“I… I can't believe I did that,” Oliver said, sagging in his seat.

Across the table from him, Adeline smiled sympathetically, and held out a cup of tea. “I know, it’s a lot when you first make the decision. And I won’t pretend you made your choice in the most ideal of circumstances.”

Oliver accepted the cup, and took a tentative sip. His eyes went wide, and he took a second, more appreciative sip. He had never had much of a taste for tea, but the brew made by the little high-end cafe Adeline had led him to was the best had ever tried. It was the sort of place his father would never allow him to be seen in, understated but inarguably high quality. It was the kind of cafe those confident in their status went, rather than the ostentatious restaurants and tea halls that catered to the majority of the ambitious nobility, seeking to see and be seen.

This cafe was quieter than those places too. Adeline and Oliver sat next to an open window, overlooking the street below, and the tasting room seated another dozen or more people, all in their own conversations. Yet some clever work of artifice and design kept the sounds of the room and the street alike quiet and distant. The quiet was relaxing after the day Oliver had had.

“I just can’t believe he really…”

Adeline took a sip of her own tea. “I apologize for dumping that truth on you. I was not even sure of it myself, though I had heard enough rumors to think it likely.”

“Then his reaction said it all,” Oliver concluded. He frowned down at his tea, and added a lump of sugar to the little cup. His family had always chided him for taking his tea too sweet–his father and eldest sister took theirs so thick it was almost black–but they didn’t matter anymore. He was no longer bound to them, for better or worse.

“Indeed,” Adeline agreed.

“Okay.” Oliver blew out a long breath, trying to excise some of the storm of confusing emotions swirling in his chest. “So… what now? What’s next, now that I made my choice?”

Adeline frowned thoughtfully, absently swirling her tea in the little cup in front of her. “First things first. We’ll need to get you a place to stay while we’re in the city. We certainly can’t have you staying at your family’s manor anymore, not after how things went with your father.” Oliver flushed, but nodded firmly. She was right about that. “The Order can foot the bill for you to stay at an inn while you get your feet under you, that’s simple enough.”

Oliver couldn’t shake the feeling that “the Order” in this case probably meant that Adeline would just be paying out of her own pocket. But without his family’s money, he certainly had limited options to pay his own way. He swore to himself then and there that he would be the best squire he could, if only to make sure Adeline didn’t regret all she was doing to help him.

“Do you need to stop at home? Anything you need to get out of your old chambers or anything like that?”

OIiver frowned at the question, thinking of his chambers back home. Closets full of uncomfortable clothes he hated. Shelves piled with dry histories and boring biographies he had read anyways, just to pass the hours. A desk of blank paper and the fireplace where…

“No,” he finally answered. “Not really.”

Adeline nodded in approval. “Good. The Argent Order is not much for being weighed down by material goods.”

“I would like to see my family, though,” Oliver added. “Not my father, but my siblings, and maybe my mother. They deserve better than whatever angry story my father tells them.”

Adeline approval seemed to deepen, and she inclined her head. “That can be arranged. I’ll find a neutral place where you can see them without interruption. We’ll need to get you some travel clothes too.”

Oliver looked down in surprise at his own fine clothes, then very deliberately looked at the stylish and expensive dress Adeline was wearing.

The knight laughed at the obvious thoughts on his face. “This is not what I wear on the road, Oliver,” she chided him, while he tried not to squirm at the way she said his name. She perked up suddenly, as if a thought had crossed her mind. “Oh! We’ll need to take you to a primal hall as well, to get your second gift! I almost forgot. I expect you have one chosen?”

Oliver smiled widely at the thought. “Wind,” he claimed firmly.

Adeline arched an eyebrow. “Really? I would’ve expected fire, given the way you fight.”

Oliver shook his head, ignoring the phantom fire flickering in his memory, consuming a child’s fantasy. “No,” he said resolutely. “Wind.”

“Okay.” Adeline shrugged easily. “Wind it is. Then let’s say… three days. That should be more than enough time to get all of that done, and it should be long enough to find a job for us to take on.”

Now it was Oliver’s turn to perk up. “A job?” He flushed abruptly, realizing he had come all this way, had left behind his family and committed himself to a new way of life, without even really understanding what he had signed up for. “Uhm… would you mind filling me in on the Argent Order? I know the stories, of course, but…”

Adeline gasped. “Oh, yes, of course! I’m so sorry, I should’ve done that first thing.” She cleared her throat and squared her shoulders in a way Oliver didn’t think she was fully conscious of, as if she was slipping into a teaching mindset, or maybe emulating whoever had inducted her. She had only slipped a couple times, but he was starting to think that, when Adeline wasn’t trying to put forward the dignified air she had projected at the dueling hall, his new mentor might be a little absent minded. It made him a little more comfortable to know she wasn’t quite as intimidatingly officious as she had come off earlier. “Let’s start with what you know of the Wastes and the traditional knightly orders. That will give us a starting point.”

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Oliver took a thoughtful sip of his tea, taking the moment to collect his thoughts. “Sure. Okay, the Wastes… they’re the places where the barrier between this world and the others is the thinnest, so they’re where most outsiders cross over. Were they left unattended, a dangerous group of monsters could build up in and around them, so the Bastion Cities were founded on the border of each Waste. Most residents of the Bastion Cities, especially among the nobility, strive to gain the proper training and gifts to be able become sentinels, and to go combat the outsiders in the Wastes.

“The orders of knights within each city are the pinnacle of those forces. Most of their members are Adepts or higher, and they’re called on to answer the most dangerous and powerful threats to emerge from each Waste. There’s the Aurul Order in the Arsilet, the Ochre Order in Terase, the Azure Order-”

“That’s enough,” Adeline cut Oliver off, her voice amused. “At the very least, your father didn’t skimp on your education. That’s good. So then, young scholar,” Adeline grinned, her teasing making Oliver flush in a way he hoped she didn’t notice, “how many outsider manifestations would you say occur within the five great Wastes, as opposed to the rest of the Realm? Half? Three-quarters?”

Oliver blinked in surprise at the question, then frowned in thought. “I’m… not sure. I never really thought about it. But I know the vast majority of them occur within the Wastes, so I’d guess… more than three-quarters?”

Adeline shook her head. “That’s what so many nobles seem to think. The Realm is so much larger than most of you seem to realize. The Wastes, and the cities that patrol them, occupy just a tenth of the Realm’s physical space, and we estimate that they account for about a third of the total manifestations that occur within our borders.”

“A third!?” Oliver asked, shocked. “But… but that can’t be right! We’d be swarmed by outsiders!”

“Of course, the Verdant Wastes to the north account for many more, but there are few even among the aristocracy that would consider that wilderness a part of our Realm. So yes. A third, maybe, of the outsiders that threaten the Realm appear within the Wastes. Of course, if not for the hard work of the bastion forces, those populations would quickly become uncontrollable, but how do you think the remainder of those monsters are handled?”

“The Argent Order?” Oliver asked, disbelieving. “But… there are so few of you! You’re only the fourth Argent knight I’ve ever seen!”

Adeline responded with a small laugh of amusement at the boy’s reaction, and took another sip of tea before correcting him. “Not quite. We’re not that powerful. But we do our part to help.”

Oliver frowned thoughtfully, thinking back to his lessons. “The wardens then?”

Oliver knew that the wardens were the equivalent of the sentinels in the trade cities. Smaller and less powerful than the bastion cities, the trade cities didn’t attract the same number of skilled battle-gifted that made up the sentinel cadres. As the wardens didn’t have a Waste to secure, they instead patrolled the trade routes that crisscrossed the Realm, ensuring monsters, outsiders, and bandits didn’t threaten the smaller communities.

“Somewhat. They do some of the heavy lifting at least, ensuring that what threats lurk in the frontier aren’t too destructive to the main trade routes, but they have neither the numbers or strength to truly secure the wilds of the Realm. The hunters and militias in the villages and towns do their part as well, as much if not more so than the wardens.”

Oliver nodded, his brow knitted together in thought. The Wastes were best surveyed by the cadres of sentinels, teams of three to eight gift bearers that worked together, usually for years at a time, to fight the outsiders that appeared in the Wastes. While the density of monsters in each Waste was generally quite high, they rarely worked together. A skilled cadre could handle most solitary threats or small forces of outsiders by themselves, so a large number of the small groups were ideal for combing through the often difficult terrain of the Wastes.

The frontier alone was an order of magnitude larger than all of the Wastes put together. Even if every sentinel in every bastion city gave up on the Wastes and just patrolled the heartland, which comprised perhaps half of the Realm as a whole, they would barely scratch the surface. It required a different approach.

“So the wardens patrol the trade routes,” Oliver said, his words slow and tenuous as he thought out loud, “while the hunters monitor the areas around their villages… and then the Argent Order fills in the spaces? The places where there are no village hunters and no trade routes?”

Adeline watched, clearly intrigued, as he thought his way through what she was explaining. “Correct in theory at least.” Adeline rolled her shoulder in a shrug, and her eyes drifted out the window. She thought for a long moment, then another. The silence stretched for well over a minute before she sighed and turned back to Oliver. “This is not the best way I’ve ever gone about recruiting someone. In some ways, I fear I may have forced you on this path. Or at the very least, circumstances did.”

Oliver watched Adeline cautiously. He hadn’t expected this sudden hesitance from the knight, who had seemed so confident since he had met her. “Adeline…” he hesitated, suddenly unsure if there was a title he should be using for her, but he bulled through it anyway. “You offered me the opportunity I never knew I wanted. You did not force me here.”

Adeline smiled sadly at him. “I hope you always feel that way, Oliver. But… if you’d prefer, I can bring you to a sentinel bar. We could have you signed up with a good, respectable cadre by the end of the day. Enough time and enough success in the Wastes will smooth over whatever feelings your father may have about what happened today. But… if I explain everything to you, there will be no going back. Do you understand?”

Oliver studied Adeline carefully. Even with everything his father had done for him, the offer was tempting. He could return to his old life. His old home. Already, he had been saved from the life of mediocrity he had feared in the first place. He could learn from his sister, he could live with his brother. He could, if he was lucky, win his family some prestige. His father would sneer at him, and find any excuse he could to punish him, but Adeline was right. If Oliver proved himself in the Wastes, it would blow over. Reputation guided all of Arthur Dennan’s decisions.

All he had to do was make his choice. Ignore the mysteries Adeline had presented him. Choose the safe path over the unknown road.

He remembered words on a page, feelings he could never speak out loud. He remembered his father’s eyes, judging him. His mother’s eyes, disappointed in him.

He remembered the day he had begun to burn his most private writings before anyone could see them.

“Tell me. Please.”

Adeline nodded. She saw the resolution in his eyes, and the pain that lurked behind them. “Very well. What do you know of adventurers?”