“Did you know my daughter wants to be a knight?” Neal asked as he walked into her office without knocking.
Kel had been in the middle of balancing the Second’s accounts, because she found checking over the company clerks’ work soothing when she had the time for it—especially when she had complicated thoughts in her mind and needed a break from sorting through them. So she looked up, stretched her neck, and smiled at her best friend. “I’m pretty sure everyone knows that Ren wants to be a knight; she’s been telling people for the last three years. Did you not believe her?”
He sank down into a chair and clutched his hair. “She told me, very matter-of-factly, that if I didn’t let her come be a page she was going to run away just like Alanna did.”
Kel thought about that for a moment, trying to hold back her laughter, but the anguished look on Neal’s face was too much for her after so many years around the open-hearted folk of Tortall’s north. She started giggling, and at Neal’s betrayed “Hey!” calmed herself enough to say, “I think that one’s on you for letting Alanna tell tales of her childhood and fill her mind with stories.”
“I was never going to send Ren to a convent, though.” Neal stood up, pacing in animated circles, a sure sign that his emotions were getting the better of him. “But knighthood! There are so many safer things she could do!”
“And if she wants to be like her father, and her god-mother, and half the other people who helped raise her…?” Kel raised her eyebrow. She had practiced the expression for over a decade, and even Neal in the midst of a full-blown panic spiral quieted at it.
He sighed, and leaned back against the door, as the only upright surface not covered in shelves or weapons. “I don’t want her to get hurt.”
Kel leaned back in her chair and studied him. Life as a healer suited him, now that he’d calmed down and settled his relationship with his father. “Neal,” she said, very slowly, “did you know that I’ve been offered the post of training master for the pages?”
Neal sank straight down onto the floor. “Mithros, no, I did not know. That’s wonderful, Kel, I’m so glad. You’re perfect for it.”
“It’s not public knowledge,” Kel warned, but though Neal’s tongue was still sharp he knew well how to keep it on a leash. “But Roald wandered in a few days ago with a very smug smile and said that there were enough young women who were knights, in the process of becoming knights, or otherwise being very vocal about wanting to be knights that he and his father have successfully convinced enough important people that a female training master would be acceptable.” She paused, then added, “They asked Buri first and she laughed in their faces.”
Neal snorted—they both knew Buri’s retirement from leading the Queen’s Riders had in no way diminished her personality, and that she was still involved with their training—and said, “I know haMinch wanted to retire years ago, but they’ve been squabbling.” Neal pushed himself back up to his feet for long enough to sit back down more properly. “Are you accepting?”
Kel rubbed the back of her neck, feeling strange. She’d been heading the Second Company of the King’s Own for the last four years, ever since the Scanran War’s refugee camps had turned into proper towns of their own. She liked the work—enough time in Corus to see her friends, enough time riding the country to make sure she never forgot the people she had chosen this path to protect, and even some free time to visit her parents occasionally—but she knew just as well as Neal that teaching had been her first love. “I asked for a week to decide, and they gave it to me.”
“So they want you to say yes, and you’re going to say yes.” Neal leaned forward and grinned at her, eyes bright with mischief. “Mithros, Kel, that’s fantastic. So you’ll be able to keep an eye on Ren.”
“More importantly,” Kel said, because as much as she loved her god-daughter she didn’t want to show favoritism, “I’ll be able to make sure everyone is treated fairly.”
“If you’re going to be training my daughter,” Neal said, gently punching her knee (since it was the only part of her close enough), “then I’m much more comfortable sending her off to learn how to hit people with sticks.”
“She’s known how to do that since she was old enough to hold a child’s naginata,” Kel pointed out, knowing that it undercut Neal’s feelings but obligated to point out Yuki’s refusal to let any child of hers go untrained in martial arts. “I’m just going to train her in how to resolve fights, not in how to have them.”
Neal waved a hand airly. “Semantics.”
“Are usually more your field of study than mine.” Kel grinned at her friend, fiercely glad that they’d ended up in the same area. “Fine, yes, I’m going to tell them later today, and then I’ll need to decide who should lead the Second instead.”
“You do realise that you’ve named a second in command before?” Neal asked, but he drew his chair near. “Have you asked Raoul?”
“He won’t let me steal Dom,” Kel said, heading off what she knew Neal’s first suggestion would be. “And he told me, very smugly, that the Second was my responsibility and he didn’t want to meddle. Then he let Buri tell me about how she’d been asked about training pages first.”
Neal laughed. “I guess it’s up to us, then.”
“It is not,” Kel protested, but she handed over her notes on the Second’s sergeants. “You are not involved in this except that you, unlike Raoul, like meddling.”
“You love my meddling,” Neal said cheerfully, flicking through the papers. “My meddling keeps you alive.”
He wasn’t wrong, and so Kel just smiled in exasperation and settled down for a long session of argument and debate, knowing that everything would turn out fine in the end.