That noise wouldn’t stop. Baratheus kept trying to go back to sleep anyway. He’d been having a nice dream. His bed was warm. He pulled a pillow in closer. “Aren’t you going to answer that?”

So, not a pillow, then. He opened his eyes. It hurt to do so. A hangover. Lovely. He took in the visage of the young woman in his bed. Lovely, in an entirely different sense of the term. She was probably 18 or 19, with a mane of tangled red hair and freckles across her face. Even drunk, he evidently had exquisite taste.

The door pounded again. Again? Ah, that’s what that racket had been. He looked over at her. He weighed the option of trying to have her again some time. He decided it probably wasn’t worth the effort. He hiked up his pants and stumbled over to the door.

He opened it to find a squire in an unspeakably shiny helmet grinning at him. “Sir! I have a missive for you from Father Frank, Sir!” His voice was high pitched and annoying. Everything about the kid sparkled. Baratheus couldn’t have hated the kid more if he’d tried.

“Well? If you don’t get it over with quick, I’m not sure I can guarantee your safety in the near and foreseeable future.” He had barely managed to groan it out, so it probably hadn’t landed as a viable threat, but- “Yes Sir! Sorry, Sir! The missive reads as follows, Sir! ‘To the venerable Lord Baratheus Masters, from the desk of Frank Veritas, Father of Hobsven. Dear-” “Alright, alright, fuck’s sake, shut up. What’s the gist of it?” Baratheus wanted to puke. It was this kid’s fault, obviously. Brat didn’t know when to shut up. “Right you are, Sir! In short, you’ve been given a mission of incredible importance! You’re to gather your things and lead a platoon of levied troops to… Twin Bells! In search of- Oh!” He lowered his voice. “In search of a prophesied hero who’s meant to have appeared there.” He glanced around, worried he’d leaked state secrets. Buffoon. If he had, it was far too late now. Bara leaned back his head and stared at the ceiling to try to drain the headache this brat was giving him.

“Choose a platoon at random, I guess. I assume you’re my liason for the mission, then?”

“Right you are, Sir. It’s a pleasure to meet you!”

“Great. Pleasure’s all mine. Now get out of my face.” With that, he slammed the door shut.

________________________________________________________________

The sorry little bastard was still trying.

Dmitri had grown tired of trying to teach Reynald to fight over the years. Reynald had never shown any particular interest in it, and no matter how hard he pushed, the boy had never bothered to push back. The young master had always seemed fully prepared to abandon all effort at the drop of a hat. He would rather run than fight, in any and all situations. Dmitri had, on many occasions, wondered where the blood of his friend Reynald the Great had gone, if not into this pathetic weasel of a scion. He lamented this thoroughly, at first, but in recent years he’d given up and started going with the flow of the young master’s whims.

That had all changed. The day he came back to the manor, Reynald had hunted Dmitri down and demanded to start training properly again. Then, when Dmitri hadn’t answered, he begged instead. He made wild promises and threw himself at Dmitri’s feet. Dmitri hadn’t even planned to tell the lad ‘no,’ he’d just been too stunned to speak. When he got the chance, he cleared away his student’s confusion and renewed his training in earnest. And now he was here.

The young master was on his 34th lap of the training grounds. He’d been assigned 50, originally. He couldn’t reasonably do 50. Dmitri had judged that he could probably manage 27 before collapsing into a boneless mash. He had assumed, as well, that the boy would give up before lap 15.

He had not. Instead, he started glowing.

The training grounds were in a concealed and solitary location, and Dmitri was confident that no one but his own son could feasibly be watching, so he left the boy to run. He was curious, after all. He’d seen heroes in the war. Never had the opportunity to train one, though. He had no idea the extent of the power the boy wielded. He was eager to learn.

“34? Is that all you got? Is that all your resolve will buy?!” He was shouting. He probably didn’t need to, but his mentor had, and somehow he had come out as good as he had, so who knows. “I didn’t take you back up to this level just to watch you give up on me again!” He had, actually. He wasn’t particularly optimistic about the young lord’s willpower.

“I haven’t…*gasp*... stopped…*gasp*... yet…*gasp*... have I?” No, indeed he had not. He was still determined to go. But even with whatever extra grit the glowing power gave him, he was flagging. He wouldn’t make it to 35.

“Alright, kid. I’m calling it. We’re done for the day. Go get some rest.” The boy stopped, staggering. He turned his head to look at Dmitri. He was steaming. Literally. Steam billowed off of him in a thick column. Presumably, he was so warm that he was sweating buckets and somehow also evaporating that same sweat as fast as it appeared. He may as well have had the sun itself under his skin.

“I… can still… go on.”

“No, you can’t, kid. Take a rest.”

“I… can still… go on!”

“Even if you could, you’d only be destroying your own muscles if you kept going now. It’s not a matter of willpower. If you keep going, it’ll all be a waste.”

“Nothing… is a waste. I… can still… GO ON!!” The boy swung a fist at Dmitri. It was clumsy. It had no footwork. It missed by a mile. And it cut the air so forcefully that the wind whistled behind it.

Dmitri slipped behind him and knocked him out. The boy may have changed, he reflected, but it would be a mistake to say the change was solely for the better. He would have to keep an eye on the boy’s temperament from here on in.

________________________________________________________________

Baratheus was by no means ecstatic. He fingered the pendant his wife had given him before he was deployed, all those months ago. He was glad the redhead hadn’t filched it while he was sleeping. He didn’t want to have to hunt it down again.

He didn’t necessarily have a habit of losing things. The wedding band he wore wasn’t lost. It just happened to find its way to his luggage or pocket when he was around beautiful young girls. But he did have a habit of waking up to find that a pretty young thing who’d been suspiciously easy to take to bed had pilfered his remaining jewelry in his sleep. That had happened a little too often for his own good.

The pendant, she had said, was given to her many years ago, before they were married, as a gift. It was said to be able to summon a great power to its user’s aid, once and only once, when it was broken. It was his ace in the hole, in case it ever got too dangerous for his blood, out in the wildlands. And now, he fondled it almost as much as he did his sword. The air smelled of danger.

The platoon he’d brought with him couldn’t sense it. He’d be surprised if they managed to find the pointy end of their spears when it came right down to it. Someone had gone to the very bare minimum of trouble to train them. They were meat shields and rank-padding and it showed. But he wasn’t your standard rank-and-file soldier. He was a Paladin, and he smelled ill intent.

It had only begun about 2 days away from their destination. He had nearly made it to Twin Bells without a hitch. But no trip is ever so pretty, especially when his caravan looked oh-so-very pillageable. And now the fruits of that sensation were appearing on the horizon.

“Squire, what do you see there?” He pointed to the crest of the next hill in the road. From here, he could barely make out two figures, huddled near a fallen tree. Both were cloaked. It stank of trouble.

“Sir! I see two citizens at rest, Sir! They appear to have been camping there overnight, Sir!”

“What time would you say it is, squire?”

“Sir, it looks to be nearing one bell past noon, sir!”

“And how far from town would you say we are, squire?”

“Sir, based on the map and how fast we’ve managed to get here, sir, I’d say less than six bells of marching, sir!”

“Squire, if you had the option of making camp and spending the night on the side of the road or marching on toward town and spending the better half of the night in a bed, which would you choose?”

“Sir, I would choose to march on, of course!”

“And if you chose to stay, would you then wait for more than half the day to pass before picking up camp and making for town?”

“Of course not, Sir! Any traveler worth their salt would know that you can never afford to waste daylight on a trip like this one! Why, the weather could turn at any moment and if it did, we’d never make it to town before nightfall!”

“So tell me, squire. What exactly would you guess those two are doing?”

“I… I don’t know, Sir. Waiting?”

“Yes, it would seem so. But what, I wonder, could they be waiting for?”

Baratheus shifted in his saddle in anticipation and rode on.