Chapter 1: A Knight's New Gown
The first thing he noticed was the smell. Not the familiar scents of oiled leather, steel, and horse, but damp straw and cheap tallow. Then the ache, a deep, wrong ache in muscles that felt too small, strung across a frame that was all bird-like bones and soft edges. Sir Eric Blackthorn opened his eyes to a low, sloping ceiling of rough-hewn stone, spiderwebbed with shadow.
A candle guttered on a crate.
He pushed himself up, the movement all wrong. His center of gravity was off. The weight of his own body was negligible. He looked down. Coarse grey wool, not plate mail. A nightgown. His hands came into view—pale, slender things, the knuckles unscarred, the fingers tipped with short, practical nails. He flexed them. They obeyed, but they felt like someone else’s.
A joke. A bad one.
He swung his legs off the sagging cot, his feet meeting cold, packed earth. He was in a cupboard of a room, barely space for the cot and a battered wooden trunk. On the trunk lay a pile of neatly folded grey fabric—a maid’s uniform. Hanging from a nail above it was a small, tarnished mirror.
Eric stood, the room tilting for a moment as he adjusted to the new height, or lack thereof. He took two shuffling steps and faced the mirror.
A girl’s face stared back, pale as milk, framed by a riot of black curls. Delicate. Doe-eyed. A face meant for poetry and timid glances. It was, he supposed with a dull sort of horror, even pretty. In a useless sort of way.
He bared his teeth. The reflection bared back small, even, white teeth. No snarl. No authority. Just a girl making a vaguely constipated face.
“Gods,” he said. The voice was the final, exquisite insult. A light, melodic thing, touched with the common lilt of the servant classes. It sounded like it should be asking if you’d like more tea. Not giving battlefield orders. Not cursing the heavens.
He remembered the stand at Gallow’s Gap. The hopeless charge. The glorious, final feeling of a lance punching through his chest. The approving roar of his ancestors waiting in the halls of valor.
Apparently, they had a different sense of humor up there.
A soft sigh came from the cot. He turned, hand instinctively going to his hip for a sword that wasn’t there.
Another girl sat up, blinking sleep from her eyes. She was the mirror of the face he now wore—same pale skin, same wild black curls, same slight build. But where his borrowed face felt tense with outrage, hers was placid, a still pond. Her uniform was crisp, her hair tamed into a marginally neater cloud. Her eyes, the same shape as his, held a vacant, accepting calm that made his knuckles itch.
“Elara?” the girl said, her voice a gentle echo of his own. “You’re up early. Did the rats bother you again?”
Eric said nothing. He was cataloging threats, exits, weaknesses. This girl was no threat. She was a mouse.
She slid from the cot, smoothing her skirt with a practiced hand. “We should start. Lady Ashford wants the east receiving room scrubbed before the master’s guests arrive. She was very specific.” She said it not with resentment, but with the quiet certainty of rain falling. It was simply what was.
He found his voice, the unfamiliar instrument. “Who are you?”
The girl paused, then a faint, apologetic smile touched her lips. “A poor joke, sister. I am Ellie. You are Elara. We have alway been here.” She stepped closer, her head tilting. “You look strange. Are you unwell?”
Sister. Twins. Of course. The gods weren’t just cruel, they were thorough. They’d trapped him in not just a maid, but one of a matching set.
“I am perfectly well,” Eric said, the words coming out stiff and too formal for the little room. He gestured dismissively at the uniform on the trunk. “We are to don… that?”
Ellie blinked at his tone. “It is our uniform. Yes.” She picked up her own from a hook on the wall and began to change with her back turned, a quick, efficient ritual of submission.
Eric looked at the pile of fabric as if it were a poisoned shroud. With a grimace that felt foreign on the soft face, he pulled the rough wool over his head. It scratched. It hung loosely in some places, tightly in others. He had no idea how to fasten the clumsy ties at the back. The whole thing felt like a surrender.
Ellie turned, already pristine. She saw his struggle and, without a word, came over and began to deftly fasten the laces at his back. Her fingers were quick and impersonal. He stood rigid, enduring the touch. It was the most humiliating moment since his death.
“There,” she said softly. “You must have slept tangled. Your hair is a fright.” She reached up to smooth his curls.
He caught her wrist. The grip was weak, a girl’s grip, but it made her freeze. Her eyes, finally, showed a flicker of something other than calm: fear. Good. Fear he understood.
“Do not,” he said, low and cold in the high, sweet voice.
She lowered her hand, her gaze dipping to the floor. “I’m sorry.”
“Stop saying that,” he snapped. “What are you sorry for? You’ve done nothing.”
“It’s just… we must be presentable. Or Mrs. Borran will be cross. It’s easier if we just do as we’re told.”
“Easier.” Eric nearly spat the word. He released her. “Easier is for livestock. For subjects. Not for…” He almost said ‘for knights.’ He stopped himself. “For people.”
Ellie just looked at him, that infuriating blankness returning. “We are livestock, Elara. For more years. It is not for us to question. It is only for us to work.” She picked up a worn wooden bucket and a pair of bristle brushes from beside the trunk. “We must fetch water from the pump. Come.”
She slipped out of the alcove. Eric stood for a moment, alone in the dim cell. He looked at the hands again. He tried to summon the feeling of the sword, the surety of it, the balance. He mimed a simple parry. The movement was fluid enough, but the force behind it was laughable. He could maybe fend off a determined kitten.
A sharp, metallic clang echoed from somewhere above, followed by a woman’s raised voice. The sound of the house waking, of servitude beginning its daily grind.
Sir Eric Blackthorn, hero of the Realm, slayer of the Fell Wyrm of Gorgoth, straightened the hideous grey dress. A grim, dry amusement settled over him like a shroud. This was his punishment. For pride? For glory? The punchline was too absurd to rage against. For now.
He picked up the other bucket. It was lighter than his shield had been, and infinitely heavier.
He followed the mouse into the belly of the beast.