I’d expected there to be more boys waiting, and it was a slight disappointment to see only two small groups gathered. A castle as big as Maniyadoc should have more squires than the twenty or so before me; maybe the others were out with their blessed.
As Heamus had intimated, the idea that keeping our surnames from one another would ensure equality was a fanciful one. Looking at the armour of the sullen boys waiting for me gave me a quick idea of the hierarchy. At the top, and surrounded by a bunch of boys who seemed upset by my appearance, was Aydor, the heir. He was dressed in armour thick with ornate gilding and bright enamelling, making it pointlessly heavy. I reassessed my opinion of Aydor a little. He may have looked overweight but he carried his armour carelessly which spoke of enormous strength in his thick body. An elaborately cast twisting snake crowned his flared helmet.
The squiremaster stepped forward as I stared. He was another stumpy man who looked to be a bastard offshoot of the Mennix bloodline.
“Girton?” he said. He made a face like he had stood in manure.
“Yes.”
“Yes, Squiremaster!” he barked back at me.
“Yes, Squiremaster,” I replied obediently, head bowed.
“Look at me, boy! You are a warrior, not a mouse.” I raised my head to meet his eye. He had the look of a carnivorous flying lizard and I recognised a killer. He was not a man I would ever want to face in serious combat, and if I had been tasked to finish him it would have been done with poison or a blade in his back. “Better,” he said with a nod. “I am Nywulf but you will call me squiremaster. What skills do you possess, Girton?” He turned my name into a sneer, the standard approach of squiremasters the Tired Lands over.
“I can ride a mount and shoot a bow, Squiremaster,” I said.
“Swordplay?”
“A little, Squiremaster.” It would be easier to feign a lack of skill than pretend some moderate skill where a slip-up was far more likely. The squiremaster felt the muscles of my arms and legs, running his hands along me the way one would when buying a mount. His hands were like spades and he made sure to hurt me with his examination.
“Scrawny,” he said. I heard laughter from the other boys. The squiremaster silenced them with a glance but I could feel the eyes of the other squires on me. It was a peculiar pressure, like an acid heat on the back of my neck that melted away my confidence, slowly stripping back Girton the assassin and leaving behind something lesser: Girton ap Gwynr, a scared and lonely boy. “You’ll need more brawn on you than you have to swing a longsword, boy.” He was right. That was why I preferred knives. “And you’ll need some weight on you if you want to put a spear through an armoured man from the back of a mount.” I would give him that too. He turned from me to Heamus, who had been waiting in the doorway to the training yard, watching. “Heamus, you can leave us now. Take his blades back to his room.”
The old man nodded and I thought how odd that was. Here was a man who had once been a Landsmen, one of the greatest powers in the Tired Lands, being treated like a member of the thankful classes by a lowly squiremaster.
“Thank you for bringing the boy,” said the squiremaster, making it an obvious dismissal. Heamus nodded again, retreating back through the gate in the wall. “Right, boy,” said the squiremaster. “Run for me.”
“What?”
He cuffed me with a rough hand and I heard Aydor laugh. “Don’t ask questions, boy. Do as you’re told. Run for me. Around the wall. Keep going until you can’t.”
I wondered if he had chosen this exercise because of my club foot. Girton the assassin’s apprentice could have hobbled around all day, but Girton the country boy would not have my stamina. As I started my uncomfortable-looking rolling jog it was the oppressive stares of the gathered squires that became the real drain on my energy. The squiremaster set them to practise swordplay, but they took every opportunity to throw suspicious, unfriendly glances in my direction.
As I jogged I watched their swordplay. They were all bigger than me and a talented enough bunch, but I saw something that made me realise how wary I would need to be among them. As two squires fenced, a huge, broad-boned boy and a smaller boy in ill-fitting armour, their fight took them near another pair, one with a damaged face and the other with a blind eye. I saw what was about to happen to the smaller boy before it took place. A look passed between his opponent and the pair of boys behind. A second later one of the pair, the one with the blind eye, disengaged and turned to deliver a vicious swipe with his wooden sword to the smaller boy’s arm. There was no way he could have blocked it, he was completely blindsided. When he turned to find out who had hit him his opponent stepped in with his wooden blade, cracking him so hard on the helmet it drove him to his knees. It was a well rehearsed bit of bullying, and from the grins on the faces of the three boys involved it was something they enjoyed doing.
I gave it six rounds of the walls before I started to flag. The fencing practice stopped and the weight of the boy’s eyes on me grew. I caught glimpses of their faces: some sneering, some smiling, some laughing quietly and a few simply avoiding looking at me as if I carried some curse. At eight laps I started to stumble, and on my tenth lap, despite being screamed at by the squiremaster, I slowed to a walk. Eventually, the man called me back to him.
“Pathetic,” he said, and a ripple of laughter echoed around the walls. “Stand there.” He pointed at a spot before him on the scrubby ground. I found myself staring at, not only the squiremaster, but at a wall of hostile boys lounging lazily behind him amid the training equipment. I stood, panting harder than I needed to, and casually studying the squires. They existed in two separate groups and everything about their body language told me they loathed one another. Aydor ap Mennix led the larger group, twelve in all including the three bullies and their victim. The heir’s group wore armour of bright colours and differing degrees of elaborateness. Only the tallest of them was dressed differently: he wore plain armour and stared out into the world as if barely seeing it. He also wore real blades and I presumed he must be Celot, the Heartblade tasked to protect Aydor.