The Masses Distort Spacetime

Killer-Kate and Luke Lackland: 830 words.  A desperate ride to a dire evening.  Blood falls with the Sun.  Nothing shows how far the Blancmange Army's morale has sunk, than what they are prepared to take heart from as a famous victory.  But with their folk-hero's blazing daughter to lead them, cunning charms and plans to undo the evil stronghold, and even a minor lord's troop now ready to serve as their steel spearhead, surely nothing in the world can daunt them now?  Right?  Right?

It's a very strange feeling for the Good Knight to sit among peasants on sufferance and mostly in silence, having had to be vouched for as a respectable person by his inferiors.  Both he and even his own tenants have spent most of his life convinced that he's a man with no pretension or condescension about him at all: he now makes the uncomfortable discovery of what that kind of fellowship feels like on the other end of it.  He's too old - and perhaps rather too simple - a dog to learn new tricks from it; and yet, because he is really a humble man at heart, in the long run this will shake him more than living ghosts walking over his threshold, or fairy-tales coming true out of the winter skies. 

He gets no viewpoint in this story, and as far as I know we will not see anything that comes from it.  Though in case I ever do write the tale from his youth, now I know him better than I did before.

Kate's road to the forest-camp, and Luke's very similar route in a previous chapter, are either spatio-temporally incompatible, or I shall have to deploy serious Weather in the redraft.  A day's discrepancy is too much, especially now when every day matters.  I won't correct this yet, because I don't know whether the final plot will require the Short Road or the Long to be the true one.  One of the things I've learned in this telling, and from the long year I was blocked on it, is that I need to leave my first drafts open and deformable as sponges - almost as badly as I need to know when I'm doing it.