the first place.
As for the six of us, tales of knights always spoke of the brotherhood and camaraderie of being brothers-in-arms, and to tell the truth, since I didn’t have a romantic bone in my body, I’d always thought that this was a lot of nonsense.
Now, though, I realized that it wasn’t. I had friends, real friends, for the first time in my life! Not just Giles, either, but also Elle, Anna, Nat, and Rob. We spent a lot of time together in the mornings encouraging one another when we were not actually training, resting, or recovering. And during the training, it was as much about helping one another as it was gaining skill. I know the others were enjoying this as much as I was; we were never late; we were often early; and for me, at least, there was a pang of disappointment when we broke up for the day, and I really wished they could join my magic lessons.
And we weren’t just friends. We were a lot more than just friends by now. We knew we could count on one another no matter what; we each had five people we could trust with our deepest secrets. We were what Sir Delacar had called us when we met that first day in the yard.
We were Aurora’s Companions. And we would guard her and one another against all odds.