The Bitter Knight
The old granny sat by the fire in her rocking chair, surrounding her on the floor where her offspring, and their offspring. It was time for Legend Telling, a family tradition. Each Midwinter, Granny would tell a new legend. It was now time for the next one.
"Have any of you heard the Legend Of the Bitter Knight?" She looked around; everyone shook their heads no. "Good. Now listen well my dears."
Once long ago, in a time where every able noble was needed as a knight, even women, Katherine of Fighting Spear was born. Her home fief was known for their producing of many Lady Knights. Most of the time, their daughters became more famed than their sons. But this particular girl changed that forever.
She came out of her Ordeal laughing. No one expected that. She had had a very normal page and squire experience. So why did she come out laughing? When she was able to stop laughing, she explained.
"You know when you get that fight or flight instinct when adrenaline rushes through your veins when you're scared?" The people around her nodded.
"Well, I got a super dose of adrenaline. When I was done being scared, I still had all that adrenaline in me, it made me giddy."
Katherine, known as Katie to her friends and family, had never been afraid of anything, or at least had never shown fear. Everyone listening wondered what in the world could have scared Katie that much. The mages in court looked at each other, each wondering if there was a spell they could use to find out what happened. People in court were whispering all around the castle, what could scare Katherine of Fighting Spear? No one in the whole line of Knights in their family had ever come out laughing.
But something worse had happened to make the gossips gossip even more. After explaining why she had laughed, her face went blank in confusion, then fear. Another first, to actually see fear on her face. Katie's elder brother Nathan knelt in front of her where she sat in a chair.
"Katie, what's wrong?" Even he was scared.
"I… I can't remember my Ordeal. It's a blank slate, all that happened between walking through the door, to stumbling out laughing," she whispered. "Nothing."
Nathan looked at the King. "May I speak to you privately Sire?"
The King nodded. He beckoned for Nathan to follow him to a private room. When the door closed and the King had finished warding it with magic, Nathan spoke.
"This has happened before. She's forgotten an event so terrifying that her mind walled it off completely. She remembered eventually. But it took a while." Nathan looked up at the King. "This is the third time."
The king looked at him in shock. "Sir Nathan, how long until she remembers?"
"Anywhere between an hour and a couple years. My family started researching after the second time. There have been cases like this across the world, and the time of remembrance varies greatly in each case. It took Katie two years to remember the first time, but only two days the second. I don't have any idea how long it will take this time."
Nathan looked at the king is despair, "I don't know what to do. Now that she's a knight, she could be in the middle of a fight when she remembers. And that could get her and others killed. Goddess, she's my only sister, I love her. I don't want her to die from a memory."
The king looked thoughtful. "We could always put her with the Kings Own, she would be under the command of the Knight Commander. So there will always be someone around with higher rank than her to have control. She'd be as safe as she could be as a Lady Knight."
"Thank you Your Majesty. You truly are the Wise King." Nathan knelt to his king. He was never more thankful than now, that he was born into the generation with the Wise King as ruler of Tortall.
And so Katie was put with the Kings Own. Her memories did not emerge. They stayed locked behind her mental shields.
It was at Midwinter, exactly one year from the moment Katie walked through the door of the Chamber of Ordeal that she remembered. She was in her rooms in the Lady Knights quarters, when she woke from the dream of her Ordeal. Her eyes snapped open, wide with fear. The look on her face would have made a man with the stoutest of hearts look around in fear of what could scare this Lady Knight so. Before she could scream, she turned her face into her pillows to muffle the sound.
As soon as she was done screaming, she got out of bed and dressed in the first clothes she found. Her face was as cold as stone as she grabbed her dagger and placed it on her belt. Katie left her rooms at a brisk walk, heading to the Chapel of Ordeal. She closed the door behind her.
The next morning, the castle was woken with a scream of bloody murder when a cleaning maid went into the Chapel to clean.
What was found was Katie (her corpse anyway), her wrists slit, her dagger coated in dried blood. She lay sprawled in front of the door to the Chamber. The door to the Chamber had writing on it, written in Katie's blood.
Are you happy now?
Beneath her message of blood, was one word. Written in a no nonsense script, but written in blood turned silver.
No.
No matter what the coroners did, they could not change the expression on the dead Lady Knight's face. She died with a bitter smile on her face. She was entombed at her home fief with that same bitter smile.
"They say that her skull looks like it smiles bitterly," the granny told her brood seriously. "No one knows what the message meant. But it wasn't until one hundred years later that a Lady Knight existed again."