Act III — The Shaping of a Paladin
The bells rose before dawn, their iron voices rolling through the sleeping halls and up the stairways of the Chapterhouse. They spoke with the grave cadence of ritual and command; they called the living to labor. In the early days the sound had been terror — a hammer at the temple of the body that drove the weak from their beds and left many broken on the yard. Now it bore different meaning. The hammer had not been withdrawn; it had been set to finer work. Where once the bell had sought to cleave and burn, it now called to temper and shape.
Shithead woke with the sound of the bell in his ear and the chill of the dormitory stone beneath his feet. The bunk where he had slept twenty times already had conformed to the shape of his shoulder; the straw within had been ground by breathing and turned by motion until it was less a bed and more a record. He rose, a slow and careful motion: the shoulder first, the hip next, the weight returned along limbs that had learned repetition into habit. He dressed in the dark, hands moving by memory — the leather thongs of his tabard, the knot of the cloak, the binding of his boots. The beads at his wrist lay warm against his skin and he did not thumb them; they had become part of his hand the way a ring grows to the finger of a man who has worn it long.
Around him the dormitory stirred. Brina cursed softly as she hauled her mail over her head and bent to lace her boots; Calder fumbled with a strap on his splinted wrist and sniffed the chill from his nose; Dorian ran a hand through hair that would not keep neat beneath the grime, exacting elegance even here; Eryk rose without motion, as if he had never slept at all but only waited. Here and there, a bunk remained empty — a fact that sank into Shithead with every breath. Faces he had come to know as part of the body of their company were missing, gone back to farm and craft, sent away by the men whose job it was to decide who might take the oath and who must leave.
They filed into the yard in lines learned through practice. Mist lay low on the ground and the torches along the wall threw halos in the fog. The earth of the yard had become a map of their labor: Divots from mis-stepped feet, the worn circle where swords had met shields, the deep grooves where the heavy stones sat and were lifted until shoulders threatened revolt. The drills began without flourish; there was no need for preface. The drillmaster's whistle cut the air and bodies moved.
"Hold the guard!" the knight shouted, voice bright as struck metal. His command was not one of cruelty but of precise expectation. "Palms open, elbows in. Shithead — do you feel the center? Bend with your knees; do not let the blade find your shoulder."
Shithead shifted as he had been taught: knees, the slight spring, the alignment of shield and arm. He had learned the lesson of the first month — that brute strength was raw and cheap and could carry a man only so far. The price of muscles left a man liable to better-aimed strikes. Still the body spoke first; he had to teach it to listen to the mind. The shield bit his forearm; the wood was dented and warm from usage, but it held. He met his partner's blade and felt the note of wood on wood in his ribs.
Brina laughed when her sword came back bleeding wet from the training block. "Again!" she cried, and the world warmed around her like sun on her shoulders. She fought the way she had run in the fields as a child, with the ease that had been meant to move. Her energy was magnificent and sometimes reckless. A knight at her elbow corrected her foot once, gentling the shape of her strike until it had weight and balance; she obeyed and hit with a force that left her breathless and thrilled.
Calder's hands shook when he first gripped the wooden blade, but steadiness crept into his fingers under the watchful correction of the instructor. The thin scholar learned to place his foot as he had learned to place a quill: small motions that added to truth. When he blocked the blow that would have taken him off his feet, pride rose a hot sudden thing in his chest and his face flushed like a boy's at a compliment.
Dorian moved with the ease of one groomed for tournaments. His posture was a thing of study; he had been taught to hold himself as if under a painter's eye. Pride made him quick to recover from being wrong. When the knight struck his elbow aside and murmured the correction, Dorian's jaw tightened and he did the form again and again until the muscles grudgingly agreed.
Eryk did not look like much. Where others shouted or grunted, he listened, and his body answered. He was not quick with words, but there was a certain blade-bearing silence about him: an economy of motion that was itself language. He watched Shithead and nodded once when he saw the heavy man adjust with the ease of repetition.
Shithead's strength had been the thing that kept him alive on the road and through the first nights. It would not be his ruin nor his pedestal. He stood in the center of their practice and took blows; he gave them and accepted them. Sweat beaded along his forehead and trailed into the hollows of his collarbone. He tasted iron in his mouth when the knight struck with the flat of the blade to correct his wrist. He tasted it and breathed through the pain; it was a sacrament now, that bitter tang.
When the whistle called an end, the company did not slump but gathered, shoulders heaving, the air filled with trade-worn breath. They were not the unformed things who had just arrived; the yard had made them into instruments that might one day sound as a choir.
The cloisters were cooler, the stones dry beneath their feet. Candles bobbed in iron sconces, beeswax smelling faint and constant. The library doors were left half-open to the sound of pages turning; monks and acolytes moved with quiet purpose. Here the training took another shape — the body gave way to study, and study gave way to the first small communes of acts called prayer.
A knight with silver threaded through her hair — Ser Maela, whom some spoke of in low and admiring tones — stepped onto the dais and bared her palm. A thin scar ran like a river through her skin; she told no story of its making. She closed her eyes and spoke words that were less language than breath. A light rose in her folded hand, a small globe that blossomed in the dim. It was not magic in the way wizards taught; it had no show. It warmed the hollow of her palm, filled the wound, and its light retreated as if shy of place.
"This is Aureon's grace," she said, the voice even as sun-steady. "He gives warmth where it serves, not to feed vanity. The light is not here for your triumph. It is here for the keeping of life and the mending of harm."
She called them forward in groups of five. Their attempts were a spectacle enough to the unlearned. Brina muttered a curse at the length of the chant and the odd shapes of the glyphs they were taught to form with hands. Yet sweat and impatience ended with laughter when a spark leapt between her fingers, small and fierce as an ember. Calder's face broke open in tears when his palm blurred into faint gold; Dorian's first flame was clean and bright as a polished blade, and then the knight beckoned him back and made him do it again for the sake of tempering pride. Eryk's try was quiet and late in the day, but when the light finally clung to his skin it was as if he had always had a secret and merely chosen to share it.
Shithead failed at first. He had not thought the prayer would be the hardest thing to master. He had expected the body to be the measure; he had believed that if he could push the soreness aside, the rest would follow. But the light demanded attention, humility, a stillness that was foreign to the rhythm of his muscles. His breath came as if in sprinting, his fingers cramped with the outline of the words. One by one, other men and women took their hold of the small radiance while his palms stayed dark. The failure added a weight to his shoulders that no stone could have matched.
That afternoon, instead of sparring or chanting, Ser Joren summoned their cohort into the vaulted hall that doubled as refectory and court. Benches had been arranged in a semicircle, facing a long table upon which rested a single iron-bound ledger and a scale of bronze. The fire behind him cast his face in stark relief, and when he spoke his voice filled the chamber as if it were carved into stone.
"Steel may hold an enemy," Joren said, "but it cannot weigh the worth of a man's deed. You will learn that strength, whether of arm or prayer, is nothing without judgment."
He motioned to two senior initiates, who entered carrying a plain-clothed man between them — an actor, clearly, for his chains were light, but he bowed his head as though under true shame.
"This man," Joren intoned, "is accused of stealing grain from the lord's storehouse during a season of hunger. He claims it was to feed his starving children. The law says theft must be punished. The question before you is this: justice or mercy?"
He divided them into groups, giving each a turn to argue.
Brina leapt first to her feet, her voice ringing with indignation. "If his children starved, then mercy is owed! What good is law if it crushes the poor beneath it?"
Dorian rose at once, sharp as a blade drawn too quickly. "Law is the bedrock. If every thief claims hunger, the storehouses will empty, and all will starve. The law cannot bend to sob-stories."
Calder wrung his hands but spoke softly: "Perhaps there is a middle path… punishment, yes, but also provision. Let him work off the debt while his family is given bread."
Eryk gave his judgment with clipped certainty: "Mercy with conditions. Pardon the theft, but bind him to serve until his debt is met. That teaches justice and spares his kin."
Finally, all eyes turned to Shithead. He felt the weight of their stares, heavier than any shield.
He looked at the man in chains and thought of Maren's stern eyes when he had been caught sneaking bread as a child, how his father's hand had been heavy but never cruel. Elira, by contrast, had always pressed food into his palms when he returned home hungry, whispering that kindness was not weakness but strength in a different armor.
He remembered Mira's sly grin, daring him to take risks, and Alan's steadying hand when games turned rough. If hunger had driven one of them to steal, would he call them criminal? Would he let law condemn them while he turned away?
His heart wrestled with both truths, and when he rose to speak, it was as though both Maren and Elira stood on either side of him — justice and mercy, each demanding their due.
"The law cannot be thrown aside," he said, voice rough but steady. "But hunger is not a crime. If we punish the man as we would a thief of greed, we strike his children as well. Justice should teach, not destroy. Mercy should heal, not excuse. I would have him labor for the lord whose grain he took, so his hands repay what his stomach demanded. But I would also have the lord answer why grain rotted in store while his people starved."
A hush settled. Even Dorian, lips pressed thin, could not immediately find a retort.
Joren nodded once, as though setting a seal on a parchment. "You have seen both edges of the sword. Remember this: justice without mercy is cruelty; mercy without justice is indulgence. A paladin must hold both, though the weight will break lesser men."
The lesson ended, but Shithead carried the words like an extra stone in his pack, one he could not set down.
He went into the dormitory that night with the odor of wax in his hair and the taste of iron in his mouth. The others slept in ragged patterns after the day's labor, but he unrolled into his bunk by the wall and whispered the words into the dark, slow as prayer. He thought of the line in which they had stood against the wolves, leather and blood and the sound of paws — thought of Brina's laugh, Calder's trembling hands and Dorian's stubborn chin. He called the names under his breath and felt, as if a reply, the small warmth between his palms. The glow was slim, like a candle's hope under rain, but it held just long enough for him to know it was not false. He did not tell the others, for how would a man boast of a light that frightened him?
The days blurred into a ringed pattern that took on the quality of ritual. They rose with the bell, took the yard in the morning, passed to the cloisters before the noon meal, took their small lessons in theology and history, and then worked again as the light lengthened toward evening. They practiced the exercises of balance and speech — saying words that were lessons, and listening to the knights tell of precedents of duty and mercy. Twice a week the lecture room held a heated debate over doctrine. "Justice without mercy is tyranny," a knight would say, and then argue little by little with a questioner until the finer shape of that truth was set upon the granite in their minds.
At the edge of the third week after the wolves a hollowness in the dormitory widened. A man named Hal ran his fingers through his hair in the early wash and packed up his gear. He had been awkward with the sword in the yard but had been bright in the cloister: a born scholar whose fingers betrayed him when they had to lift wood in the cold. He left with a letter folded into his coat and eyes that would not meet anyone. Another, a woman called Murna, whose throat burned with cough and whose hands had always been more slender than the work required, was taken to the infirmary, and after a fortnight the staff told the seniors that she would not continue. She wept as she kissed the scabbard she had been allowed for practice, and Brina sat her down and held her hands until the tears ran dry.
The leaving of others did something to the room that no lecture could. The empty bunks, the unvisited cubby where a pot used to sit, the silence where a voice used to be — these were not only the absence of work; they were a reminder of choice and of mortality. Shithead watched their removal as one watches a storm pass and does not expect the sun to return immediately. A quiet ache spread in him, not self-pity but the deep-born fear of failing those who might still trust him.
"Do not let the absence hollow you," Ser Joren said once, standing in the quartered light of the cloakroom. He had been taciturn all month, an unmoving presence at their edge, and when he spoke the sound was like stone set down with care. "Where they have failed, we learn. Where they have left, remember the cause. The order is not monuments of the past. It is a living weight. Take it up if you would, or lay it down and return to comfort."
His words were simple; they struck with the better part of truth. Shithead thought of the man from the wagon, his gratitude a bright thing. He thought of Maren and Elira, their faces stitched into his memory like weathered cloth. He would not be the one to step back into the small lights they offered; he had chosen the long night. That must be enough.
In the quieter hours, long conversations grew thick at the edges of the dormitory like moss on cedar. Brina told stories in a voice that braided anger and humor. "My father," she would say, "would sell a cow rather than a word of flattery." She mimed the exchange of a man who had been born to barter and to swing a scythe. Calder, emboldened by the glow that had first clung to his palm, began to unravel small threads of theory about the chants — why certain cadences took hold and why some failed. Dorian preferred to argue but found himself often listening when the right point was made. Eryk said little, but when he did it was with a clipped precision that stopped their laughter as readily as any rebuke. They taught and teased one another; their jokes became small armor against the cold.
There were arguments too. Dorian, blow after blow, would protest the democratizing insistence of the Order — that any one, for all their blood or station, could shoulder the helm. "It is not the same!" he would cry. "I will not be made common!" But when faced with the necessity of the yard he would sweat and bend and come again, and tendency would change him a little. Brina laughed at him and, when the moment allowed, would ask his advice about footwork in such a way that he could not help but answer. Calder's nervous cleverness turned suddenly quick in contests of wit, and Eryk's reserve became a well from which they drew counsel. Shithead listened and learned; sometimes he spoke, and his words fell with a blunt truth that earned them awkward silence and then a wry, begrudging respect.
One dawn they were marched into Westmarch. The city lay beyond the stone gate like a spread of patchwork; roofs jutted and slipped into alleys, the market square was a beating heart of colors and shouts, and banners flapped from tall houses like ears. They passed as a column between market stalls, the calls of sellers rising and falling: spices whose scent stung the nose, bolts of cloth that shone with dye, a young fruit seller who offered a free apple to a child who could name all of the sun's houses. Citizens turned — some bowed, some merely peered, some spat childish slurs into the air and were hushed by mothers. The sight of the initiates walking through the city was at once ordinary and a spectacle. Children pointed at the shields and the crude tabards, and old men set their mugs down and nodded as if they had been waiting for this.
Shithead felt the stares like a wind. Once, from beneath an archway, a voice muttered "orc-blood" as though the word were a talisman to summon fear. It slid across the skin of his back and refused to leave. He did not answer; there is no profit in arguing with the air. But the word lingered like a small bitterness, and he chewed on it as they walked.
On the day of the market they were given a task: fetch medicinal herbs and thread for the cloister's repairs. It sounded a trivial thing until they found themselves tasked to bargain properly and resist the tiny, practiced ruses of shopkeepers. Brina bartered for a length of cloth with an old woman who taught her how to spot a bad dye at a glance. Calder found his voice and argued the price of rosemary with an aplomb that surprised him and irked a merchant who had meant to bleed his coin. Dorian attempted to buy apples with a coin and was corrected on his offering by a woman whose smile held the sharpness of a hawk's beak. Eryk, who had done no such thing before, remained quiet and effective; he hailed a cart and guided it down a lane while the rest argued price.
The market square pressed in with noise and color, the smell of sweat and roasted meat heavy in the air. Their small errands had been completed, and the knights allowed them a measure of freedom to move in pairs. Dorian, naturally, strode ahead, nose high as though the city owed him its deference.
It was at the spice stall that the trouble began. The merchant, a wiry man with eyes like flint, glanced at Dorian's tabard and smirked. "Little paladin chick, is it? Do they let silk-wrapped lordlings play soldier now?"
Dorian bristled, retort sharp on his tongue. "Better a lordling than a gutter-rat peddling dust to peasants."
The merchant's smile vanished. He slammed a jar down so hard its lid rattled. "Careful, boy. Some of us earn our keep." His gaze slid to Shithead, lingering on the tusks that edged past his lip. "And some of you—orc-blood—ought never have been let through the gate."
The words cracked the air sharper than any whip. A few nearby shoppers turned to watch. Brina's hand went to her practice sword, but Eryk shook his head, his face unreadable. Calder looked ready to bolt.
Shithead felt the old heat rise — the urge to strike, to end the sneer with one good blow.
The word "orc-blood" struck harder than any blade. For a heartbeat, he was small again — the boy standing in the square while children pointed, laughter sharp as knives. He remembered clutching the ribbon the Willow Pact had given him, the only proof he belonged somewhere. He remembered Elira's soft voice: "Hold your head high, Shi-theed. The world will try to name you, but only you decide what you answer to."
He wanted to lash out, to silence the sneer the way Mira would have — with daring, or a stone flung true. He wanted Alan's steady hand to anchor him. But here, none of them were present — only his companions, watching, and the knights, measuring. He had to be his own answer now.
"My blood," Shithead said, low but steady, "has never stolen a coin from your purse, nor begged bread from your table. Judge me for my deeds, not my face."
The merchant spat at the cobbles. "Deeds won't wash what you are."
Shithead reached into his pouch, drew out the herb bundle Calder had bought, and set it firmly on the counter between them. "Paid in full, fair as any man. If you think less of that because of me, then it is you who are poorer, not I."
The merchant's mouth opened, but no words came. The silence spread just long enough that the crowd turned away, bored of a fight that never came.
Brina muttered under her breath, "Better than I would've done."
Dorian looked away, cheeks flushed, whether from shame or pride none could tell.
It was in a narrow side street, the market's roar a rumbling sea behind them, that a boy followed them for a beat and then thrust forward a small patched toy horse. "For your parson," he said, shy as a weasel, before stumbling off. Brina laughed and accepted it, pressing a coin into the boy's palm and then tucking the toy near her throat with a fierce gentleness. It was a small thing, this kindness, and yet it was like a coin struck from real metal; it had weight enough to warm them.
The city reined them back to the cloister in the evening and the work of the day resumed with fresh intention. Each man and woman carried something inward from that day: a price learned that would save coins later; the sight of a child who had no father to teach him the names of the tools he might hold one day; the knowledge that the world beyond the walls was not unmade but had its own rules and economies. They came back different, which is to say they came back more truly themselves.
And as the weeks went on, the weight of culling spread like an ever-deepening shadow. A few men packed with anger and pride, their hands tugging at straps as if at last they had found a place to anchor the blame. Others left with eyes hollow and small like those of a man who has had his lamp blown out by rain. Their space was made up in the dormitory as the sheets were folded and the scabbards polished and placed upon the shelf. The quiet in the room became a lesson in its own right.
Shithead felt the emptiness as an ache that did not pass. If he had been who he was at the beginning — a boy who took the world as if it were all his to bargain — he might have hardened and spat. Now he felt the loss as one who had set a hand upon a loom; the missing thread changed the pattern. He prayed for the vanishing men and women without naming them, and the prayers took shape into small acts: he placed an extra length of bread upon the table for the cook one night; he made an effort to correct Calder's over-eager form in the yard; he stood a breath steadier during a drill so another man's shield would not fall and expose his flank.
Ser Joren watched, always at a measured remove. When he spoke it was not in sentences of instruction so much as in the setting of a weight on the table and letting them see how it settled. "You will be tested," he said one evening as they sat in a small circle around the fainter glow of a dying lamp. "Not for show. Not for glory. For the world beyond this house. There are trials that will not be met by muscle or glow alone. You will need kindness without softness, and steel without cruelty."
Words have the power of rain; some water the fields and some drown the saplings. Joren's words were of the first sort: a measured watering. They lingered in Shithead's mind like a refrain.
There came a night when the bell tolled thrice and the knights called them at a sharper pace. A man in the barrack had fallen ill: a fever that took the throat and would not let go. The infirmary smelled of vinegar and sweat; the men who handled herbs moved with the worry of those who know a life might be steered one degree away from death by the steady hand. They worked through the night with poultices and whispered invocations. Calder's hands trembled as he held a cloth, but he did so with the steadiness of one who will not be found wanting. The fever subsided by dawn, but the scare sharpened them all.
The months braided themselves into a skein of learning, of sweat and small success, of empty beds and renamed oaths. The second fire had not consumed them. It had recessed to coals that burned on, slow and intent. Shithead's light in the palm came steadying and brave and then would gutter like an insecure candle in wind. He was a man still learning to hold a flame against the movement of gusts.
At the half-year mark, the masters read aloud the list of those who would be sent to tasks of deeper responsibility and those who were still to be schooled. A few names were called to serve as wardens in small border towers; some were told to travel with knights on errands that would teach them how law lay heavier than armor. Others were sent to learn clerical records and to read the parchments of the Order. The list was not reward as much as it was assignment; each dispatch carried with it trust and burden alike.
Shithead's name did not appear there. He felt a strange mixture of relief and emptiness, like the silence after a bell. He had neither been singled out for praise nor for rebuke. He took it as his lot and carried it as he would any weight.
If the year that would end his first chapter at the Chapterhouse had been merely trials in the yard and the cloister, the change that had come then would have been less keen. But there are days when a man's mettle is revealed not in the clang of wood but in the quietness of choosing. One such evening, late, when the moon rose a pale coin above the roofs, Shithead sat in the yard alone – not out of design but because his feet brought him there — and watched the shadow of the keep swallow the light. He heard the muffled breathing of sleeping men inside the dormitory, and he thought of the names that had been called and not come back. He imagined Hal's shoulders slumping as he left the gate, Murna's cough trailing into the fog. He asked himself, not for the first time and not the last, whether he would be the next to fail.
He took his palm into the dim and placed the prayer upon his breath. The light came, a thin thread of warmth that coalesced for a heartbeat, then waned. It was so small that, if asked, he could not have said whether it had shone for itself or for those he would someday keep.
The foreboding that settled then was not the roar of a storm but the hush before one. He felt it sink into his limbs with the patience of frost: a slowly forming ice that would either give him new resistance or crack him open in time. He pushed his hands into the dirt and felt the cold of the ground and then the steadiness of the shield he had set beside him, and he imagined, with a strange patience, the long road yet to come. He thought of Aureon's teaching: the sword and the open palm. Could a man who had been born with his blood that would often be feared ever hold those things in equal regard? Or would his strong arm betray the gentleness that must temper it?
He rose and walked back to the dormitory with the ordinary, necessary steps of someone who had done this walk a thousand times: left hand upon his sword-belt, right hand light at his side, eyes to the path. The bell tolled once more, and sleep gathered its people. When he lay down upon his bunk and the room sank into the hush of the sleeping, he felt the fresh bite of fear and the older comfort of companionship.
He whispered the prayer with his mouth closed and held the small, wavering light to his chest. It was not victory. It was not even assurance. It was a slender promise: that he would not let the empty bunks be the measure of him; that he would, if he could, learn to bear others as the shield bore the strike.
Outside, the wind moved across the roofs and the Chapterhouse's stones took it into their old memory. The bells slept. The forge of the life he had chosen glowed faint within him, and though the night was long and the road ahead full of tests he did not yet understand, he felt, in that small and errant glow, the first true beginning of the making of a paladin — not by birth or by proclamation, but by the slow and certain accumulation of oath and trial.
He did not know the form his next trials would take. He only knew that the next dawn would come, and the bell would call, and he would rise. He did not know if the light would always hold. He only knew that he must tend it with hands that had been made for other work: for lifting stone, for carrying wood, for steadying a friend's shield. He pressed the warmth to his breast, and in the hush before sleep he whispered one more thing, not wholly a prayer and not wholly a vow:
Let the next trial come. Let me hold.
The light flickered, then steadied for a breath, as if to answer.