A/N: I'm so sorry that this has taken so long. Senior year has been...ah...hectic. But hopefully, Chapter 6 being the whopper it is, it is worth your while.

Disclaimer: When I (A) master the brewing of Polyjuice Potion and (B) procure Tamora Pierce's DNA, I'll let you know. Until then, I own nothing.

Slowly, Neal placed a hand on the door and pushed it ajar. There was the baron, leaning against a large, paper-strewn desk in what was clearly his study; there was Alanna, facing her husband, arms crossed, feet apart in a rigid stance. The baron's weatherworn face was settled in a mild expression as he looked at Neal, an impressive feat considering the storm clouds gathering on the Lioness's face.

Alanna glanced at Neal as he came in.

"I should have known," she said, rather frostily. "In a house full of eavesdroppers, of course I just bring home one more."

"I have no idea what you're talking about," Neal said immediately, trying for an innocent expression. For some reason, this startled a chuckle from the baron. Alanna shot her husband a dark look. Baron George raised his hands in reply.

"You have to admit he fits in here," he said. "The only thing left to do would be to train him to hold up under interrogation. Then he would be a true member of the household."

"George," the Lioness growled. "Honestly? First the girl and now my squire? How can you make light of these things?"

"I am not making light, Alanna," the baron said, serious now. "But the realm uses the tools that the gods give it, and the girl is no exception."

"So that's what she is," Alanna said flatly. "A tool. Did it occur to you that the point of the realm is to protect its children? You know, with them being the future and all?"

"And I would argue," the baron replied, "that she volunteered for this work, and that her choice to become a tool of the realm—at twelve, mind you—is just as valid as the choice you made at ten." Alanna flushed and began a heated reply.

They had clearly forgotten all about Neal's presence. Maybe he could edge slowly out of the room and the couple would forget the day's events. Probably not, considering that said couple was the King's Champion and her husband. At least the information Neal had overheard was interesting. It confirmed a theory he'd had for years about the Lioness's mysterious husband.

Just as he reached the doorway, however, it hummed with sudden purple fire.

"I wasn't born yesterday, Queenscove." Surprisingly, it was the baron who spoke. Neal turned around to see the baron looking at him sternly. Alanna stood next to him, spinning a small ball of purple fire in her hand—ready, Neal surmised, in case her squire tried to make a break for it. He gulped.

"Of course you weren't, my lord baron," he said. It seemed like a safe remark.

"So how do you expect me to not notice you slipping away?" the baron asked. "Moreover, how do you expect me to allow you to do so?"

"I…don't," Neal said, slowly, carefully (for once). "I felt that…" A thought occurred to him. "I felt that I was…I was encroaching on a sensitive discussion and, ah, I wanted to leave you to it. I'm sure that these are all Crown secrets, and I'm just a lowly squire, after all. I wouldn't want to jeopardize any of your delicate work."

Alanna snorted. Baron George, however, narrowed his eyes.

"Delicate work?" he asked. "Exactly what work do you think I do?"

It was Neal's turn to snort. "My lord baron, you're obviously involved in royal intelligence," he said.

"Obvious, is it?" Baron George's mouth twitched. "How so?"

"Well, Sir Myles is the King's spymaster, and hearing so much about the two of you from Father, I figured you both would be involved in some way," Neal said, shrugging. The baron raised his eyebrows.

"And how many others did you share your figuring with?" he asked lightly.

"None," Neal said. Belatedly he added, "Sir."

"And why not share such a tantalizing bit of information?" The baron's voice remained even in the most frightening way possible. Once again Neal cast back on his life choices and wondered why he hadn't picked a nice, normal, easygoing knight-master instead of all this grand and terrible intrigue.

"I—well, I'm not stupid, my lord baron," he said. "I mean—no offense intended—"

"Too late," Alanna muttered.

"—I mean, anything like that would be sensitive, wouldn't it?" Neal was positively babbling now that both the Lioness and the baron had stony eyes trained on him. "I know better than to just run around gossiping about things I shouldn't know for all and sundry to hear!"

"Do you, now?" Now the baron eyed him curiously. "Have you an interest in that kind of work, then? I know you've a good memory, aptitude for reading and noticing things—"

"You are not recruiting my squire, George." Lady Alanna glared at her husband.

"Not yet, anyway," the baron said. "But then, we've four years before us, so there's no rush." He winked at Neal; Lady Alanna scowled.

"Don't think you've gotten away with any of this," she told her husband sternly. "I still don't like what you're doing, even if it's for the good of the realm—" George set a finger to her lips, and she quieted.

"Delicate matters, lass," he said, seriously this time. "The less said of work, the better, I think."

Alanna sighed.

"If you must," she said. She turned sharply to face Neal and steered him from the study. "Let's go. Book learning it is, for now."

They spent the rest of the afternoon reviewing anatomy. Neal already knew a great deal, anatomy being a compulsory course in the first year at the university. He felt fairly pleased that he remembered most of the material, considering that four years of brutal page training had passed since he had seriously studied the human body, but Alanna warned him not to get cocky.

"This is all theoretical," she reminded him. "It's whether you can remember in the field that matters."

"I do remember in the field," Neal said. "Four years in the pages' wing, remember? Little children running around waving sticks trying to crack each others' skulls?"

"I do remember," his knight-mistress said, rather ruefully. "So is that what you spent your page years doing? Healing boys so that they could survive Lord Pain-Builds-Character?"

"I think I healed Kel the most, actually."

"Of course. Her war on hazing—of course she would get into the most fights."

"How did you hear about that?" Neal asked sharply. Certainly, he expected people to know that Kel and her circle of friends got into many fights, especially during those first two hellish years. Far fewer, however, understood exactly why those fights had taken place. Last he checked Neal was certain that Alanna was not among those few.

The Lioness blinked, then said, "Neal, I would have thought that after living at the palace half your life you would understand that everyone hears everything, eventually."

"True…"

"If you're done being suspicious, let's get back to work," Alanna said. "We have more to review before dinner."

Cleaned up and headed down to the small hall for supper, Neal made a wrong turn and promptly lost himself again. As he tried to navigate back to a landmark, he wondered whether, being the man he was, the baron had intentionally built Pirate's Swoop's hallways into such a twisting labyrinth. Perhaps it was just another layer in what Prince Roald had once described as a royal armory's worth of defenses built into the very stone of the coastal keep.

Neal spotted a girl leaning on a doorframe ahead and hurried up to her.

"Excuse me," he called. "I was wondering if you could—" He broke off as the girl turned and he found himself looking at his patient from the infirmary. She had cleaned up and was dressed in better clothes, with her pale blond hair combed and braided. "What are you doing here?" he asked. "You should be sleeping!"

"I feel better, sir, honest," the girl said. As if to prove it, she stood on tiptoe, then lowered herself. "See? Don't hurt at all." She spoke with a strange lilt, but Neal couldn't place where it came from.

"How did Maude let you past?" Neal asked sharply.

"Is Maude the old mum?" the girl asked.

"That's her," he said. "She's a healer and she knows you're not to tire yourself—"

"Begging m'lord's pardon but she had to follow Lady Aly's orders," the girl said. "And Lady Aly says not much time, so I have to go with her." She shrugged. "Did you need help getting somewhere, m'lord?"

"The small hall, yes," Neal said. The girl gave him a series of rapid-volley directions. "Um," he said, trying to remember it all. "Thank you." He remembered his manners and held out his hand. "I'm the Lioness's squire, Neal," he said.

"Inga," the girl replied, cautiously taking his hand and shaking it.

"Ready, Inga!" a girl's voice called from within the room. A strawberry-blonde head poked out into the hall. Green-hazel eyes narrowed when they saw Inga talking to Neal. "If you can concentrate well enough to talk to someone, you'd better get every single one right this time," Alianne of Pirate's Swoop said, imperious tone matching her mother's note for note. Inga paled.

"I'm sorry, m'lady," she stammered. "I'm—sorry. Milord." She bobbed a little curtsy to Neal and scuttled inside the room.

"What are you doing in there?" Neal demanded. "What's so important that you had to drag her out of the infirmary?" He made to enter the room, but Alianne stepped squarely in his way, barring the doorway. She glared up at him with all the ire a girl of eleven could manage.

"Stop right there, squire," she said. "I haven't a moment to waste as it is, and she's already having a hard enough time learning without distractions."

"Learning what?"

"Memory exercise," Alianne said. She flashed him a sudden smirk. "If you'd said yes to Da, maybe you'd know more." And then she spun, light as a pixie, and shut the door in his face.

Neal's days at Pirate's Swoop fell into a routine. At the crack of dawn, he rose for weapons practice. As the Champion, the Lioness kept a large and well-furnished practice court; there, Neal practiced with his knight-mistress, the fief's men-at-arms, the baron, and even the Pirate's Swoop children, all of whom (of course) were well trained.

After breakfast, he and Alanna went riding. They practiced fighting on horseback, and gathered herbs and remedies from the nearby woods. Sometimes they tilted, or hunted. They rode back to the keep for lunch, after which Lady Alanna instructed Neal in healing, in the infirmary. Some days, there were patients to treat—people came in with cuts and bruises and broken bones from fieldwork. Some days, when the infirmary was empty, they catalogued the storerooms and Lady Alanna taught Neal about herbs, potions, and the making of splints, slings, and casts.

Mid-afternoons, they went to the library, where Neal studied anatomy, or history, or mathematics, or whatever Alanna decided he was lacking in on that day. Sometimes they were joined by Alan, Alianne and their tutor, a Mithran master named Igon; sometimes Thom came in for a book and a chat with his mother.

Neal was pleasantly surprised to find that the Lioness was extremely well-read. Perhaps he should not have been, given Alanna's father was the famously bookish Sir Myles of Olau. But Alanna's reputation as a warrior and mage so eclipsed all other facts known about her that it always jolted him to hear her discussing a variety of topics with her children and retainers, adroitly conversing on everything from the history of the Bazhir to Tyran food to the intricacies of Tortallan law.

"When Jon made me the King's Champion, and so a high-ranking diplomatic figure," she explained to Neal, "I had to become knowledgeable. Before my first diplomatic trip, I was so scared that I wouldn't be able to hold my own and do the realm's work, so I spent ages reading up on—oh, everything—in Myles's library." She smiled at the memory. "I just ended up liking it more than I'd thought."

After book learning came supper, and then a brief session of unarmed combat practice. The hours after practice were Neal's own. Sometimes he stayed up reading or climbed up to the ramparts to listen to the comforting murmur of the sea. Most nights, however, the exhaustion of the day got to him, and he was content to curl up in his bed and sleep.

One afternoon about two weeks after they arrived at Pirate's Swoop, Lady Alanna found Neal curled up in the reading nook he had discovered and unofficially claimed.

"Philosophy?" Alanna raised her eyebrows.

"Let me guess. You don't like it either, do you, my lady?" Neal knew he ought to be used to this attitude by now. But was it really so much to hope for a fighting knight who believed in exploring the higher planes of thought?

Lady Alanna shook her head.

"It's impractical in our line of work," she said. "Knights and healers both are people of action, Neal. Our use lies in being able to assess a situation and react quickly—to do otherwise costs lives."

"Funny," Neal remarked before he could stop himself. "That sounds like something Lord Wyldon would say."

"Insults are the last resort of a man with no argument, Queenscove," Lady Alanna growled. "My point stands. If you disagree, argue it, instead of comparing me to that man."

"I didn't mean it as offense," Neal said, a little stung.

"Offense taken nonetheless," Alanna replied immediately, although she looked a little calmer. She sat down on the window seat next to him. Neal scooted over to give her more room. "So. Enlighten me, Queenscove. Why read philosophy? Did Lord Wyldon force it on you? It's a traditional subject, after all. I had to learn from an utter bore of a philosophy teacher."

"No," Neal said. "I read it because I think it's interesting, thinking about morality outside of the gods' teachings. And thinking about humanity, and our nature. Haven't you ever wondered what people might be capable of if we didn't have the gods watching us?"

Lady Alanna shuddered.

"I hope never to find out," she said.

"But that's the thing," Neal said excitedly. "Maybe we'll never find out, but thinking about extreme situations makes us question how we act in daily life. How do we make decisions? Is it right to put the good of one person over the greater good—suppose if we had to make the decision on our own, without the gods guiding us. What then?"

"Too often, Queenscove, you'll find that you do have to make those hard choices," Lady Alanna replied. "You'll have to choose between the good of a few people and the good of the realm. No amount of your ivory-tower philosophy can prepare you for that." Neal started. Was that bitterness?

"You are still angry about the whole business with Inga, aren't you?" Neal said.

"I dedicated my life to the realm so that children like her wouldn't have to make the kind of choices she made." The Champion's voice was sardonic. "I swore to protect those weaker than me. To not ignore a cry for help. To not look away from wrongdoing." Her lips twisted as she recited the ancient words.

"But you also have to uphold the realm, don't you?" Neal said quietly. "And Inga's case is the realm's business. I can see why the baron would pick someone—young. Nobody suspects children."

"Can you see?" she said. "Then maybe you're smarter than I am." She got to her feet and tugged her belt and tunic straight. "To answer your philosophy question: in my experience, there is a different answer for each situation. And you'll only find those in the field." She turned to leave, then turned back. "By the way, Neal," she said. "A letter arrived for you. I had them leave it in your room. You may take until dinner to answer it."

"Thank you, my lady."

Neal sat back, thinking. Lady Alanna had a temper, and she wore her heart on her sleeve, but that didn't keep her from being obscured by myth much of the time. Neal felt that with this conversation, he had pulled the veil aside, if only for a moment. Alanna was, really, a woman of simplicity: give her codes—magical ethics, medical ethics, chivalry—and she could keep them. Give her problems, and she could solve them. She wasn't like Neal, who loved complexities for their own sake, who liked puzzles and mind games that were harder to disentangle because the feeling of wisdom gained was worth the headache.

Perhaps it was just as well, he thought, getting up and returning his books to their shelves. The realm, after all, needed all sorts of people: knights who kept to the straight and narrow right alongside scholars who tied themselves in knots.

The letter lay on his desk by the window. Neal picked it up and had to grin when he saw the handwriting: a firm, flowing hand, refined over years of writing military reports. He broke the plain seal and began to read.

Neal:

You'll probably regret to hear that I'm still alive and well. Exuberant, in fact, since we just finished rounding up a group of human and centaur bandits in the Royal Forest and now it's back to the normal fun of Own life.

My lord's new squire, your friend Kel, is really something. She took on a centaur toward the end of the whole bandit-hunting business and killed him using her Yamani pole arm; even Captain Flyn was impressed, for all he tried to hide it. She also took charge of a griffin the centaur had stolen, and I don't know who to feel sorrier for: her, because he's a pesky crosspatch at the best of times, or him, because he doesn't know how dangerous an angry squire can be. At any rate, it's frankly unnerving how your friend grows more and more like my lord by day. It shouldn't surprise you at all that she's adapted to riding with us like a bird to flying. (Speaking of birds: I was expecting a great many more sparrows than the number she brought with her. Now I have to question everything you've ever written me about, wondering which were facts and which were exaggerations. You see the trouble you cause me?)

I heard about your new knight-mistress. If you're still alive by the time this reaches you, my sincere condolences. Think of it as a character-building experience.

Must go for now; sorry for brevity. Capt. F has been keeping us hopping chasing spidrens. Give Jessa, Uncle Baird, Aunt W etc. my love. Your loving cousin,

Dom.

And that, Neal thought, rather chagrined, was the trouble with writing to soldiers. They so rarely wrote satisfactory letters. They always claimed to be "kept hopping" by their superiors, but it was true often enough that Neal couldn't fault the excuse.

Well. Maybe he should follow Alanna's advice and accept that his life would soon take on that frenetic pace. Better to take advantage of slow and joyful moments when he could. Better to write the most gregarious letter he could, just to show Dom that Neal not only survived under Alanna's guidance—he thrived.

Smiling just a little, Neal sharpened a quill, dipped it, and began to draft a reply.

A/N: As you can see, I am shamelessly hopping on the "Dom's and Neal's letters are mostly raving about Kel" headcanon wagon.

One of my pet peeves in Tortall fanfiction is the way so many people write George as this unsophisticated rube who always speaks with a Lower City accent, even though the Trickster books specifically mention how the Lower-City cant is a veneer for him by then: "His lower-class speech was gone, shed with his identity as a buyer of slaves." IMHO, George wouldn't have survived at Court if he spoke like a thief (if he'd tried, I imagine the results would have been something like the beginning of My Fair Lady); he strikes me as one who easily adapts to the level of discourse of their surroundings, and so I think he would have had to adopt proper, patrician speech in order to fit in among all the nobles and scholars. Since most of his interactions in this chapter are with Neal, a high-ranking noble heir that George doesn't know very well yet, I figured George would stick to formal speech, which is what you see here.