33. Three Months Gone
Three Months Gone
Three months passed in a blur of lessons that carved away the mercenary to reveal something that could pass for nobility.
The quartermaster had outfitted us well. Tournament-grade weapons, properly balanced, with scale armor that moved with the body instead of against it. Maise had smiled when she first held her new blade, a reaction I’d only seen from her mid-fight. Weapons were the easy part.
Cromwell’s study became my second-least-favorite room on the estate, edged out only by Danzing’s punishment yard. Every morning after Danzing beat technique into my bones, Cromwell beat civilization into my skull.
“A lord’s bastard who speaks like a dockworker is merely entertainment,” Cromwell said, tapping his cane against the chalkboard. “One who speaks properly is dangerous. Which would you prefer?”
I held my tongue behind my teeth. The old man knew the answer. We both did.
Power wasn’t in the blade alone. It lived in the pauses between words, in the tilt of a chin.
Henrik’s bargain demanded I play noble as well as warrior, and the Red Gale had known seven ways to say “fuck you” in different tongues, all learned from soldiers and whores.
Danarre needed to know seventeen ways to say the same thing while smiling over wine .
“Your accent betrays you,” Cromwell said, circling my chair like he’d done so many others. “You flatten your vowels like a commoner. Listen.”
He demonstrated the difference between “certainly, my lord” spoken from the gut versus from behind the teeth. The first sounded like agreement. The second sounded like you were still considering whether to have them killed.
Power lived in the space between tongue and palate.
Cromwell had spent these months proving it, making me recite lineage tables until my throat cracked, drilling me on names, houses, creeds, feuds, and the seventeen forms of address for clergy ranked by temple and seniority.
Maise would’ve laughed at the absurdity. I memorized every word.
Rain battered the windows. Cromwell snapped his fingers.
“Again. You’ll have time to die in the mud later. For now, you belong to me.”
◇ ◆ ◇
The cane cracked against the desk.
“Enough scowling like a thug,” Cromwell said. “You carry yourself well enough with steel in hand, but nobility demands more.”
He leaned across his desk, eyes sharp despite his age. “De Blaise blood runs in your veins. That alone carries weight. But you’ve earned what few bastards ever do: Henrik’s attention.”
I clenched my jaw and kept silent. Cromwell wouldn’t tolerate protests today, not with the tournament one dawn away.
“You fought your way into the Stone Yard,” he continued, tapping the desk with each point. “Survived the Palisade. Killed a Warchief with a spear through his throat. You’ve the makings of a leader. ”
His cane jabbed toward my chest. “Henrik didn’t move you to the main house out of sentiment. He sees potential.”
Rain kept its steady drum against glass worth more than most families earned in a year.
“And now,” Cromwell said, his voice dropping, “you’ll prove it before half the nobility.”
I turned that over in silence. Three months of preparation condensed into a handful of fights and twice as many formal dinners. Win, and Henrik acknowledges me publicly. Lose, and I stay another bastard with an interesting story and no future.
Cromwell sighed and pushed a leather-bound folder across the desk. “Rules of engagement,” he said, tapping the cover. “Not about killing. About living through the next fortnight with your dignity intact.”
He held up a finger. “First: never duel tired. A lad like you thinks stamina means swinging steel until your arms fall off. It doesn’t. Rest is a weapon. Sleep when you can. Once it starts, you’ll sprint and never stop.”
I looked at my notes. Sparse lines in neat script: Never flinch from a challenge, but never accept one that doesn’t serve you.
“Second: know the difference between winning and surviving.” His wrinkled lips twisted. “Every hot-blooded idiot wants glory. Smart ones want to walk off the field afterward. You beat Erik’s lot bloody back in the Palisade. Doesn’t mean a thing if you’re dead next week.”
I traced the line below: Eyes on the prize, not the applause .
“The crowd will scream for blood,” he continued. “Noble ladies will flutter their fans, lords will promise patronage. All smoke. The only thing that matters is Henrik’s recognition.”
He stood and moved to the window where rain streaked the glass. “You’ve learned to hold a wine glass without crushing it. To speak without revealing ignorance. To enter a room without broadcasting your intentions.”
He turned back. “But the tournament isn’t combat alone. It’s theater. Every meal, every conversation, every moment between matches, someone is measuring you.”
“Who?”
“Everyone.” He returned to his desk and pulled out a folded document. “Duke Hemmrich’s tournament draws observers from every major house. They come for entertainment, but they’re scouting. Weaknesses, alliances, future threats.”
A list of attendees. Names I’d half-memorized over painful weeks, each carrying agendas behind their smiles.
“The White Cardinal will be there,” I said, keeping my voice level. Hel’s warning about the man sat in my chest like a splinter that wouldn’t work free.
Cromwell’s expression tightened, the only crack in his composure I’d seen in months of lessons. “Yes. Duke Hemmrich’s new spiritual advisor. He has particular interest in promising young fighters.”
The way he said interest put an itch between my shoulder blades where the Knight Brand sat warm and watchful. I remembered Hel’s vision: white robes walking among corpses, black sand spilling from a chalice, a hand pressing into my spine with fingers that sank through flesh like clay .
“Avoid him when possible,” Cromwell said. “When avoidance isn’t an option, be polite and distant. Men of the cloth sometimes forget their vows around things they covet.”
I filed that warning beside every other warning stacked inside this skull. Another threat to account for, beyond the steel and the ring.
“Your team,” Cromwell said, shifting topics with the ease of a man who’d controlled conversations for longer than I’d been alive in either life.
“They’ve proved themselves capable fighters.
But they don’t have your training in protocol.
Keep them close during combat and distant during social functions. ”
“They’re my people.”
Cromwell didn’t blink. “Then protect them by keeping them away from situations where their instincts will get them killed.” His tone left no room for argument. “Maise’s temper will earn her a flogging. Perrin’s light fingers will earn him a noose. Grit’s silence will be read as insolence.”
He was right, and that’s what made it sting. They’d fought beside me, bled for me, but the tournament played by rules the Palisade never had. Social rules, with consequences that lasted longer than any wound.
“They understand,” I said, though my throat was tight. “We’ve discussed it.”
“Have you?” Cromwell’s eyebrows rose. “Because understanding and accepting are different animals. That girl with the red hair won’t take kindly to watching from the servants’ section while you dine with lords. ”
He was right about that too. Maise had already bristled when I’d tried explaining the social expectations. She’d called it “playing pretty” for people who’d never held steel in anger.
“They’ll adapt.”
“See that they do.” Cromwell closed the folder with finality. “Because Henrik’s acknowledgment means nothing if scandal burns it the next day. One misstep from your people, and you’ll find yourself back in the barracks before the tournament ends.”
◇ ◆ ◇
“One final lesson,” Cromwell said, moving to a cabinet behind his desk. He withdrew a small mirror, its silver surface polished clean.
“Look.”
I stared at my reflection. Three months had stripped away something I hadn’t noticed leaving.
My mother’s eyes stared back from a face that carried Henrik’s bone structure, sharpened by years of Danzing’s training and Cromwell’s relentless corrections.
The expensive doublet fit like it had been cut for this body, for this version of who I was becoming.
“What do you see?”
“Someone pretending to be noble.”
“Wrong.” His cane tapped once. “You see Henrik’s son. Not his bastard. His son. The blood doesn’t lie, no matter the circumstances of birth.”
The mirror held truth I’d been avoiding. My mother’s features around the eyes and chin, refined by my father’s architecture. I looked like I belonged in the portraits that hung in great halls, alongside names that had mattered for generations .
“When you walk into Duke Hemmrich’s court tomorrow, carry yourself like you know it. Half of nobility is performance. The other half is believing your own performance.”
He set the mirror down.
Thunder rolled across the sky. Through the window, I caught sight of torches moving in the barracks courtyard. Maise, Perrin, and Grit would be finishing their own preparations.
Cromwell straightened in his chair. “Take this to heart. The world outside these walls is far crueler to bastards than anything inside them. Don’t let your closeness to that team be what gets them killed over an etiquette mistake.”
He met my eyes. “We leave at dawn. Don’t embarrass the house.”
◇ ◆ ◇
I stood with the folder tucked under my arm.
Instead of heading to my quarters in the main house, I walked toward the practice yards. Rain had stopped, and the air hung thick with the smell of wet earth and iron.
They were there, running through one last set of formations in the torchlight.
Maise’s red hair caught the flame as she spun through a sword combination that would have dropped me six months ago.
Perrin wove between targets like he’d been born in the gaps between them.
Grit stood perfectly still until the precise moment he needed to move, then returned to stillness as if motion were a language he used sparingly and only when the sentence mattered.
I stayed in the shadows of the colonnade, watching. Tomorrow I’d have to maintain distance, stand apart, be Lord Henrik’s almost- acknowledged son rather than the friend who’d bled beside them in the Palisade.
“You going to stand there all night?” Maise called without turning around.
Should’ve known better. They’d trained to notice everything. I stepped into the torchlight.
“Wanted to watch.”
Perrin stopped his routine, fingers resting on a throwing knife. “Watch or say goodbye?”
“We’re traveling together.”
“Are we?” Maise finally turned, sweat making her face glow in the firelight. “You’ll be in the fancy carriage with the legitimate heirs and acknowledged bastards. We’ll be with the guards and equipment.”
The separation had already begun. I wanted to say it didn’t matter, that nothing between us would change, but we all knew better. The tournament would formalize what these months had started: the distance between us measured in more than carriages.
“After we win,” I started.
“After you win,” Grit corrected quietly. He’d moved without my noticing, standing at the edge of the torchlight with his arms crossed. “The rest of us are swords in your story now.”
The words stung because they carried truth. Henrik’s bargain was for my acknowledgment. They’d become my sworn swords, protected and bound, but subordinate. Separate.
“That’s not what I want.”
“Wanting’s got nothing to do with it.” Maise went back to her forms, but her movements were sharper now, angrier, each cut biting the air like it owed her money. “Go back to your feather bed, Lord Danarre. We’ll be here with the rest of the weapons, ready when you need us.”
I wanted to argue. Wanted to remind them of every fight we’d survived, every night spent watching each other’s backs in the dark. But Cromwell’s warnings kept circling. Showing attachment made them targets. The kindest thing I could do was let them hate me a little. It might keep them alive.
“Dawn comes early,” I said, and turned to leave.
“Danarre.”
Perrin’s voice stopped me. When I looked back, he tossed something small and bright. I caught it on instinct.
A silver coin, filed down until it was perfectly balanced for throwing. One of his tricks.
“For luck,” he said. “Since we won’t be able to watch your back properly.”
“We’ll be watching,” Maise added without turning around. “Just from farther away.”
Grit said nothing, but his nod carried the weight of a sworn oath. I pocketed the coin and left them to their practice.
The walk back to the main house felt longer than usual. My quarters were too warm, too soft, too empty of the sounds of my team breathing in the dark.
Earning Henrik’s acknowledgment meant giving up the balance we’d built. The closeness of equals, traded for the formal distance between a lord-in-waiting and his sworn swords. I didn’t know how to be both their friend and their commander in a world that wouldn’t allow the two to coexist .
The Knight Brand burned low and steady against my spine, eager for what was coming.
Beneath it, deeper, I thought I felt one of the other Brands twitch in its sleep.
The Emperor, maybe. Or the Magician. Impossible to tell through the Knight’s constant heat, but Hel’s gifts kept their own timetable and didn’t ask permission before waking.
Tomorrow, we rode to Duke Hemmrich’s tournament. To the White Cardinal. To whatever waited in the arena.
I’d kill him first. Whatever it took.
◇ ◆ ◇
「Hel’s Ledger」
Vessel: Danarre de Blaise | Year 828 | Age 13
House de Blaise | Status: Bastard (Unacknowledged)
Location: de Blaise Estate, Main House
「Knight of Swords」 — Burning
「Emperor」 — Sleeping
「Magician」 — Sleeping
Active Charge: Find the Hierophant. End what was begun.
The old man sharpens a new edge on the vessel. Words. Posture. The killing smile. The pack snaps at the leash and doesn’t understand that the leash is what keeps them breathing. The hunt narrows.