Chapter 411: Squire (Part One)
"A square?" Emmie asked, wiping the tears away with a sleeve and stumbling over the unfamiliar human word. "What’s a square?" "A squire," Ashlynn corrected, emphasizing the middle of the word. "Where I come from," she said, standing up and walking around her desk so she could sit on the floor and be on eye level with the young, horned girl. "Brave warriors who serve lords and rule over villages in their name are called knights. Some people become knights because their parents were knights or lords, but others earn their title through bravery and valor."
"Are, are you a knight then?" Emmie asked Heila. "Because you’re the bravest warrior I know besides Father. But he doesn’t serve any lords so he can’t be a knight," she added, trying to make it clear that she didn’t think that her father and Heila were the same kind of warrior.
"I’m not a knight," Heila said, shaking her head and holding back a small laugh at the idea. What would Sir Thane think if he heard that she’d been mistaken for a knight? "I’m Lady Ashlynn’s lady-in-waiting. Just like she’s Lady Nyrielle’s Seneschal and serves her, I serve Lady Ashlynn."
"But you’re a witch! And a champion," Emmie protested. "How can you be a servant?"
"I was little more than a chambermaid when I met Lady Ashlynn you know," Heila pointed out. "I used to fetch and carry water, wash the linens, scrub the floors. I wasn’t always so powerful," she said, reaching out to rest a hand on the young girl’s knee. "When I was your age, I never thought I’d be like this, but sometimes, you meet the right person and everything changes."
"I take it then that this ’squire’ is a kind of servant?" Kurtz asked, frowning slightly at Ashlynn, uncertain whether or not he liked the direction the conversation was taking. He’d only planned on letting Emmie meet the Willow Witch but now things seemed to be getting quickly out of hand. "One that normally serves these ’knights’?" he asked.
"In a manner of speaking," Ashlynn said, focusing her attention on Emmie rather than Kurtz. In a way, this was a test for both of them. Emmie needed to understand what Ashlynn was offering well enough to make her case to her father.
At such a young age, Ashlynn would never pull a child away from their parent unless it was to rescue the child from an unfit parent, but Kurtz seemed to be overly doting on his young daughter more than anything. Since that was the case, Emmie would need her father’s permission before she could do anything.
"A squire follows a knight, tending to his weapons and armor," Ashlynn explained. "They also tend the knight’s horse, mend his clothes and ensure that the knight is always ready to do his duty when the time comes. In exchanges, the squire learns the ways of weapons and armor, how to fight, how to ride, and eventually, when they’re old enough, they learn the other things a knight must do as well."
Though she kept her explanation simple, Ashlynn hoped that that Kurtz and his young daughter could understand the tradition. The Vale of Mists had already adopted a number of distinctly human traditions, particularly since Thane, Nyrielle’s first human progeny, had been a knight himself. Now, Ashlynn hoped to build on that by inviting someone who had grown up outside of the Vale of Mists to participate in a timeless human tradition.