Skalts studied her face for a long moment.
It was the Count of Biche’s face, exactly.
And yet the feeling it carried was entirely different. The blazing, near-manic vitality was gone; what remained was a kind of dim, erosive melancholy. If Hyderlin had been a fire, this woman was the charred wood left behind when the flame goes out.
If the fire were extinguished from Hyderlin — if what remained was nothing but dry timber — she would look exactly like this, Skalts thought.
Which meant she would look the way Hyderlin had looked in those final days. Stripped of her rank, reduced to a condemned prisoner in a thin ceremonial gown, walking through the rain toward the executioner’s platform — barely registering that it was Skalts himself guiding her there.
He remembered the peculiarity of that experience with unsettling clarity: escorting to her death the woman he had served under for years.
And now, standing before a woman who wore that same face and calling himself Knight Commander felt stranger still.
It wasn’t only the face. The height, the eye color — even the shape of the hands. Nearly identical.
It was like meeting a ghost.
“…Please, have a seat.”
After the long silence, Skalts gestured to a chair. He seated her by the hearth and perched himself on the edge of the table.
He broke into a grin, and the scar that divided his face seemed almost to move with it.
“This wound — it’s rather disfiguring, isn’t it? Some of the noblewoman have screamed and fainted at the sight of me.”
Hyderlin smiled thinly and asked a question whose answer she already knew.
“How did it happen?”
“Punishment for disobeying the former Knight Commander.”
“Ah. The Count of Biche —”
“A dagger. From the brow to the lip, on the diagonal. Fortunately, the eye was spared.”
“You must have been relieved when the Count of Biche died.”
“Honestly? I’m not certain. I respected her — personally, I mean.”
“A person who carved that scar into your face? Who attempted to assassinate Queen Margarite?”
“Yes. And I’m not alone in that. I don’t think there was a single knight in Lotsa who didn’t look up to the Count of Biche. Her end was cowardly — some would say — but before that, she was a knight among knights. An undefeated swordswoman. It had always seemed like she would simply never die.”
Undefeated. Immortal. Words that had no business being applied to her. Hyderlin let out a short, almost involuntary laugh.
“What a ridiculous thing to say.”
And the scorn in that laugh — even Skalts could see it. It was more purely Hyderlin than anything else she had shown him.
He watched her carefully.
“Which is why I can’t quite believe it — that she died the way she did. I kept thinking, even after everything: that she would come through that door and give me an order.”
He was testing her openly now. There was no real question of how long the pretense could hold.
Hyderlin answered him.
“My name is Hys.”
“I know.”
“People were already criticizing my husband for keeping company with a woman who resembled the dead Count of Biche. Now you’re trying to overlay her image onto me directly.”
She smiled.
“I don’t particularly enjoy being treated as someone else.”
Skalts spoke impulsively.
“But your husband overlays that same image onto you, does he not? In the same way.”
“That’s different.”
“Why?”
“Because I am fond of Sarg.”
The words were out before she had made any decision to say them. The moment they left her mouth, she regretted it. But what was done could not be undone.
Hyderlin stood, turning her back on him.
“I should be going.”
“Shall I walk you back to your room?”
“No. I’d like to see a bit more of the training ground, if that’s permitted.”
“Of course.”
Hyderlin crouched in the corner of the training ground and watched the knights practice with unhurried attention. The knights, for their part, kept casting glances at her and speaking under their breath.
“I feel like the old Commander is watching me drill.”
“I keep expecting to get a boot in the backside from the Count of Biche.”
The knights voiced their unease in the register of jokes as they continued to work through their forms.
A new recruit — not yet a year in — leaned toward the others and asked in a low voice:
“Who is it she’s supposed to look like?”
“Right, you wouldn’t know the old Commander.”
A ten-year veteran scratched the back of his head.
“Before Sir Skalts Petaora, the royal order’s Commander was Hyderlin Biche — niece of the king, daughter of the Knight King. A prodigy with a blade, if there ever was one.”
It was, strictly speaking, not quite accurate — Hyderlin shared no blood with the Knight King — but there was no way for them to know that.
“She sounds extraordinary.”
“Extraordinary and beyond. She was frightening.”
A knight with a nose bent at an angle — the legacy of old damage — rubbed his arm and shuddered. His companions snickered at the exaggerated performance. He looked at them flatly.
“You only find it funny because you never actually had to deal with her.”
“We seem to remember you getting rather presumptuous yourself, once.”
Laughter rippled through the group, but the recruit was intrigued.
“What happened?”
That would have been — let him think — eleven years ago now.
In those days, Hyderlin was already being called a prodigy, a genius — but she was also barely twenty years old. A young woman, for all her talent. And the idea that a soft-faced girl, barely grown, had been assigned to command the most proud and distinguished and frankly difficult corps of knights in the kingdom was, to those knights, an insult delivered without apology.
“And what are we supposed to do with the Commander who was just there before her?”
The previous Commander, an older man, had stepped aside gracefully, saying it was past time for him to retire. The knights did not share his equanimity.
She may be decent enough with a sword, but that’s got nothing to do with leadership. What would someone that young even know?
To be clear, the knights had not refused to show her respect. This was the world of strict hierarchy, and no one in it could ignore those rules entirely.
The trouble was that the respect the knights offered was meant for a princess — not a Knight Commander.
The young Commander found that distinction deeply unsatisfactory.
“I know you’re all deeply unhappy with this arrangement. I understand it. I’d be furious too if I had to watch some child plant herself in a seat she didn’t earn and start giving orders.”
Hyderlin had said it lightly, propping herself on her sword with a thin smile.
“So I’ll offer you the chance to do something about it. Pick up your swords.”
The knights exchanged uncertain glances. It was of course the natural instinct of any subordinate, when their superior told them to express their grievances, to bow their heads and say there are no grievances, sir. That kind of well-worn reflexive submission kept soldiers alive in organizations.
But there was always one who had more nerve than sense.
“I’d be glad to, Commander.”
“All right.”
That knight had stepped forward with the intention of humiliating her — of dropping a young princess in front of her own men and making a demonstration of how unsuited she was. What followed was less a duel than an exhibition.
Hyderlin dealt with him quickly, easily, with an almost careless economy of motion. Then she offered a brief assessment of his technique and called up the next one.
If the first man was the hardest to get moving, the second came easier. Some thought she’d be tired now, that this was their moment. Others simply wanted to receive whatever terse critique she had to offer. They came forward one by one.
Hyderlin worked through them all without showing the slightest fatigue. Quite remarkable endurance. Quite remarkable patience.
“Anyone else?”
She had looked around at them with a smile broad enough to split her face. The knights, more than adequately exhausted at this point, had nothing left to offer. Hyderlin scratched her temple.
“I may be young, but my experience isn’t far behind yours. I was there for the winter undead campaign. I rode with the suppression of the southern lords’ rebellion. That ought to count for something in terms of both personal combat and command ability. I know I still have things to learn. I’d like to hear your input when it matters, and I’ll act on it. So — let’s make this work.”
Even the most grudging of them had found their resistance softening slightly at that. But there were always those who stiffened instead.
Particularly the newer recruits who didn’t yet know the shape of her character. The bent-nosed knight was among them.
“Your Highness.”
“I believe I’ve told you before to call me Sir Biche.”
She had made allowances for a while. But when the quiet insubordination persisted past her tolerance, she stopped allowing it.
“Do you hear with your ears, or with your nose?”
And then she had broken that nose. Cracked the cheekbone. Left a hairline fracture in two ribs for good measure.
The bent-nosed knight had been beaten thoroughly by a woman who stood half a head shorter than him.
“She couldn’t hit me because she was a princess. That’s the only reason.”
He had said it, loudly enough for word to get back to her. She had found out about it within the hour, grinning from ear to ear as she hauled him behind the building.
“Oh, so you were going easy because I’m a princess? Then let’s settle this somewhere with no witnesses — no rank, just swords.”
When one of the concerned knights crept behind the building to check on him some time later, the bent-nosed knight had been found hanging upside down from a tree, unconscious. No one could figure out how she’d managed to get him up there.
“The lot of you treat me like a tree and assume you can climb whenever you like.”
After that, the young Knight Commander changed her approach.
Rule one: new recruits would be beaten to within an inch of their lives to instill the proper respect.
Rule two: anyone who refused to listen would also be beaten to within an inch of their lives.
As a result, a large portion of the royal order’s knights who had served during Hyderlin’s tenure carried the memory of having been beaten to within an inch of their lives by their Commander. The lucky ones simply had that. The less fortunate ones had had their boots taken and been strung up by the ankles, or had been buried to the neck in the courtyard dirt.
“The kingdom has no one of worth anymore. Knights can’t even overpower a slender princess…”
The princess who had also served as Knight Commander had a habit of saying that — kicking shins and backsides as she went, with a smile at the corner of her mouth that her knights had never been entirely sure how to interpret.
The bent-nosed knight grumbled.
“Doesn’t matter how fearsome she was. Dead is dead. There’s no order to the dying.”
In any case, the knights who remembered her tyranny were now looking at the woman who was her perfect reflection and rubbing their own arms in involuntary memory.
“Damn. I feel like I’m looking at the ghost of the Count of Biche.”
But there was always one brave soul in any gathering.
One of the younger knights broke from the group and approached her.
“Pardon me — my lady?”
Hyderlin, crouched in the corner, tilted her head up to look at the man. She recognized him. He was the kind of person who had always seemed to be courting a short life; he moved without hesitation in the way that usually meant someone would eventually have to teach them consequences.
“Since you’ve come all the way to the training ground — would you care to hold a sword? I could show you a basic stance and a few fundamentals. You never know — you might discover a hidden talent.”
The knight persisted until she had a practice blade pressed into her hand.
The grip was worn smooth from years of use — polished by hands she had never counted, but which had left their mark in the wood. The weight was just slightly less than a live blade.
She closed her hand around it.
The stance came to her the way breathing did.
Hyderlin stood there, training blade raised, the order’s crest burned into the wood — and became suddenly, completely aware that every knight on the training ground had stopped to look at her.
The bold young knight let out a low whistle.
“Oh — well, that form is actually quite impressive —”
“I can’t do this.”
Hyderlin handed the blade back to him.
She ignored his follow-up attempts to coax her into a practice swing, stepped out from the sun and into the shade of the tree line, and sat back down.
She crouched there and looked at the knights for a long time.
As she had been among the noblewomen, so she was here too — a stranger, out of place and unwanted by the landscape. There was no room for the dead on the ground of the living.
