A Marriage of Swords
"The tiltyard. An hour before dawn."
Without another word, she collected the swords and walked past him, her stride eating up the garden path. He didn't turn to watch her go. He stood in the mist, feeling the residual warmth of her grip on the sword hilt, and the unsettling sense that the carefully ordered chessboard of his life had just been swept clean, replaced by a game with rules he did not yet know.
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The "old tiltyard" was a forgotten rectangle of packed earth between the mossy back of the armory and the high, blank wall of the monastery. Weeds pushed through the cracks in the viewing stands. It smelled of damp stone, old hay, and solitude.