Post by Shhasow on Nov 16, 2010 11:34:10 GMT 10
Tilting Too
Summary: Kel and Wyldon joust. Wyldon ponders.
Rating: PG
This is a companion to the previous post, Tilting at Windmills, from Wyldon's point of view. I thought it gave a nice symmetry and an opportunity to peer into both minds before we play with them a bit.
Big thanks to Ankhiale.
Part 5 of 10 (so far)
______
The Lady Knight looked tired even under her full armor astride her beast of a horse. It had something to do with the slope of her shoulders, how after every round she drooped so slightly that someone less familiar with here would not notice and might think her as spry as when they began rounds ago.
Yet just before he gave the order to charge, she seemed to pause, breathe, and grow, putting aside her aches and pains and tiredness to fly down the lane. She seemed determined to unseat him every time.
“Again.”
Mindelan might do it, one day. Although with padded lances neither were in true danger of taking flight – though she came very close to it their first round – if they were to wield naked lances with their smaller point of impact, Wyldon thought she was coming close.
She hit nearly as hard as Raoul, with a stronger finish that left her more vulnerable but more likely to unseat her opponent. With practice, she would lose that vulnerability.
Raoul had done a very good job with her squire training. Wyldon had been quite pleased when he choose her; he had even taken the chance and had written to him after the fourth year examinations. It would have been a terrible waste for the most promising page to have gone unsquired, even if she was a girl, and Raoul was the perfect match. He was always in the public eye, a progressive war hero. Raoul would teach Mindelan how to command, how to plan, even how to enjoy what she did.
Mindelan was too much like himself. She was naturally serious and had to learn how to enjoy her duty.
Still, he held a furtive wish to have seen Raoul’s face when he received his letter implying her suitability for the commander.
Lord Raoul might have chosen her anyway, and Wyldon did admit to being concerned at the time that the man would turn her down to spite him. They didn’t have the best relationship, the two knights.
He had been worried when Raoul had taken so long to come to the palace, though his fears were in vain. No conservative knight would take her and there were not enough progressives interested in taking squires, especially not one with her potential. Her excellence worked against her for few knights cared to be outshone by their squire, especially if that squire were a girl.
“Again.”
It had been several years since Wyldon admitted to himself that Mindelan had great potential, more than any boy he had ever trained. The fact had rankled at first, destroying all of his preconceived notions about females in arms and how even the best girl fell short of the weakest boy.
Mindelan was living proof. More than physically besting even the older males, or at least holding her own, the girl was inexplicably charismatic.
Before her first year was out, all of her year-mates but one naturally gravitated towards her. After her second, half of the older pages did the same. Mindelan was a natural leader, not by words, but by deeds. Her charisma was physical; she led by going first so that the rest had no choice but to follow.
Then after her second year, all doubts were completely erased.
During her first year, he saw the girl as a leader. After the bandits, he saw her as she truly was, a commander. Wyldon couldn’t help but ponder the consequences if he had sent her home after that first year. Would the rest of those pages have been slaughtered?
What a tremendous waste of life and potential. Knights were not so numerous that Tortall could absorb the loss of six pages in one afternoon.
“Again.”
Then there was that debacle during her fourth year examinations. Wyldon had never expected Joren to go so far; after he allowed Mindelan to stay, Wyldon thought Joren had given up. He had failed to drive her away, but it seemed that the training master had underestimated the tenacity of both Mindelan and Joren.
Wyldon had not expected the girl to do something so rash as to skip the examinations to search for and rescue her maid. Strictly, it was what a true noble would have done, but he could think of no one who would have risked so much for a commoner. He might have when he was young, reckless, and entirely unwavering from the Code of Chivalry, but he would have done so for honor, not compassion.
That Joren had stooped so low as to orchestrate the kidnapping of the maid was appalling and indicative of a wanton lack of honor. It was at this point that Wyldon began to fear the Ordeal for the boy, though it was too late to do anything. His character was set in stone, and he shattered under the hammer of the Chamber.
That day when the Chamber of Ordeal opened up on the corpse of Joren of Stone Mountain was one of his most terrible. Utterly guilt-wracked due to the two failures in one year, Wyldon blamed himself for his complicity for both Vinson and Joren. Somehow, somewhere, he had a severe flaw in his training methods.
He hadn’t been surprised when Mindelan sought him out the day he resigned. It was very much to her loyal nature, and besides, she had appreciated his drive to push them past their limits, as she had the same determination for herself.
One of the proudest and yet most conflicting moments of his life was when she, with wide earnest eyes, said, “You’re the kind of knight I want to be.”
At that point, he realized that he had somehow become her ideal of knighthood. It was deeply appeasing, for Mindelan was quite a morally bound person possessing great potential, and to be honored in such a way was a balm to his wounded pride and shaken confidence. Yet it was sad, too. The knight she thought him to be would not have placed her on probation or given Joren implicit approval to haze her, or spent her entire four years continually testing her for a weakness that would give him a reason to send her home. That he found none was more frustrating than consoling; even her fear of heights was not enough, not when she excelled at everything else and worked to rid herself of it. Wyldon had always wondered why such a grounded girl had such an irrational fear, though he gathered that she lost it after Balor’s Needle.
It was with a conflicted heart that he had responded, “I’m not, but the fact that you think so is the greatest compliment I could receive.”
“Again.”
Mindelan proved herself time and time again. The scathing gossips who asserted the Ordeal would break her were resoundingly refuted when the Chamber doors opened and the girl reluctantly left. From all reports it was as if she didn’t want to leave, which was madness, but he did not doubt his sources when it was corroborated by several different voices.
Those same gossips predicted that she would die on the frontline, or worse, get good men killed, were silenced when she undertook a secret mission into Scanra to retrieve hundreds of refugees.
Well, that was the official story, one hastily cobbled by himself and Lord Raoul to give to the king.
The truth was that he knew Mindelan too well – Mithros, she was him but for her age – to have let her go back to Haven alone. Had he been thinking, he would have dragged her back to Fort Mastiff himself. At her age, a green knight with too much responsibility, dedication, and recklessness, he would have gone after the refugees as well, especially when she reported to him and Raoul how she had been sent visions by the Chamber since her Ordeal, that she had actually returned to the Chamber to question it.
Even Wyldon marveled at her audacity. For most knights, once was too much, but the one person whom almost everyone expected to fail, went back voluntarily.
Still, when she was gone, Wyldon was struck with dread. Mindelan was the best knight he had ever trained, and her friends that followed her all individually excellent and honorable. His unsettled emotions were not helped by the furious Raoul, nor the knight’s angry missives that tersely demanded immediate notice when she arrived. Mindelan had many powerful champions.
When Wyldon finally received word from a scout of their arrival he and a trusted escort from the Third Company had left immediately. They reached the banks of the Vassa just as Mindelan hobbled off the raft. Relieved that the knights were all alive, including his intrepid hapless squire, Wyldon was struck beyond words.
It was at that moment, he analyzed later, that he had consciously realized the changes in himself, the subtle modifications in his mindset. He was no less hidebound, but she had defied his expectations too many times to leave him unaltered. Every time she was doomed to failure, she rose above triumphantly.
Wyldon no longer could put any limits on Lady Keladry of Mindelan. She defied limits. She defied the impossible.
No, he was not the kind of knight she wanted to be; the Lady Knight was the kind of knight everyone should be, the knight he wanted to be.
Overcome, it was all he could do to kiss her brow and bless her.
“Again.”
Merely weeks after Mindelan and the other knights were pardoned, Wyldon received word from Cavall.
His beloved wife was dead, taken by a sudden fever in autumn as he was stationed at Mastiff.
Jesslaw walked in on him weeping silently, tears running down from open staring eyes. His squire read the letter written by Margarry, and left only to inform the second in command that the commander was unreachable. They sat together in companionable suffering, for Vivenne had taken a shine to the enthusiastic pup and he to her. Owen was one of the few who knew the depth of his love for his wife, and Wyldon supposed later that his squire had decided he was not to be left alone.
Sunarine was in Port Legann, too far away to make it to Cavall in time, and Cathrea was unreachable in her Temple in the City of the Gods. His only consolation was that Eiralys married a Naxen and was close enough to be with her mother and that Margarry was still home. Vivenne did not go alone or unloved, but it tore at his heart that she passed without his knowing, without his presence.
It seemed a cold message to be informed of her death by black and white.
Now, a year later, he still felt the absence of his wife. He carried Vivenne in his heart and sought solace with his daughters and with duty.
“Mindelan, live lances.”
He met the Lady Knight at Corus and she had given her solemn condolences. Since his recent discharge of duty left him at ends with too much time to think and be idle, he had offered to continue her jousting training.
She had improved little since their last bout during Progress, but there had been little time for tilting during the war. They were both slightly rusty at first, and after he showed her a few tricks, though she was under oath never to repeat them especially not to Lord Raoul, they were fairly well-matched.
“Again.”
This was the first time they drilled with unpadded lances, and by Mithros, the power behind her thrust was staggering, nearly equal to Lord Raoul. She had gained more muscle over the months, he could tell, but she was weakened by fatigue.
How much longer could she go? He was almost done in as was Cavall’s Heart, so she and her monster of a horse had to be just as exhausted if not worse.
Who would call for the end of the practice?
Would he crack first or would she?
Wyldon stretched briefly as she turned away to drink and select a fresh lance. This would be their last, he decided. There was no need to strain the horses, though they needed the exercise to build up stamina as well as the knights.
He picked up a new lance and walked Heart back to the starting place.
There was fire in Mindelan’s eyes as she turned back, visible only for a second before she replaced her helmet.
Somehow she and her mount were connected, for he fed off her sudden vitality, frisking and high-stepping as if it were morning and his sides were not soaked with sweat.
She readied herself, suddenly sitting tall and proud again, as fresh as the first run.
As Mindelan stared down the yard at him, the sun peeked behind a cloud and hit her armor. It illuminated her, glancing off the proud angles of her body, concentration and determination in every inch of it. Wyldon was struck with a sudden unwelcome notion.
“Again!” he heard her say.
They surged forth, but Wyldon could not help but be late with his timing, his lance suddenly felt unwieldy, his seat uncertain.
Keladry of Mindelan was beautiful.
The revelation was shocking to him who had never looked at a female warrior in any physical way.
So surprising that, by the time he convinced his mind to forget about the aesthetics of his opponent and concentrate on the joust at hand, it was too late.
He flew with the birds in the blue sky.
As he lay on the ground, winded and watching the clouds drift by, Wyldon’s first reaction was anger at himself for getting distracted and at her for being the cause. He hadn’t been unhorsed since he was a green knight. “That fool Raoul will never let me forget this,” he muttered in annoyance.
Yet when her worried face filled his vision, Wyldon felt only pride that his best pupil had bested him. It felt right, as if a passing of a mantle from one champion to the next, but he would make her earn it to do so again.
Next time he would not be caught off guard by such inopportune notions. After all, he normally didn’t find the Lady Knight beautiful.
Fatigue was the cause of his distraction. Fatigue and stress.
Summary: Kel and Wyldon joust. Wyldon ponders.
Rating: PG
This is a companion to the previous post, Tilting at Windmills, from Wyldon's point of view. I thought it gave a nice symmetry and an opportunity to peer into both minds before we play with them a bit.
Big thanks to Ankhiale.
Part 5 of 10 (so far)
______
The Lady Knight looked tired even under her full armor astride her beast of a horse. It had something to do with the slope of her shoulders, how after every round she drooped so slightly that someone less familiar with here would not notice and might think her as spry as when they began rounds ago.
Yet just before he gave the order to charge, she seemed to pause, breathe, and grow, putting aside her aches and pains and tiredness to fly down the lane. She seemed determined to unseat him every time.
“Again.”
Mindelan might do it, one day. Although with padded lances neither were in true danger of taking flight – though she came very close to it their first round – if they were to wield naked lances with their smaller point of impact, Wyldon thought she was coming close.
She hit nearly as hard as Raoul, with a stronger finish that left her more vulnerable but more likely to unseat her opponent. With practice, she would lose that vulnerability.
Raoul had done a very good job with her squire training. Wyldon had been quite pleased when he choose her; he had even taken the chance and had written to him after the fourth year examinations. It would have been a terrible waste for the most promising page to have gone unsquired, even if she was a girl, and Raoul was the perfect match. He was always in the public eye, a progressive war hero. Raoul would teach Mindelan how to command, how to plan, even how to enjoy what she did.
Mindelan was too much like himself. She was naturally serious and had to learn how to enjoy her duty.
Still, he held a furtive wish to have seen Raoul’s face when he received his letter implying her suitability for the commander.
Lord Raoul might have chosen her anyway, and Wyldon did admit to being concerned at the time that the man would turn her down to spite him. They didn’t have the best relationship, the two knights.
He had been worried when Raoul had taken so long to come to the palace, though his fears were in vain. No conservative knight would take her and there were not enough progressives interested in taking squires, especially not one with her potential. Her excellence worked against her for few knights cared to be outshone by their squire, especially if that squire were a girl.
“Again.”
It had been several years since Wyldon admitted to himself that Mindelan had great potential, more than any boy he had ever trained. The fact had rankled at first, destroying all of his preconceived notions about females in arms and how even the best girl fell short of the weakest boy.
Mindelan was living proof. More than physically besting even the older males, or at least holding her own, the girl was inexplicably charismatic.
Before her first year was out, all of her year-mates but one naturally gravitated towards her. After her second, half of the older pages did the same. Mindelan was a natural leader, not by words, but by deeds. Her charisma was physical; she led by going first so that the rest had no choice but to follow.
Then after her second year, all doubts were completely erased.
During her first year, he saw the girl as a leader. After the bandits, he saw her as she truly was, a commander. Wyldon couldn’t help but ponder the consequences if he had sent her home after that first year. Would the rest of those pages have been slaughtered?
What a tremendous waste of life and potential. Knights were not so numerous that Tortall could absorb the loss of six pages in one afternoon.
“Again.”
Then there was that debacle during her fourth year examinations. Wyldon had never expected Joren to go so far; after he allowed Mindelan to stay, Wyldon thought Joren had given up. He had failed to drive her away, but it seemed that the training master had underestimated the tenacity of both Mindelan and Joren.
Wyldon had not expected the girl to do something so rash as to skip the examinations to search for and rescue her maid. Strictly, it was what a true noble would have done, but he could think of no one who would have risked so much for a commoner. He might have when he was young, reckless, and entirely unwavering from the Code of Chivalry, but he would have done so for honor, not compassion.
That Joren had stooped so low as to orchestrate the kidnapping of the maid was appalling and indicative of a wanton lack of honor. It was at this point that Wyldon began to fear the Ordeal for the boy, though it was too late to do anything. His character was set in stone, and he shattered under the hammer of the Chamber.
That day when the Chamber of Ordeal opened up on the corpse of Joren of Stone Mountain was one of his most terrible. Utterly guilt-wracked due to the two failures in one year, Wyldon blamed himself for his complicity for both Vinson and Joren. Somehow, somewhere, he had a severe flaw in his training methods.
He hadn’t been surprised when Mindelan sought him out the day he resigned. It was very much to her loyal nature, and besides, she had appreciated his drive to push them past their limits, as she had the same determination for herself.
One of the proudest and yet most conflicting moments of his life was when she, with wide earnest eyes, said, “You’re the kind of knight I want to be.”
At that point, he realized that he had somehow become her ideal of knighthood. It was deeply appeasing, for Mindelan was quite a morally bound person possessing great potential, and to be honored in such a way was a balm to his wounded pride and shaken confidence. Yet it was sad, too. The knight she thought him to be would not have placed her on probation or given Joren implicit approval to haze her, or spent her entire four years continually testing her for a weakness that would give him a reason to send her home. That he found none was more frustrating than consoling; even her fear of heights was not enough, not when she excelled at everything else and worked to rid herself of it. Wyldon had always wondered why such a grounded girl had such an irrational fear, though he gathered that she lost it after Balor’s Needle.
It was with a conflicted heart that he had responded, “I’m not, but the fact that you think so is the greatest compliment I could receive.”
“Again.”
Mindelan proved herself time and time again. The scathing gossips who asserted the Ordeal would break her were resoundingly refuted when the Chamber doors opened and the girl reluctantly left. From all reports it was as if she didn’t want to leave, which was madness, but he did not doubt his sources when it was corroborated by several different voices.
Those same gossips predicted that she would die on the frontline, or worse, get good men killed, were silenced when she undertook a secret mission into Scanra to retrieve hundreds of refugees.
Well, that was the official story, one hastily cobbled by himself and Lord Raoul to give to the king.
The truth was that he knew Mindelan too well – Mithros, she was him but for her age – to have let her go back to Haven alone. Had he been thinking, he would have dragged her back to Fort Mastiff himself. At her age, a green knight with too much responsibility, dedication, and recklessness, he would have gone after the refugees as well, especially when she reported to him and Raoul how she had been sent visions by the Chamber since her Ordeal, that she had actually returned to the Chamber to question it.
Even Wyldon marveled at her audacity. For most knights, once was too much, but the one person whom almost everyone expected to fail, went back voluntarily.
Still, when she was gone, Wyldon was struck with dread. Mindelan was the best knight he had ever trained, and her friends that followed her all individually excellent and honorable. His unsettled emotions were not helped by the furious Raoul, nor the knight’s angry missives that tersely demanded immediate notice when she arrived. Mindelan had many powerful champions.
When Wyldon finally received word from a scout of their arrival he and a trusted escort from the Third Company had left immediately. They reached the banks of the Vassa just as Mindelan hobbled off the raft. Relieved that the knights were all alive, including his intrepid hapless squire, Wyldon was struck beyond words.
It was at that moment, he analyzed later, that he had consciously realized the changes in himself, the subtle modifications in his mindset. He was no less hidebound, but she had defied his expectations too many times to leave him unaltered. Every time she was doomed to failure, she rose above triumphantly.
Wyldon no longer could put any limits on Lady Keladry of Mindelan. She defied limits. She defied the impossible.
No, he was not the kind of knight she wanted to be; the Lady Knight was the kind of knight everyone should be, the knight he wanted to be.
Overcome, it was all he could do to kiss her brow and bless her.
“Again.”
Merely weeks after Mindelan and the other knights were pardoned, Wyldon received word from Cavall.
His beloved wife was dead, taken by a sudden fever in autumn as he was stationed at Mastiff.
Jesslaw walked in on him weeping silently, tears running down from open staring eyes. His squire read the letter written by Margarry, and left only to inform the second in command that the commander was unreachable. They sat together in companionable suffering, for Vivenne had taken a shine to the enthusiastic pup and he to her. Owen was one of the few who knew the depth of his love for his wife, and Wyldon supposed later that his squire had decided he was not to be left alone.
Sunarine was in Port Legann, too far away to make it to Cavall in time, and Cathrea was unreachable in her Temple in the City of the Gods. His only consolation was that Eiralys married a Naxen and was close enough to be with her mother and that Margarry was still home. Vivenne did not go alone or unloved, but it tore at his heart that she passed without his knowing, without his presence.
It seemed a cold message to be informed of her death by black and white.
Now, a year later, he still felt the absence of his wife. He carried Vivenne in his heart and sought solace with his daughters and with duty.
“Mindelan, live lances.”
He met the Lady Knight at Corus and she had given her solemn condolences. Since his recent discharge of duty left him at ends with too much time to think and be idle, he had offered to continue her jousting training.
She had improved little since their last bout during Progress, but there had been little time for tilting during the war. They were both slightly rusty at first, and after he showed her a few tricks, though she was under oath never to repeat them especially not to Lord Raoul, they were fairly well-matched.
“Again.”
This was the first time they drilled with unpadded lances, and by Mithros, the power behind her thrust was staggering, nearly equal to Lord Raoul. She had gained more muscle over the months, he could tell, but she was weakened by fatigue.
How much longer could she go? He was almost done in as was Cavall’s Heart, so she and her monster of a horse had to be just as exhausted if not worse.
Who would call for the end of the practice?
Would he crack first or would she?
Wyldon stretched briefly as she turned away to drink and select a fresh lance. This would be their last, he decided. There was no need to strain the horses, though they needed the exercise to build up stamina as well as the knights.
He picked up a new lance and walked Heart back to the starting place.
There was fire in Mindelan’s eyes as she turned back, visible only for a second before she replaced her helmet.
Somehow she and her mount were connected, for he fed off her sudden vitality, frisking and high-stepping as if it were morning and his sides were not soaked with sweat.
She readied herself, suddenly sitting tall and proud again, as fresh as the first run.
As Mindelan stared down the yard at him, the sun peeked behind a cloud and hit her armor. It illuminated her, glancing off the proud angles of her body, concentration and determination in every inch of it. Wyldon was struck with a sudden unwelcome notion.
“Again!” he heard her say.
They surged forth, but Wyldon could not help but be late with his timing, his lance suddenly felt unwieldy, his seat uncertain.
Keladry of Mindelan was beautiful.
The revelation was shocking to him who had never looked at a female warrior in any physical way.
So surprising that, by the time he convinced his mind to forget about the aesthetics of his opponent and concentrate on the joust at hand, it was too late.
He flew with the birds in the blue sky.
As he lay on the ground, winded and watching the clouds drift by, Wyldon’s first reaction was anger at himself for getting distracted and at her for being the cause. He hadn’t been unhorsed since he was a green knight. “That fool Raoul will never let me forget this,” he muttered in annoyance.
Yet when her worried face filled his vision, Wyldon felt only pride that his best pupil had bested him. It felt right, as if a passing of a mantle from one champion to the next, but he would make her earn it to do so again.
Next time he would not be caught off guard by such inopportune notions. After all, he normally didn’t find the Lady Knight beautiful.
Fatigue was the cause of his distraction. Fatigue and stress.