Nicole officially has no particular plans except to wander over to the little merchants row - it's only two or three shops since it's only a small war - and perhaps buy something from the tavern, since a friend of hers is running it. She unofficially might have had other plans, but she doesn't show any of that on her face - just a small pleasant smile. (She doesn't have to fake that smile once she sees it's one of her favourite newer fighters.) 

"Of course. What's on your mind? Is it something we could talk about while meandering down to the merchants?"

She turns to gesture at a path that would take them the long way through the woods towards the "tavern" (really just a slightly bigger pavilion set up by a boy-scout cabin). On that route they can circle all the way around the battlefield and not be overheard, though she'll have to step carefully to avoid getting mud on the embroidered hem of her cotehardie. 

"If you want to come with, I'll buy you a drink."

"Sure, that works." Theoretically a large fraction of this conversation could be had in front of witnesses but it's nice not to have to.

Once they're a little ways off, she says the line she's been rehearsing all day. "I've been learning a lot from you at fighting practices and I admire your skills as both a fighter and a teacher, and I'm wondering if you'd be open to the prospect having me as a squire. I know that I don't know everything about what it would entail, and there are some things I'd want to discuss before finalizing anything, but that's the conversation I'd like to open." She decided against saying that she knew more than she was supposed to right off, because she doesn't want to come off like she thinks knowing too much is a reason Sir Nicole should say yes. She'll be open about it in a minute, but she'd want this even if there was no secret, so that's the world she's asking in.

"I'm glad you asked. You're a good student and you have the right attitude, so I'd been thinking about bringing it up, too."

It's a deliberately chosen answer; a way of reassuring Sergia that the question isn't unwelcome without fully committing to a positive response. Nicole's instinct is just to start quizzing Sergia, but long practice at courtesy has made it easier to tamp that instinct down. 

Nicole picks a nice wide path with fewer trees overhanging so they can enjoy the already-fading sunlight - it's only late afternoon, but it's early spring. Once they're in the woods, the noises of the post-court crowd chattering fade away, and they can hear one or two birds fluttering around in the bushes.

"I certainly have things to ask you too, but let's start with the things you wanted to discuss." Nicole could've guessed Sergia had been rehearsing that sentence even if it hadn't come out as a long complicated thing without a single nervous um or uh. If she's been rehearsing that, she's probably got a list of questions too, and Nicole wants to let her work through whatever she's holding in her head before she starts introducing new thoughts. "What's your most important question?" 

It's definitely a relief that Sir Nicole was thinking about it too. And that she was willing to say as much.

"Most of my questions are variations on the theme of 'what would our obligations be to each other'--how much time we'd be spending together, any rules you'd want me to start following, what things other than fighting prowess you'd want me to focus on learning, that sort of thing. Also I'd want to meet some of the members of your household who I haven't met yet."

She takes a deep breath and adds, "Also I want to know more about--the secret thing all the peers and dependents are involved in. I know I'm not supposed to know there even is a thing, but I do, and I'm pretty sure it's something I'll want to help with once I know what it is."

"The secret thing all the peers and dependents are involved in - so I take it you're not talking about things like chiv meetings?"

Nicole is perfectly unruffled, and much better than either Cináed or Lucia at keeping secrets. Her expression is a slight but polite confusion - as though she's certain Sergia is just mistaken about a perfectly ordinary sort of thing, like not realising that there's plenty of non-squires in the Kraken meetings. 

"What makes you think there's a secret?" 

"I don't mean the order meetings, no. I think there's a secret because people sneak off in small groups to "fight pickups" and sometimes come back from them with injuries you can't get from a piece of rattan. Because everyone had to clear off the archery range at Seven Pearls a few years ago because there was a "rabid possum" and animal control never showed up and instead a couple of Pelicans went that way and then it was clear again. Because way too many people have actual sharp steel weapons they keep in their cars and never actually put on where I can see them. Because I once saw a Laurel's cloak fall into a campfire and the fire turned green and the cloak was completely undamaged. Because of the conversations about authenticity where people who are generally pretty chill suddenly treat "would someone from the actual time and place notice this was weird" like a hard standard and then they get covid and quarantine for two weeks every time. Because the medical tent at Pennsic has equipment for blood transfusions and a dispenser of holy water. Because I once saw seven people come out of the same porta-john without anyone going in. Because of the way people act like if they mess anything up they or someone else will actually die for real."

Her voice has been getting harsher and quieter this whole time; by now it's barely above a whisper. "I think you're fighting a real war, a shadow war. I think the enemy isn't human. I think the people I know wouldn't be doing it if it wasn't right, if it wasn't important. So I want to know and I want to help."

"Very nicely done. Correct on almost all counts."

(Sometimes seven people being in one portajohn is a sex thing. But most of that was related to the secret. Sir Nicole makes a mental note as to places where information security failed, people to speak to - she'll have to find out who that Laurel was and have a stern word.) 

Sir Nicole du Vivier, Knight of Atlantia and heir to some tiny fraction of the holy magic of Joan of Arc, clicks her fingers and attracts the attention of an old, old power that listens and cares about the gravitas of who she is and the oaths she's sworn. It answers with a brilliant, shifting white light that plays gently around her palm and fractures into rainbows around her fingertips, and then she tips her hand to fling it at a small rock lying by the roadside and disintegrates it. A little hint of glittering glimmer remains in the air where the rock was. 

"So, yes, I will have to ask you to keep the magic and the demons secret, and even if you don't swear fealty you'll have to swear something to that effect."

She will give Sergia some time to process the obvious show of magic before she explains anything else, but that part is important and needs to be said upfront. 

She stares at the magic and re-evaluates what kind of world she's living in, then stares at the air and turns words over in her head. "I swear I will make no attempt to reveal the existence of magic or demons to someone who doesn't already know about them unless you or someone else you say can give me permission gives me permission or unless I am certain that not telling will get someone killed and there's no time to ask you. If you want there to be fewer exceptions than that I'd really like to know why it has to be secret first. I expect there's a very good reason but there are a bunch of different things it could be."

"No, that was well worded. It's easier to explain why the secret is important if you understand how magic works."

Nicole takes a second to collect her thoughts and figure out the correct order to explain everything in. It's a pretty good sign about Sergia that she immediately thought to swear something and didn't say anything stupid, like not giving herself an exit clause. People who swear stupid oaths tend to end up being oathbreakers and that's not a good way to have a successful magical career.

"So, you've noticed that chivalry and honour matter. You've also probably heard stories of objects like the holy grail, where you can't touch them or use them unless you're sufficiently pure of heart. When an old thing has power, it's typically because it accumulated power from the belief and good deeds and virtues of the people who held it and passed it down over the years. A sword used for brave deeds for decades or centuries by people who were brave and believed in the importance of courage - it'll acquire a little magic from the strength of all that courage. That's an oversimplification, but you're with me so far?" 

What a beautiful way for magic to work. "With you so far."

"So yes, we fight demons. And there's a lot of old artefacts that are very useful in fighting demons, and we'd like to use them. When you've got a holy grail type of thing, that only answers to the pure of heart, that's often relatively easy - most of the Order of the Pelican qualifies. When you've got an Excalibur type thing, a sword that can only be used by a true and legitimate king... well, we don't have a lot of legitimate firstborn sons of firstborn sons of Kings of England around, and we'd quite like to use as many of those artefacts as we can get our hands on, so we needed a way to convince the swords. Crown Tournament is, basically, our way of manufacturing as many people as possible who count - for magical purposes - as true kings. As long as we believe in the Crown and acknowledge them as worthy of loyalty and reverence, it works, and Crown Tournament winners tend to be able to pull swords out of stones. We've found a six month reign is about the minimum - outside the West - to get the relevant magic working. Still following?"

"Yes. Rapidly accumulating questions, but not ones that can't wait while I get the initial explanation in a sensible order." (Does the enemies being "demons" mean there are angels? Is any specific religion true? Is the West faster at getting kings because they were first, or what? Why are there that many swords in stones? Are there swords that can only be wielded by a legitimately elected president? Which answer to the previous question would be more fucked up?)

"Good. So now you can understand part of why this is all secret. If you walked in on day one thinking that you needed to respect the Crown in order to make a magic sword work, you'd fundamentally have a transactional relationship with the kingdom - you'd be forcing or faking those feelings, motivated by your fear of demons. We need to let people develop those feelings on their own, for real, and now your understanding of why it's important will hopefully strengthen your loyalty but won't ever be the original motivation for it. There's certain artefacts that will work for true and loyal warriors who are obedient to their liege lords, and if you do end up swearing fealty to me and thinking of me as legitimately your liege lord, they'll work for you. They'll hopefully keep working for you if you ever become a peer and swear fealty to the Crown." 

Nicole looks over at Sergia to check she's not looking too disturbed before adding, "And that brings us to the other reason this has to be secret. You're ready to hear something you might not like very much?" 

She's going to need to spend some time processing her emotions about fealty being magically real--in particular, it makes the question of how to deal with bad royals significantly more important--but that can wait for later, when she's alone with time to think. Knowing that some of the conclusions she could come to will result in magic powers is pressure enough without also being watched and under time pressure. And apparently there's bad news to deal with first. "Go ahead."

"It'd be really nice if demons were evil and we defeated them with the power of goodness and friendship. But the good magical artefacts we use and the evil demons aren't fundamentally different types of things, though many of us like to day-to-day maintain suspension of disbelief about that - and you probably should too. They're all just old things that gained power through people really really feeling strongly about the moral codes they represent for a really long time. Sometimes a demon is sort of like.... a ghost from the twelfth century that really really believes usury is evil and wants to bomb Bank of America about it. And sometimes we defeat those demons with magic artefacts that are powered by virtues like obedience and chastity and loyalty, because they were empowered by some medieval church that felt those things were really important and passed them down between monks."

Nicole skirts delicately around the edge of a larger churned-up area of mud, lifting layers of fancy French velvet with a practised twist of the wrist.

"You can game it to an extent, as we've done with Crown, but you can't fake it. If we didn't feel real, legitimate reverence for our Crowns then we'd lose every Excalibur-type artefact that we have, and a lot of people would probably get eaten by demons. You have to be a very particular sort of person to strike the balance we strike, and qualify as a good person by both medieval moral codes and modern moral codes. Tell the general public that magic is powered by chivalry and honour, and not the modern romanticisation of it but actual ancient and medieval moral codes, and they'll turn into a bunch of fascists. The SCA maintains a sort of.... quarantine zone for medieval moral codes so the rest of the world can make social and moral progress. And in a few centuries, we'll hopefully have artefacts that are powered by modern values like democracy and equality, but they still need a few centuries to slowly accumulate power."

Ah. Yeah. That's gonna take some thinking. Sergia loves the SCA, loves having royalty and peers to look up to as shining examples of virtue and achievement, but she's also a proud American feminist with bordering on religious feelings about the Bill of Rights. 

"That's a very good reason for the secrecy and I will take it appropriately seriously. Um, and I'm going to need to sit down and think about all of that for a while later, and--figure out what my principles are. And I want to warn you that there's a chance it will all come crashing down in my head and I'll never be able to use magic. I don't think that's very likely but if I'm not prepared for the possibility I won't be able to think straight about it. Obviously if that happens and you decide not to give me a belt because of it I won't hold it against you."

"I know you will take it appropriately seriously, or I wouldn't have told you. Also we do have someone with the ability to edit memories, which you can ask for voluntarily if you don't feel able to handle this. I strongly recommend not being someone who needs to have memories removed involuntarily, and I don't think you will be."

They are almost rounding the corner where the tavern will come into sight in the distance. Sir Nicole deliberately slows her footsteps and dawdles so that they'll have a little longer in the woods. If Sergia seems like she needs more time, she can always turn around and wander in the opposite direction.

"But yes, figuring out your principles is the right approach. We've got plenty of artefacts that care about faithfulness and loyalty but don't care at all about being brave or generous, and vice versa, plenty that require courage and charity but don't require honesty or obedience. Figure out what you can genuinely feel, what you can get on board with enough to game, and what you can't do at all. If there's something you can't do at all because it's fundamentally opposite to your nature, sometimes you're still useful because some artefacts are fooled by virtue relative to the surroundings - we had a really hard time with some of the chastity-powered stuff until we realised that almost any demisexual we pick off the street counts as chaste-by-comparison if they camp close to people who host orgies every night." She says this perfectly matter-of-factly, entirely detached from the subject matter. Sergia may, or may not, figure out on her own time why nobody's ever seen Nicole with a partner. Nicole's used to the supreme awkwardness of that conversation by now, but she doesn't need to put Sergia through it by saying anything too explicitly.

"None of us are the model of a good tenth-century Catholic peasant and none of us want to be. We keep the secret because we don't need this kind of magic in the hands of people who would want to bring back the bad parts of that era. You're not bad or wrong if you can't use every artefact. Figure out what you think you can use and we'll go from there."

"That makes sense. I'll figure it out." She believes that a lot of cultures have things worth learning from. "It's not just medieval Europe, right? There are, like, katanas that can only be wielded by true samurai and spells that only work for good Confucians and so on?" She usually wears Greek more for the convenient rectangles than because Athens was the cradle of democracy but it would be really cool if there was ancient Athenian magic that ran off Aristotelian conceptions of virtue or something.

"Yes, there are katanas that can only be wielded by true samurai. You don't have to have a Japanese persona to convince those swords you're a samurai, but the closer you are to the type of person it's expecting the better, so medieval Japanese garb certainly doesn't hurt and neither does speaking Japanese. No standalone spells that work without possessing an artefact of some kind, but there's Chinese artefacts too. All the major world religions work too, before you ask. There's some cultures we don't have many personas from because we've been trying to hand their artefacts back to them - there's a lot of different groups all over the world that do this kind of thing."

"And some cultures we'd like more personas from, but usually people have already settled on something by the time we tell them the secret and not everyone can conveniently switch their emotions over to be passionate about the cultures we're most in need of. In Atlantia we still possess far more of the relics of lost Atlantis than we can use, because for some of them we haven't been able to figure out someone they'll answer to."

"Wait, Atlantis was real? That's so cool! Kind of messed up, if it actually sank, but also cool. How much do we know about their culture, do we have anything they wrote or is it all guesswork from 'hand around an artifact and see if it lights up' or what?"

"Yes. We went down there in a submarine. The myth says they were cast beneath the sea by the gods for their hubris. I'd prefer to phrase it as an evil tectonic demon got mad about insufficient quantities of the virtue of humility and their guardians didn't manage to defeat that demon before it successfully submerged the island. The same kind of tsunamis would fairly regularly come for New York, Boston, San Francisco or DC if it weren't for the West, the East and Atlantia fairly regularly sending kill teams after those demons."

There's a note of emotion in her voice that rarely shows through her polished, poised politeness - an anger old and constant enough to have turned from fire to cold steel. Humility isn't one of the virtues Sir Nicole needs to operate any of the artefacts she works with - and that's a deliberate choice she's made. She loves that the modern world, with all its hubris and ambition, gets to try and do things like cure cancer or run four-minute miles or put people on the moon. If ancient powers want to kill her for that, well, that's what she has a sword for.

She'd die to protect the SCA's secret before she let demons intimidate the East Coast out of betting on wild startup ideas, challenging established scientists about whether their papers replicate, posting their selfies with flirty captions, running for office, letting kids confidently declare that they'll be singer-songwriter-astronauts when they grow up... 

Nicole tells herself to cut it out after only a brief indulgence in distraction, her usual slight smile never wavering from her face - though for a few moments there it didn't reach her eyes. Plenty of time to get into all that later. 

"Anyway. Almost nothing they wrote survives. Ancient Greek personas, and other ancient Mediterranean seafaring cultures, have some success with their artefacts. We've figured out some things by magical trial and error and other things with standard archaeology methods. If you're interested, you might very well be the sort of person who can make some Atlantis things work."

It's a sobering realization, that the problem exists on the scale of city-destroying tsunamis. She'd be terrified, if she wasn't learning about it in the context of being part of an organization of thousands of people fighting against it together. Instead she's skipped right to thinking that this is her country and she's not going to let anything fuck with it.

"I look forward to finding out."

As they walk around the next bend in the path, the tavern becomes visible some two hundred metres away across a coldly sunny green field. 

The permanent Scout cabin is a simple log longhouse type of construction, with a set of double doors tied open on the centre of the long side. On either side of the doors an open-sided dayshade has been set up, with a scattering of camp chairs and folding tables set atop richly coloured rugs and picnic blankets. A tiny street of merchants' pavilions extends off to the left. 

The place is bright with Atlantians in splendid brocade and fluttering cloaks and gauzy veils, chattering and relaxing and laughing. Some of them are re-enactors who will miss their friends until the next event, and some of them will fight a demon tomorrow and maybe die, but many of both groups have that unique frantically merry air of warriors who only have tonight to drink together before parting ways again. In one corner two bards are drumming and playing the sort of cheerful-despite-the-minor-key dancing flute tune that strikes the modern ear as slightly strange and slightly medieval. A few nobles have spontaneously started dancing together on the lawn. A group of younger fighters are arm-wrestling each other on a corner table while others stand around them cheering and teasing. The Dream is thick in the air.

Nicole gestures towards the tavern. "If you want to ask me questions, I'm happy to linger, but I want to let you figure out your stance on demonslaying and magic before we even start talking about whether you want to be specifically my squire. If you need some time and space to process and think, let's get you a snack and a Diet Coke and talk again tomorrow?"

Nicole is only vaguely aware of Sergia's social circles but she knows the tavern will have at least somebody like Lucia or Cináed or Erik who can, if Sergia turns out to not be able to happily chatter about her day to the fellow taverngoers right now, take her aside for a gigantic hug and help her get back to her camp. She isn't quite the right person for that right now - she thinks Sergia will need someone she knows exactly where she stands with. 

"I still have a bunch of questions about how the magic works, but I think I know everything I really need to know right now. So, snack and a coke and having a think and then asking all the practical questions tomorrow morning, how about."