Read Online Knight's Valor by Ronald Coleborn - Free Book Online Page A

more rounds.”
    â€œGood,” said Jerreb. “Then we ride.”

T he younger of the two Daughters of the Realm, Princess Redora, was finishing her history lesson with her grand tutor, the sapient Jayvin Breen. Sapient Breen was the youngest of the tutors assigned to the princesses, a man in his early thirties, it was supposed, since the members of the Valiant Order of Glyssian Sapients were not pressed to divulge their ages. Jayvin Breen was handsome, far more handsome, some said, than a man of the sacred teachings ought to be. But no one disputed that he was learned. He had completed his studies in half the time it took most sapients to do. He had mastered the sciences and histories easily enough, and become well versed in the arts. He had applied himself to his studies through a disciplined and rigorous training schedule involving strictures that far exceeded the requirements of his order. After careful consideration by the High Chamber, the body of sapients who advise and elect the primus and assign the order’s offices, Jayvin Breen was elected a grand tutor. Grand tutors alone were entrusted to instruct the Daughters of the Realm.
    Sapient Breen and Princess Redora conducted their studies in the solar, a large room on the second storey of a south-facing tower that stood not far from that which housed the great hall. Outside, the rains had ceased, and the sky was clear and blue, but Redora, who longed to peek through her window to glimpse the activity in the courtyard or scan the hills in the distance, was restricted to the pages of the worn and dusty Antiquities of the Great Realms . The edges of the large book were frayed, and its pages too numerous to count, but they had somehow made it halfway through the weighty tome within an annum.
    Sapient Breen pressed his index finger against an image that depicted the twin monarchs from whom the two great realms took their names.
    â€œBrother and sister they were, twins at birth,” he said, with some excitement. “The elder was Vassorin Prybbus, a boy who at nine annos had already taken to hunting the various creatures that roamed Bokrh. He felled a gray horned rhaynus his very first day on the hunt. His sister, the dark-haired beauty next to him, was Vasserine Glyssa, the fairest maiden in the land at that time, according to the tales. She it was who caused three suitors, who held a pact, to fling themselves from the peaks of the gorges that lie between the castle and the eastern edge of Bokrh. Her refusal to marry them had wrought such despair in the three that they could not bear to breathe the air she breathed.”
    Redora was stunned by that revelation. “She must have been quite beautiful. But why were they called vassorin and vasserine?”
    â€œAt that time, the realm was known as a vassordom, and the Office of High Vassor was the highest in the land.”
    â€œLike that of Prichard Hennis,” said Redora.
    â€œQuite right. This was according to the tradition of the land of Austrand, during the Age of the Sigil, which we will come to in another lesson. In our own day, the high vassor is second to the king, but it was only after the vassordom fell that men who assumed the throne began calling themselves kyngs in the land.”
    â€œWhat became of the twin monarchs?” asked Redora. “How long did they rule?”
    â€œNot long,” said Sapient Breen. “Not by today’s benchmarks. They sat the throne at your age, sixteen annos, and ruled the realm for twelve.”
    â€œOnly twelve annos?” Redora asked. “Why only twelve?”
    Sapient Breen hesitated a moment before replying. “Alas, they were murdered.”
    Redora sat bolt upright in her chair, her mouth agape. “By whom?”
    â€œIt was never discovered. But the sapients of the day concluded that they were poisoned, perhaps by powder of the desidum flower dissolved in their wine.”
    â€œBut the desidum is used for