One Good Knight

by Mercedes Lackey

  She nodded. “So, being a Bookwyrm is less dangerous, I would think?”

  He sighed pensively and let his eyes roam over his collection. It really was quite impressive. The Great Library was probably smaller.

  “Yes and no. Your average iron-thewed barbarian doesn’t come after us, but the people that do are generally quite sophisticated, quite powerful, quite ruthless, and have the wherewithal to purchase top-notch help. They know exactly what they’re looking for, they know if we have it, and even though normally I would be inclined to just let them have it, or at least borrow it, they’re generally the sort of nasty pieces of work that as a Dragon of the Light, I have to make sure they don’t get their hands on it.” He sighed.

  “That’s why I collect history books for the most part, and try not to let any magic books sneak in.”

  “History?” she perked up. “What kind of history?”

  “By preference, historians who are aware that The Tradition exists and can analyze why events happened in the light of that.” He swiveled his head on his long neck and extracted a book neatly from the top quarter of a pile. “Arthur Ventus, for instance.”

  She could hardly believe it. “You have Ventus?

  Which history?”

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  “Tedious and Long-winded History of the Portaian War,” he said, and laughed. “You have to admire a man who doesn’t beat around the bush when it comes to his work.”

  “True, true,” she agreed, and knew she was getting a greedy look on her face. “I haven’t read that one—and I love Ventus.”

  “Well, I have more—this is just the one I picked off the top of the pile.” He handed it to her. “Be careful with it, it’s quite rare. Just not the sort of rare that gets Magicians with impressive staffs and hordes of demonic minions interested in me.”

  She took it carefully, and set it down on a stone shelf near the door so she wouldn’t forget it. “How do you end up getting these things, anyway?” she asked curiously. “I mean, they’re not the sort of items that end up in tombs and whatnot.”

  “No, but they are the sort of things that end up on the auction block,” he said, surprisingly. “I buy them, mostly. Adam and I will go out on treasure hunts, sell most of the baubles, then I’ll send the money to one of my human agents when I know of interesting volumes for sale.” He bared his teeth in what she figured was a large draconic grin. “That simple, really. And relatively painless, except for the bauble-collecting part. We’ve always lived on the coastline, though, so we’ve made it a practice of robbing pirates. That’s quite painless.”

  “Even more intriguing,” she said aloud. “How can robbing pirates be painless?”

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  “Because dragons can smell treasure,” he explained. “The bigger the hoard, the easier it is to smell. Unless it’s something small but incredibly valuable—that sort of thing gives off its own kind of scent. So we just wait for them to bury the ill-got-ten gains, then we move in, dig it up and carry it off. Painless.”

  She had to laugh at that.

  “So tell me, where did you get those lenses?” he asked, while she was still chuckling.

  “Ah, that is a long story,” she replied, and launched into it.

  “Armor,” said Gina. “The garbage you have them wearing will not do. You’ve seen how my armor looks. Everything fits, and fits well. Badly fitting armor is worse than none. I don’t suppose you know any dwarves?”

  “New armor—right—uh—dwarves?” Adam said, taken aback. “I do, but what does that—”

  “Dwarves make the best armor. Everyone thinks it’s the Elves, but the Elves are only putting ornament on top of Dwarven-made suits. We don’t need filigree and chasing. Just good solid pieces that will go on well, stay on, and be light enough that these girls won’t be laboring under the weight of it.” She tossed a helm in the discard pile; so far she had not found a single piece that was worth keeping. “This did all right to impress some country lad with his mother’s best kettle on his head, but not a trained fighter.”

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  “So it didn’t impress you, then?” The poor dragon sounded terribly disappointed.

  She decided not to laugh. This was, after all, a fellow fighter. Not a Champion, perhaps, but worthy of her respect. He had done his best with what he had at hand.

  Actually, he had really outdone himself, all things considered. He wasn’t even human, and he had managed to make a lot of untrained girls look moderately competent to the untrained eye.

  “Adamant—” she began.

  “Adam. Please,” he said, bringing his head down to her level. At that moment she marveled at how human he acted and sounded. Really quite amazing when you thought about it.

  “Adam. You did a fine job with what you had. No book of your brother’s would ever have been able to help you make a gaggle of girls into real fighters.

  Only someone like me can do that.”

  And here she smiled, because this was one of the best weapons in a Champion’s arsenal. And it was one of the least known. It did turn up in The Tradition, oh my, yes, but somehow, like The Tradition of the female Champion, the wrongdoers always seemed to overlook it.

  “Why you?” he asked.

  “Actually—let’s get all the girls together. I’d like them to hear this. Down at the arena, I think.”

  The spot she had chosen as the training field, which she had dubbed “the arena,” was a flat-bot-

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  tomed grassy bowl. It was just the right size for group exercises and not so big that girls sitting on the hillside would have any trouble seeing or hearing what was going on below. When she had all of them arrayed on the shaded slope—bibble-babbling as she pretty much expected they would be—she went to parade-rest position and cleared her throat in that way that only someone trained by a competent ser-geant-major could.

  She got instant silence, as she had expected she would.

  Adam sat on the floor of the bowl beside her, looking down at her expectantly, which didn’t hurt.

  “Now,” she said. “We lot are about to invoke a very powerful Traditional path for our own benefit.

  We are about to become the Ragged Company.”

  “The what?” asked Cleo, puzzled. But Thalia, surprisingly enough, clapped both hands to her mouth, her eyes going round.

  “You might know it as the Rebel Companions, Cleo,” Gina said, and looked around. Cleo shook her head, and only Helena and another girl, Dita, looked as if they recognized the reference. Well, there probably hadn’t been anything like outright rebellion in this Kingdom for a very long time, and it didn’t look or sound as if they got much news from the outside world, either.

  “The original tale goes like this. In a small Kingdom much like this one, the monarch fell ill and died, the rightful heir, a baby, disappeared, and One Good Knight

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  affairs were taken over by the Seneschal, who was, as you might expect, a very bad man. He taxed everything in sight, oppressed the poor, so forth and so on—” She waved her hand to indicate the usual thing. “However, he also went further. He had the nobles arrested, all in a single night, and their estates confiscated on various causes. He put his own men in their place, so that the nobles would not be able to topple him. Now there was no one that could effectively oppose him.”

  “Except?” prompted Cleo.

  Gina nodded. “Except. There was one noble, and a fine old Warrior he allegedly was, too, who had gone into the wilderness to become a holy hermit.

  The Seneschal assumed he was dead, or else had forgotten about him. But he got wind of what was happening, and he gathered up his arms and armor, donned them and went out to find out what exactly was going on. In the tale he has many adventures, and one by one he collects a band of untrained peasants, traveling entertainers and assorted riffraff, turns them into a small army, infilt
rates the Castle with them, kills the Seneschal and conjures up the baby and puts it on the throne.”

  “Oh! Now I recognize that,” said Amaranth.

  “That’s Robbing John’s Army.” And Adam nodded.

  The rest still looked blank. All the better. If they didn’t know it, Solon probably wouldn’t, either.

  “Now, we Champions know the truth of the first tale,” Gina continued. “Yes, there was a Hermit 306

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  Warrior, the King’s former war-leader. Yes, he did get wind of what was happening and come to start some trouble. But his army was not a lot of untrained peasants, because even the cleverest villain is going to have some people escape his net. A substantial core group of nobles and their bodyguards and retinues escaped to join the hermit, and the few peasants who also joined up had all been trained fighters themselves, usually serving in one or another of the nobles’ militia. And, I’m sorry to say, the ‘rightful heir’ was a random infant of the right age and looks.

  It hardly mattered, since the wee mite was immediately married while still in diapers to our old hermit, making him King. History says nothing more of the child, but the line continues to this day, and history does record that he was a just, honorable and fairly kind-hearted soul, so one assumes that she was happy, or at least as happy as royal heirs in such a situation can be.”

  Amaranth looked disappointed.

  Gina smiled. “That was the first tale,” she said.

  “And it served the nobles’ purpose to have it spread about that the pure-minded peasantry had risen up on their own and brought down the evil Seneschal.

  Thus the Traditional path was begun. The tale spread, changed a little, grew in the telling. And the next Ragged Company that arose really was com-posed half-and-half of trained and untrained peasants, and with clever leadership and the help of The Tradition along the way, they, too, destroyed their One Good Knight

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  evil Seneschal and put the rightful heir back on the throne. And again the tale spread and grew, and the third time—in the Rebel Companions—all but the officers were untrained. The fourth time—which is, I believe, Robbing John—only the leader had any training at all. By now The Tradition is highly in favor of an army of untrained peasantry with only the leader knowing anything about fighting. And this is where we are now.”

  Cleo pondered this and raised her hand. “Are we better or worse off being girls?” she asked, tossing her hair back over her shoulder. “I mean, should we all start pretending to be boys?”

  “My guess would be better off,” Gina replied after a moment of thought. “It’s clear that The Tradition is favoring an army made up of unlikely heroes. So the more unlikely we are, the more likely it is that we’ll get Traditional luck in force behind us.”

  “Maybe we should all be hunchbacks or something, too,” Dita said from their rear, prompting giggles.

  “I wouldn’t go that far,” Gina replied. “But it’s pretty clear that the more we invoke the Traditional path, the better off we will be. So those of you who have noble blood, I would like you to renounce it and swear blood-sisterhood to the band.”

  A couple looked reluctant for a moment or two, but the rest, some of whom were exceedingly angry with their families for giving them up, readily agreed. Then there was some chaotic nonsense and a little girlish squealing over having to extract a bit of 308

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  blood to mingle with the others, during which both Adam and Gina stood by impassively until they had all settled again.

  “Now,” said Gina with a grim smile. “I am going to prove to you that this has already worked.”

  She crooked her finger and summoned Dita, possibly the least likely fighter of them all, from the back of the group. She picked up one of the two fighting staves she had at her feet, and handed it to the girl, who held it uncertainly. Then she herself took the second stave, looked off nonchalantly into the distance, then suddenly whirled and executed a lightning three-strike attack on the girl, holding nothing back.

  The others gasped, squealed or screamed. Dita herself yelped.

  But her hands moved surely and of themselves.

  Crack, crack, crack. All three attacks were met.

  And countered.

  Gina grounded the staff and went back to parade-rest with it tucked over her shoulder. Dita stared at her hands, dumbfounded.

  “Now, that will only work if you are attacked without any warning,” Gina said. “And with an audience.

  However, you will find yourselves picking up fighting skills at a rate that would make most commanding officers weep with envy. Your real job will be to get yourselves into good fighting condition so that you can use those skills. I trust I make myself clear?”

  “Perfectly,” Adam rumbled. And turned an eye with a wicked glint in it on the girls. “Exercises, One Good Knight

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  ladies. Strength and flexibility training. Twice a day, at dawn and at dusk.”

  Gina smiled. She liked the way Adam thought.

  “We’ll start out training with staves. You’re less likely to get damaged, and they’re easy to replace.

  Shockingly versatile to use, too, and invoking Robbing John’s Tradition, as well. Meanwhile Adam here will be getting you proper armor and arms. And they will fit well and look like garbage.”

  Some of the girls’ mouths dropped open, as Gina continued. “This will be armor that would make a cat laugh. You will all look as if you’d dug the stuff up out of the backyard. This will be the Ragged Company, remember. We need to invoke The Tradition. If you look like a lot of hardy war-maid-ens, shining and beautiful, you’ll lose. If you look like a disorganized gaggle of girls who didn’t have brothers to take the family armor, you will win.”

  Actually, it was by no means certain that this was the truth. There were plenty of “Ragged Companies”

  that had gone down into the obscurity of failure. But they hadn’t had three key things that Gina was pretty certain were going to make the difference.

  They hadn’t had a Champion leading them.

  They hadn’t had a Champion trained by a Godmother planning their moves and their appearance.

  And they hadn’t had dragons.

  “All right, ladies, you know what our plan is.

  You’re dismissed to take care of community busi-

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  ness, but from now on, you’re each going to have to decide just how fit you are and how much extra time you are going to want to devote to training to make yourselves fitter. This, of course, is going to be as well as the morning and evening exercises and the afternoon weapon-work.” Gina nodded as a couple of the girls sighed in resignation. Still. They had volunteered. They could unvolunteer at any time.

  Gina did not want any reluctant fighters on her side.

  The group broke up, and Adam brought his head back down to Gina’s level. “How much of that was true-talk and how much was morale building?” he asked quietly.

  She shrugged. “Most of it is true. Glass Mountain Champions study The Tradition quite extensively, because Godmother Elena and Grand Master Alexander send us out on some rather complicated missions. If there are any Champions in the world that are good at manipulating The Tradition, it’s us.

  Now the question of just exactly how much this is going to make a difference remains to be seen. You and I have to come up with good strategy. I think we can do this. The way that the Palace itself is situated plays to our advantage. The fact that the Princess is known to most of the Guards there plays to our advantage. The isolation of the Palace plays to our advantage.”

  Adam nodded, eyes glowing with enthusiasm.

  She shrugged. “Now, can you get me Dwarven armor that looks as if it’s been dragged through hell?”

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  He pondered that for a moment. “Well, I can get you Dwarven armor, and we have more than enough to pay for it
, but they’re pretty peculiar about pride-in-workmanship, and getting them to do something that looks bad—I don’t know.”

  Gina smiled. “You just get the Armor Master up here and leave that to me.”

  They had a visitor. An Armor Master of a Wyrding Dwarf clan. Andie was playing the Princess, which was, evidently, a Traditional role that needed to be invoked occasionally—like today—in order to keep the good luck flowing.

  So today, when they had a visitor, the rightful-heir part of the story needed to be displayed. Andie was gowned in the one white sacrificial dress that had survived intact, with a gold belt, a gold circlet and a gold collar from Adam’s hoard making her look regal. She felt like an idiot, but evidently the Dwarf was impressed.

  The visitor was a female Armor Master, which was something of a shock. There were rumors that female Dwarves didn’t exist, that there were never more than one or two, that there was no way of telling them from the males because both sexes had beards.

  It didn’t appear that any of that was true.

  The lady in question was sturdy, short and fairly rough-hewn; you would expect that of a Dwarf. She was also unmistakably female, beardless and very much in charge of her entourage.

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  Andie’s role here was to be silent and serene.

  The former was easy; the latter she could fake.

  Apparently, according to Periapt, Dwarven rulers never said anything themselves. They let their underlings do all the talking. So she, flanked by Peri on the left, sat on an improvised throne, while the Armor Master, flanked by a swarthy dwarf with an ax almost as big as he was, sat on a section of column. Two younger Dwarves, with much shorter beards than the swarthy one, negotiated with Adam and Gina.

  A price was agreed on. All of the girls were brought in and measured meticulously. Several

  “adjustable” sets of armor were added to the list, because it did not appear that destroying the scale was having any effect on the spell binding Adam to carry off the sacrificial virgins.

  Now, finally, the subject of “appearance” came up, and Andie braced herself.