"You are a little bit scared, though, right? It's one thing to not be scared off but if you weren't nervous at all then something would be off." 

"There's a very serious Kalomeros tradition where whoever is the newest of the red belts has to buy beer for all of the rest of us," Roger says with a perfectly straight face. "You should be appropriately nervous about that. If you don't then you get thrown to the wolves and eaten."

Cináed tries to kick him again but this time Roger is prepared and dodges. 

"I am a little bit scared, yeah. Not of the beer thing, obviously. Of the . . ." surely everyone here knows at least as much as she does. "Of the stakes of it all. Of the possibility of screwing up in a way I can't fix. But fear exists for a reason, it's how we know to take things seriously."

Of the stakes of it all. How much does Sergia know about the stakes?

Lucia grew up in the SCA, unlike Roger and Cináed. Even before she was told all the secrets, she guessed - felt, really - that the fighting was more important than anyone was letting on, but nobody had actually told her anything until she'd gotten her red belt. (Though of course that wasn't a prerequisite - they'd told Cináed after getting his Kraken. Point was - probably nobody had told Sergia. But maybe she had a sense of something more.)

"The stakes are a lot higher than whether pineapple goes on pizza, yes. Especially with something like Crown, or when you're deciding whether to take a blow and your honour is always at stake. Honour is everything." Someone who couldn't resist the temptation to shrug off a blow in order to win a tournament might not be trustworthy to shrug off other, more important temptations to stray from the path. "And the Dream, the integrity of it - it relies on us striving towards the standard just as much as on the peers upholding the standard, I think. If we stop believing it matters and chasing it, then it will die."

Maybe die more literally than Lucia's allowed to say. But this much at least would be true even if those secrets didn't exist. 

Sergia is now pretty sure her guess was right: whatever the thing is it's something squires usually get told. She doesn't know it yet--technically she doesn't even know for sure there's a secret, but over the past few years it's gotten to the point where she'd be shocked if there wasn't, and most of her uncertainty is about the details. 

"Yeah. And that matters, because--it's not just about us, right? It's about--everyone who's going to benefit from it down the line, the way we're benefitting from the people who came before us. The world is a better place for having this Dream in it."

"Yeah. We all need a Dream. Because the modern world is full of nightmares, right?"

Lucia ignores the looks that Cináed and Roger are giving her, both trying to say too far with their eyes. There's plenty of mundane things she could be talking about. 

Roger thinks this is too far. "Yeah, nightmares like the one I had last night where I was on the battlefield and my pants fell down and I couldn't get them back up again because all my armour was in the way."

The evil look he's shooting Lucia probably makes things worse rather than better, though. 

Oh no, she has to choose between social harmony and--probably the other option is not "find out the whole thing tonight", Lucia seemed to be sounding out how much she knew already more than considering whether to say it straight out. Which makes the social harmony option more appealing. Still, she takes a moment to gauge Lucia's reaction before speaking.

If Sergia doesn't say anything, Lucia backs off a little. She thinks Sergia's perceptive enough that she probably suspects something - they're both second-gen and she knows that she suspected before she was told - but Cináed and Roger aren't wrong, she shouldn't be telling Sergia if Sergia doesn't know. That's not her place. She hurriedly forces a laugh at Roger's joke and goes back to the subject at hand.

"So, you're sure you want to be a knight someday, she doesn't seem like a collector or like she's just using you or wanting to take credit for your achievements, you think you like her household, you'd let her crash on your couch and you think she'd let you crash on hers, the fighting style she teaches is one you want to learn..." Lucia is counting off criteria on her fingers, though she isn't sure why since she isn't counting towards any particular number. It just kind of helps her keep the points straight in her head. "She's definitely someone who can advocate for you, uh, hm..."

"You don't have a crush on her," Roger adds cheerfully, with an additional raised finger. 

Cináed may as well join in with the finger-counting. "You think you learn well from her and you think she's got more to teach you, she's not too busy with an office to be able to teach you, she's someone you actually look up to as a person and not just a fighter. I can't personally imagine having a beer with her but I assume you like her as a person. That definitely sounds like you should just ask her and see what she thinks? The worst she can say is no."

"Hm, I..." Lucia hesitates, not quite sure that they've covered everything despite the total of ten raised fingers around the little firelit circle. "I guess, one of the more useful interesting questions someone asked me when I was uncertain about this - well, one of the things my knight told me I had to do before I took a red belt was I had to ask a bunch of people for advice about it - someone asked me if I thought he had any really serious flaws, because if I couldn't say anything then it meant I was putting him on a pedestal and that wasn't a good basis for a relationship. Are there things you don't like about her?"

She hates speaking ill of people who aren't here but they have a point. "Uh, as far as I can tell she's 'on' one hundred percent of the time? She doesn't do 'sitting around a fire telling jokes about stuff', or at least not where I can see it. Also I think sometimes she forgets that not everyone has read every book she's read, but possibly the problem there is that I've read objectively not enough books and am self-conscious about it." That last thing will hopefully be solved by taking college history classes until she's enough books.

Lucia used to share that discomfort (speaking ill of her knight felt like a sin) until she figured out that her cohort-mates thought her knight was a cantankerous stuffy old relic, and if she acknowledges that he is maybe a little irritable and old-fashioned then they might be open to seeing the immense respect she has for him despite that, whereas if she tries to pretend that he's a ray of sunshine then they'll just think she is insane. (Admittedly, they think she is insane anyway, but that's because her love for studying the blade verges on an all-consuming obsession that makes the passion of Shakespearean love sonnets seem like mild interest by comparison. And that's an okay reason for everyone to think she's crazy, since it is pretty accurate.) 

"And that's something you can deal with? Like, a couple years from now you're not going to be sitting around the campfire going man I wish I had someone I could tell stupid jokes to? Or goddamnit I am so tired of reading, I wish nobody expected me to read any goddamn books? I don't think Roger's knight has asked him to read a single book in his life."

(It took Lucia a year to figure out that she could tell her knight dumbass dirty jokes, and that when he sighed and said things like you can make jokes that bad once you can defend yourself from the consequences that was his way of joking back.) 

"My twelfth century English persona probably wouldn't have been literate. It would be terribly inauthentic for me to ever read a book," Roger says with a practised air of innocence. 

"If she expects me to get my garb game up to the standards of hers I might actually die in a horrible sewing machine incident, so that's definitely something I should ask her about." She's not even sure how much of Sir Nicole's garb is stuff she made herself--Sir Nicole is a Duchess and at least in Æthelmearc that would mean she had gotten presents from half the garb Laurels in the kingdom--but at least some of it is, and everything she wears out of armor is prettier than everything Sergia owns.

"Well, I already promised to say nice things at your funeral. I will say here lies Sergia, yet another squire cruelly bullied by an evil sewing machine, whose example inspires us all to wear early period rectangles and renounce floofy Renaissance nonsense. It will be a worthwhile sacrifice for the cause of finally getting Luce to shut the fuck up about Venetian lace." Roger is too tired and too drunk to be good at staying serious. 

"You can make a list of things to ask her about. I made a really long list before I got my red belt and we went through the whole thing while on the eight-hour drive to Pennsic. Probably be prepared to have a conversation that long, by the way, don't wait until this kind of hour to ask her. And - find a time when you're mentally ready to think about a whole bunch of new stuff." 

"Yeah, for sure. Maybe at some event where there's a big gap between the end of the fighting and the start of court. Actually, maybe she'd appreciate an "I'd like to have a long conversation in with you, what's a good time" sort of thing." Sergia would, but she knows some people hate that kind of advance notice more than they like getting to pick a convenient time.

"I won't hold you to fighting me tomorrow, if you want to go spend time talking to her. That way she can talk to you before the-" 

"-yeah, before her household go home on Monday, in case she wants to introduce you to anyone and get their thoughts, I think some folks leave pretty early on Monday because they're driving a long way!"

Lucia is such a terrible liar and Cináed is so used to smoothly covering for her. He can so calmly inhabit a world where nothing is happening Monday except people packing up and going home. 

"Just, you know, only if you're ready, it's a big conversation," Roger chimes in. "Don't go have it tomorrow unless you're really really ready. Don't let Luce rush you." 

"Thanks, all of you. I've learned a lot about being a squire from this conversation and I intend to use that information responsibly. If you wanted to tell me anything else, I would also be responsible with that information, but I'm not going to badger anyone more than they're comfortable with, or keep anyone up too late when there's lots to do tomorrow." That probably sounds ridiculous in the universe where there is no secret, but so have several earlier statements, and conveying that she takes promises of secrecy--hers and other people's--seriously is important. If they're not allowed to tell her anything then they won't and she respects that even if she is also deeply curious and frustrated.

Lucia just about vibrates with the suppressed desire to blurt out everything she knows. But Sergia is hinting that she knows there's a secret and wants to know it - she's not giving Lucia any reason to believe that she knows something about what the secret is. 

It is so not fair that Lucia has to keep secrets! Honesty and commitment to truth are some of her best traits! She will take this frustration out on her opponents' helmets tomorrow.

"Oh, wow, yeah, there is a lot to do tomorrow and it's nearly - god, it's two in the morning." Cináed has pulled his phone out to check. "I want to make sure the fire gets put out before we sleep - are any of you all staying up much later?" 

Nobody in the group wants to stay up much later, so Cináed kicks some dirt over the embers of the fire and they wander to bed by the pale silver moonlight. 

Sergia only manages to fall asleep at a reasonable speed because it's two in the morning and she's exhausted, and in the morning she too has plenty of emotions to take out on her opponents' helmets. 

And when the sun is setting and the awards are given out and the thrones are packed away, she goes and finds Sir Nicole and asks her if she has time for a long conversation.

Lucia spots Sergia, sees the direction she's moving, and gives her a little wave and a mouthed, "Good luck." She's honestly really hoping Sergia gets it - it'd be great to have someone else she can commiserate with about the perils of being (she feels like) a tiny baby in a giant ancient household. In neither Sevenroads nor Rosemary can someone swing a stick without hitting a peer. 

She gives them some space and goes to hit her pell on her own.