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Yes. Those eyes were mine.

That girl was me.

1

Honesty

From this distance, the maiden on strings looked almost real. The eyes, the mouth—and especially the nose, which tilted upward, mocking the angle of my sword buried within her chest, as though I had failed to stab her correctly.

I yanked the blade out, wishing to run her through again, a truly black thought for a knight of honor.

My comrades clapped, brothers-and-sisters-in-arms filling the training yard with the clank and clash of armored gloves. As the discordant noise resounded through my bones, I saw the girl in her truest form: a large puppet dangling from the branch of a tree, hanging at eye level, with an X painted on its chest.

She was an unreal thing, a false thing, of course.

Of course, she was. What else could she be?

She,it, was merely a puppet. I would do well to focus on the task at hand, not to dwell upon infernal fairytales.

Dawn crested the horizon, a luminous crown of sun. Outside the citadel and lower town, the burnished sky touched the harvest fields of our kingdom, tinting the corn and oat stalks.

I stepped backward, spinning my sword. The blade sliced the air—the whispers of a sharpened edge—as I twirled it once, plunging it into my scabbard.

When I was a boy, I wished for a horse.

When I was an older boy, I wished for a sword to go with that horse.

When I was a much older boy, I wished for a knighthood to use both sword and horse.

My tale was simple. In the land of falling leaves, there lived a knight who believed in only three things: chivalry, bravery, and honesty.

The last one, most of all. Truth, the life’s blood of honor.

The almighty Seasons—nature itself governing over the Kingdoms of Spring, Summer, Autumn, and Winter—never lied. As such, their subjects shouldn’t, either.

Untruths belonged in an untrue world, meant to collect dust within the pages of fanciful, slandering books. Fairytales were lies that belittled children, vilified women, disgraced men, and glorified shallow desires. Mothers and fathers betrayed their offspring, husbands and wives manipulated one another, princes kissed sleeping princesses without asking permission, and princesses married them anyway.

Fairytales indeed scorned vices like jealousy and greed, but still: lies.

Lies that awarded dimwits for their dimwittedness, whereas in the flesh-and-blood world, real villains were not always punished, and the truly good didn’t always live happily ever after.

They didn’t always liveat all.

I glanced toward the birch-filled graveyard beyond the citadel, where nobles buried their loved ones. As I stared in that direction, my thumb brushed the ring around my finger, the metallic band scuffed with age.

Fairytales made false promises. I knew this well.

Let others, but not me, subscribe to stories and fables, those campfire tales borne of my home’s history, here in Mista, the Kingdom of Autumn.

The tale about acorns, I spurned the most.

My fingers traveled from my ring to the hilt of my weapon. I knocked my chin, summoning the next squire, who gulped the length of his beanstalk throat. As the lad raised his blade, my eyes strayed to the target, its genderless face.

What had inspired me to assume it was a female?

Perhaps the puppet’s expression had misled me to idiocy. Perhaps that crinkled, cautionary tale of a nose had provoked me to envision a life for its owner, one that fled the boundaries of reality, thusly testing my own boundaries.

In the land of falling leaves, there lived a knight....