Goodbye to the Knight✔️

Prologue III

Kahlo. Early Autumn. 1348.

"It's here! It's here!" A shrill cry echoed out from a balcony. "An apprentice from the Tailors Guild down Murray Street has been infected. We're doomed!"

That was when darkness truly sunk over the city.

But amongst all this, light still shone on in my life. I had Will, and that was all that mattered to sixteen-year-old me.

Only five more months were left until he moved up from being an apprentice to a journeyman, and then we could be married.

I had first met William many years ago when he came to our guild to live with us and learn the ways of a carpenter. Each day my father would teach Will the ways of all the tools and how to use them. I remember he caught on very quickly, and like my father, the tools became an extension of him.

Years past and we both grew up slowly. Although we lived together, we hardly interacted at all in the first two years. When I reached the age of ten, Father started teaching me the ways of woodwork, but I found it hard. I didn't find pleasure in creating furniture.

I remember it was a day in early autumn when Father came home from Kahlo Castle with Will by his side. They were talking joyously to each other about how the Earl was interested in having them come in and make bookshelves for his library. They talked about how he wanted two bows, hung up on the back wall in a majestic fashion. This puzzled eleven-year-old me. What was a bow? And so, I had asked my father.

"A bow, my dear Ella, is a weapon, used to strike down enemies from afar. It sends arrows soaring through the sky and into enemies far in the distance, it—" and that was when Mother interrupted us.

"She doesn't need to hear about weapons, not yet. We hear too much about battles already."

Although the conversation moved on that day, my curiosity had been poked. Before too long, I had found a bow buried in my father's workspace.

I was in awe.

It was beautifully strung with intricate designs carved onto it. And that was when I discovered my passion for making bows.

Secretly I studied the bow and started making my own. Once it was finished, I had showed my father and he looked at it for a few long seconds.

"Will, come here!" he had yelled to his apprentice.

Will ran into the room and came to a stop, waiting to hear what was to be said. "I want you to take Ella down to the fields and see whether her bow works."

And it did work. Just.

The arrow had flown a few metres through the air before it thudded to the ground.

"Well done," Will said with a grin.

After that, a friendship bloomed between us, and I was allowed to focus on making bows instead of furniture.

A year came and went, and everything got a lot better at home. The Earl liked my father's work so much that he came to him every time he needed something made, and so, we were finally able to afford better food and clothing.

I was also now twelve, the perfect age to be married off, allowing our family to form a relationship with another guild. Of course, I was excited but nervous at the same time. My older sister had been married off a few years prior, and she was happily married to a mason journeyman.

From a young age, I'd dreamed of being married off to a lovely husband and falling in love with him. What came as a shock to me, however, was when my father and mother confronted me about the matter and told me how William wished for me to become his wife. I'd been shocked. Up until then, I'd thought of him as a friend. But, as twelve-year-old me pondered over the thought of living with him forever, I became more and more happy with the idea. We got along like two peas in a pod. He made me laugh often enough, and I knew that I would be happy to be his wife.

Over the years that followed, we became even closer. He came from a baker's guild and taught me many things that he'd learned while he lived there. We were happy. However, we had to wait until his nineteenth birthday, when he could become a journeyman, to get married. But that was fine. We were still able to be together until then.

I thought everything was perfect, that we were going to live happily ever after.

If only I'd known then, what I now know was about to be thrown upon me.