Leaving the damp autumn street behind, Henry entered the main stone hall of the Rattay Rathaus.
The air inside was warm, smelling faintly of melted wax, old paper, and stale ink.
He climbed the worn stone spiral staircase leading up to the second floor, his boots echoing off the thick mortar walls until he reached the heavy oak door of the scribe’s chambers.
He pushed the door open quietly.
Inside, the room was lined with high wooden shelving crammed with leather-bound ledgers, rolls of official decrees, and jars of dried oak galls and copperas.
Seated on a tall stool near the arched window, soaking in the fading daylight, was Scribe Friedrich.
The old man was hunched over a heavy volume, his spectacles resting near the tip of his nose.
Across the room at a secondary writing desk sat Bosch, the young Rathaus clerk apprentice.
The boy was busily trimming goose quills with a small penknife, dipping a rag into an inkwell, and filing entries into the town’s tax ledger.
Hearing the heavy tread of Henry’s boots, Scribe Friedrich paused, slowly lowering his book.
He squinted through his round spectacles at the dust-covered young man standing in the doorway.
“Who are you?
And what is it you need?” Friedrich asked, his voice dry and raspy like rubbing two sheets of old parchment together.
Henry stepped closer to the old scribe’s desk.
“Good day, Master Scribe.
I wish to buy a basic primer, a Latin alphabet parchment—the Abecedarium—and if possible learn to write .”
Friedrich raised a grey eyebrow, peering over his spectacles to take in Henry’s worn travel clothes and the dirt on his boots.
“You are not from Rattay, are you, boy?
I know most faces in this town, and yours isn’t one of them.”
“No, Master Scribe,” Henry replied plainly.
“I am a refugee from Skalitz.”
“A Skalitz refugee…” Friedrich muttered, leaning back on his stool.
“And what does a lad like you want with an Abecedarium and ink-stained parchment?”
“To learn how to read and write,” Henry said directly.
Friedrich let out a short, dry chuckle that ended in a soft cough.
“A peasant boy wanting to read?
What next?
Pigs reciting the Holy Mass in Latin?”
Henry did not flinch.
“I am willing to pay for your time and materials, Master.
I have been taken into Sir Radzig Kobyla’s service as his squire.
If I am to serve a lord properly, I need to know letters.”
“A man-at-arms who wants to read?” Friedrich scoffed, shaking his head.
“What for?
Are you going to read Latin prayers to the Cumans before you stick them with an arrow?
Books are for the Church, bailiffs, sons of councilors, and men of noble blood.
Swordsmen need sharp eyes and strong arms, not letters.”
Henry met the old scribe’s gaze squarely.
“An illiterate commander is at the mercy of whoever reads his letters for him, Master Scribe.
A leader who cannot read his own scout reports, maps, or contracts is blind on the battlefield.”
Henry took a step forward, his voice steady.
“Sir Radzig has taken me on, which means one day I may earn my spurs and hold land of my own.
If I ever do, and I cannot read a ledger or a lease…
my own bailiff will rob me blind without me ever knowing it.”
Friedrich stared at Henry for a long moment.
The mock smirk faded from the old man’s face, replaced by a look of quiet, surprised respect.
He stroked his grey chin thoughtfully.
“Well…
I suppose I can’t argue with that logic,” Friedrich admitted with a faint sigh.
“You’ve become a squire, so there is a chance you might rise to knighthood—or end up with a Cuman shaft through your throat tomorrow.
Who is to say?”
The old man shifted uncomfortably on his wooden stool, wincing slightly as he rubbed his swollen, inflamed knee.
“As you can see, I am nearly blind in one eye and crippled with gout, so I cannot sit here for hours beating the alphabet into your head.
But…”
Friedrich turned his head toward the corner desk.
“Bosch!”
The apprentice immediately set down his penknife, looking up from the ledger.
“Yes, Master Friedrich?”
“Fetch this boy a basic primer and an Abecedarium sheet,” Friedrich ordered.
“You shall teach him his first letters.”
Friedrich turned back to Henry, his sharp eyes narrowing.
“Mind you, boy, learning letters in the Rathaus does not come cheap.
Do you even have silver to pay for ink, vellum, and my apprentice’s time?”
“How much will it cost me?” Henry asked.
“Fifty silver groschen upfront,” Friedrich declared flatly.
Henry’s jaw set.
That was an exorbitant sum for simple literacy lessons.
“Or…” Friedrich added, a subtle, calculating gleam entering his eyes as he patted his painful knee, “…you could go to the apothecary down in the square and fetch me a brewing potion for my gout and joint pain.
If you bring me proper medicine to ease this burning in my leg, I will cut the price in half—twenty-five groschen.”
Henry calculated quickly in his head.
Twenty-five groschen in silver, plus the cost of a potion…
But then he recalled the herb witch past Rovna the apothecary had mentioned, and the alchemy bench down at the watermill.
If he bought raw dried comfrey and marigold for a couple of groschen—or brewed a draught himself—he could clear this entire debt while saving twenty groschen.
“I don’t have the full amount on me right now,” Henry said, counting out twenty silver coins onto the corner of Friedrich’s desk with a sharp clink.
“Here is twenty groschen as a down payment.
I shall start my first lesson today, and I will bring you the gout remedy to cover the rest.”
Friedrich looked at the bright silver pieces glittering on his desk, then glanced up at Henry with a nod of satisfaction.
“Fair enough, boy.
A deal is a deal.”
Friedrich carefully swept the twenty coins into his palm, grunting as he used his walking stick to push himself up from the tall stool.
Limping heavily across the room with his swollen leg bandaged in greasy rags, the old man unlocked a small iron-bound oak chest sitting in the corner, dropped the silver inside with a satisfying heavy rattle, and turned the iron key.
He dragged his feet over to a narrow rope cot against the wall, kicking off his leather slippers with a weary groan.
“Bosch, take him over to the side table, pull out the inkboard, and teach him his first lines,” Friedrich muttered, pulling a thick wool blanket up to his chest. Get faster updates on novelping dot com.
“Don’t wake me unless the bailiff himself walks through that door.”
Within minutes, the old scribe was wheezing and snoring softly against the stone wall.
Henry adjusted his satchel and walked across the chamber to the smaller worktable.
Bosch gestured toward a low wooden stool opposite his desk.
“Sit down then, squire.
Let’s see if you can hold a quill without snapping it.”
The afternoon sun cut through the narrow leaded panes of the Rathaus upper chamber, catching the motes of chalk dust that floated above the tilted writing desk.
Bosch laid out a scrap sheet of sheepskin parchment, dipped an iron stylus in charcoal wash, and cleared his throat with the self-important air of an academic tasked with schooling an illiterate peasant.
“Right then,” Bosch began, pointing the tip of the stylus at a dense row of blackletter Gothic script.
“Letters aren’t like horseshoe nails.
You can’t just hammer them into shape.
Every mark has a sound and an order.
Most merchant sons spend three weeks crying into their slates before they can tell an A from an ox’s head.
Let’s start with the basics.
Look here—what sound does this stroke make?”
Henry leaned in, staring down at the jagged, stylized strokes of the Bastarda script.
To an ordinary commoner in 1403, the ink looked like a bewildering tangle of briars.
But in Henry’s mind, the strange shapes fell into place effortlessly.
The original Henry’s ears already carried the deep, rolling cadences of spoken Bohemian—he knew the precise weight, dip, and sound of every spoken vowel.
Layered over that was his modern intellect, accustomed to deciphering fonts, reading phonetics, and parsing structured code.
To Henry, the jagged strokes weren’t mysterious symbols at all—just a stylized alphabet waiting to be unraveled.
“That’s an A,” Henry said without missing a beat.
“Open at the base, angled at the spur.
Sounds like the start of otec.”
Bosch blinked, his stylus freezing against the vellum.
“Aye…
well, beginner’s luck.
What about this one, with the long ascender and the loop to the right?”
“A B.
Plosive, voiced on the lips.
Bratr.”
“And the open curve beside it?”
“A C.
Soft before front vowels, hard as stone before the back ones.”
Bosch stared at Henry, his mouth hanging slightly open.
The apprentice hurriedly dragged the stylus further down the alphabet, testing him with increasingly complex ligature pairs and abbreviations commonly used in Latin and courtly registers.
“This stroke?”
“An M.
Three minims, joined at the head.”
“This cross?”
“A T.”
Bosch dropped the stylus onto the desk with a soft clack.
But instead of jumping straight to conclusions, he pushed a fresh goose quill, a penknife, and a small horn of black oak-gall ink toward Henry.
“Words aren’t just recognized, squire—they’re laid down,” Bosch challenged softly, his eyes narrowing.
“Write something.
Anything.”
Henry took the knife, cleanly trimmed the split nib of the quill with a single practiced stroke, and dipped it into the horn.
Holding the quill with steady, light pressure, he leaned over the sheepskin scrap.
With fluid, precise movements, he traced a crisp line of text across the parchment in smooth, dark ink:
Sidera non mentiuntur.
Bosch leaned over the table, watching the ink dry on the sheepskin.
He scrubbed a hand over his ink-stained face, looking at Henry as if the blacksmith’s boy had just pulled a live trout out of thin air.
“Merciful Christ,” Bosch breathed, his voice dropping to a harsh whisper.
“Are you taking the piss out of me?
Even Lord Hans Capon threw a fit and spent a whole summer with the tutor just trying to memorize his vowels, and half the time he still slurs his Latin like a drunk monk.
You’re reading and laying down syllables like you were born with a quill between your teeth.”
“A quill is no different from a hammer, Bosch,” Henry replied smoothly, setting the pen back in its pewter rest.
“Hold it right, hit the mark, and don’t force it.”
Bosch watched the dark lettering, utterly spellbound.
He leaned over the table, his eyes darting toward the snoring Friedrich before his gaze fixed on the broad-shouldered young squire.
“It’s true, then,” Bosch whispered, leaning in with breathless fascination.
“What the town guards were saying down at the lower gate.
They said Sir Radzig’s peasant came back from the ashes like some kind of ghost with blood on his boots.
They’re swearing by the saints you cut down twenty Cumans and a whole host of Sigismund’s marauders to drag that cart of plunder out of Skalitz.”
Henry gave a dry, quiet snort.
“Twenty?
Rumors grow fat on cheap ale.
That’s pure nonsense.”
“So you didn’t fight them?” Bosch asked, sounding almost disappointed.
“I fought,” Henry said, his tone dropping into the cold, flat reality of a man who still smelled the copper of spilled blood.
“I put an arrow through a Cuman’s loins, ambushed scavengers, killed bandits.”
Bosch swallowed hard, staring at the scarred knuckle on Henry’s sword hand, then back to the immaculate lettering on the sheepskin.
“You write too cleanly for a provincial clerk, Bosch,” Henry remarked, eyeing the apprentice’s fine leather shoes.
“Rattay is a muddy garrison compared to Kuttenberg.
?”
Bosch gave a self-deprecating grimace, twirling a goose feather between ink-stained fingers.
“The curse of being the third whelp, my friend.
My father, Master Vratislav, buys the timber and iron that keeps the deep silver shafts from caving in on the King’s miners.
My oldest brother Oldrich is groomed to sit in the Rathaus and count coin at the Italian Court.
My brother Radim takes the wagons to Prague with six guards at his stirrups.
And me?
There was no guild mastership left for the third son.
My father sells half of Sir Hanush’s oak lumber, so a favor was called in: pack young Bosch off to Rattay, let him wipe the drool off old Scribe Friedrich’s chin, and wait for the old gout-bag to die so I can hold the town seal.” Read the latest chapters at novelping dot com.
Bosch looked down at the dull tax ledgers and sighed.
“It’s a respectable living, they tell me.
But sometimes I look at the riders leaving the gate and wonder if I’m doomed to die with ink on my knuckles and dust in my lungs.”
A slow smile touched Henry’s face.
“A man who knows letters doesn’t have to rot behind a desk, Bosch.
Not if he’s the one writing the orders for two hundred lances.”
Henry reached across the table to pick up the wooden ruler.
As he did, his gaze dropped to Bosch’s right hand.
The skin around the thumb and first finger was stained with deep, purple-black oak gall, as expected of a clerk.
But along the base of the palm and across the second knuckle of the ring finger were thick, raised yellow ridges—hard, calloused friction pads that never came from spinning parchment or trimming goose feathers.
Henry knew those marks by heart.
They were the exact calluses formed by the leather-wrapped grip of an arming sword.
“You spend a lot of time striking vellum, Bosch,” Henry noted quietly.
“But those aren’t ink blisters on your palm.”
Bosch flinched, instinctively pulling his hand back under the cuff of his woolen sleeve, a guilty flush rising up his neck.
He shot a quick, nervous glance toward the far cot where old Scribe Friedrich was still wheezing in his sleep.
“It’s nothing,” Bosch muttered defensively.
“Just…
handling the heavy iron ledger presses.”
“A ledger press doesn’t bite into the heel of the thumb when you throw an oberhau from the right,” Henry said softly.
“You drill with a blade.”
Bosch stared at Henry for a long moment, realizing the blacksmith’s boy-turned-squire recognized the signs instantly.
The clerk slumped slightly, blowing out a long breath through his teeth.
“Aye,” Bosch admitted, his tone a mix of bitterness and quiet pride.
“Behind the lower granary at dusk, when the watch changes.
I practice with a weighted wooden waster and an old buckler I bought off a traveling peddler.
My father wanted me chained to this desk because he had no noble blood or royal favor to buy me a page’s post in Kuttenberg.
He thinks a third son should be grateful to lick ink off a ledger.
But I don’t want to die with a bent spine and dust in my throat, Henry.”
“So why the rush?” Henry asked, tapping the slate.
“You have the calluses of a man training for a deadline.”
Bosch leaned over the desk, his eyes alight with reckless ambition.
“The Rattay Tourney.
Sir Hanush announced it for next week.
Open lists in the upper courtyard.
If a common man or free retainer wins the grand prize, Sir Hanush presents the champion with a purse of silver and takes notice.
If I enter the lists and hold my own…
maybe the lords will see a man-at-arms instead of a quill-driver.
Maybe Hanush would take me into the garrison.”
Henry studied the youth.
Bosch had fire, but against seasoned mercenaries and men like Black Peter, raw enthusiasm with a wooden waster would get a clerk’s skull cracked like an egg.
“Hanush’s tourney isn’t a festival game, Bosch,” Henry said evenly.
“Those men fight with blunted steel, but a blow to the bascinet will still leave your brains scrambled.
Even if Hanush took you, you’d spend five years as an ordinary gate watchman standing in the rain for two groschen a day.”
Bosch’s face fell, his shoulders drooping.
“It’s better than waiting for Friedrich to die.”
“I have a better path,” Henry said, his tone measured and confident.
Bosch blinked.
“What path?”
“Look at where I was a week ago, Bosch—raking coal in Skalitz,” Henry said, holding the clerk’s gaze.
“Now I’m in Radzig’s livery with silver in my belt.
I won’t stay a squire forever.
When this war moves and our steel takes ground, I will earn my spurs and raise my own company.
When that day comes, I won’t need a peasant who can only swing a club, nor will I need a coward who hides behind a desk.
I’ll need a man who can ride with a blade on his hip, balance the company’s payroll, verify our contracts, and keep the supply wagons from running dry.”
Bosch’s jaw tightened.
“A company clerk?
A…
quartermaster?”
“My personal secretary and quartermaster,” Henry corrected smoothly.
“With a sword at your side and a seat at my table.
And once I hold land of my own, the man who manages my books will be the one who rides as my first sworn retainer.”
Bosch stared at him, breath caught in his chest.
“You…
you aren’t even a knight yet, Henry.
You’re talking about building an army.”
“If you want to spend your life watching other men make their way in the world, stay at this desk,” Henry said with a calm grin.
“If not, be ready when I call on you.”
The clerk swallowed hard, a sharp grin breaking through his usual nervous posture.
“Prove it, then,” Bosch said, a daring look crossing his face.
“You talk about fighting and leading companies.
Enter the Rattay Tourney next week yourself.
If you step into Sir Hanush’s ring and win the champion’s purse against the best blades in the province…
I’ll waive every single groschen of your reading fees.
I’ll teach you every cipher, seal, and legal script I know until you write like a royal notary.
And when you march out to build that company, I’ll pack my inkhorn and ride behind your stirrup.”
Henry extended his right hand across the tilted desk, his palm scarred and firm.
“Keep your quill sharp and your slates ready, Bosch,” Henry said.
“You’ve got yourself a commander.”
Bosch gripped Henry’s hand firmly, sealing the pact over the drying sheepskin.