Twin Knights of Fork Hill

They were not always at the academy in the capital. They were, for a very long time before they came here, on Fork Hill in the eastern part of the kingdom.

Fork Hill is a hill in the eastern province of the white-board kingdom that is shaped, when seen from the air or from a low-flying bird's perspective, like a kitchen fork laid down flat on the landscape. Two prongs, a stretch of saddle between them, and a long handle leading down to the valley below. The prongs are about a kilometre apart at their widest. The saddle between them dips sharply in the middle, with a stream at the bottom that runs cold even in the height of summer when everything else is dry.

The road through the area went around the hill, naturally enough. Anybody sensible who wanted to get from one prong to the other walked the long way around the base of the hill. It took an hour and was, as walks go in that part of the kingdom, perfectly fine.

The twin knights did not walk the long way. They learned, before they had learned almost anything else useful in their childhoods, how to jump.

The story their mother tells about the first jump (it is her favourite story to tell, and she has told it many times over the years) goes something like this. They were six years old. They climbed the eastern prong with their lunches in their hands, took a long look across the saddle towards the western prong, and just went. It was not a leap of faith; the hill had been teaching them how to leap for some time. They had spent every day for nearly a year throwing stones across the saddle and watching them arc through the air. They knew the distance. They knew the wind. They knew that the brook at the bottom of the saddle had a single smooth flat rock that you could land on if you came down at exactly the right angle, and otherwise you got wet.

Their mother did not learn about the first jump until the twins came home for dinner that evening. She was peeling apples at the kitchen table when they walked in.

The first knight said, "We went to the west prong today."

The second knight said, "We did not take the road."

Their mother set down the knife on the table. She asked them, very calmly, with that particular calmness mothers use when the news could be much worse than it sounds, how they had gotten there.

The first knight said, "We jumped."

The second knight said, "It was very fast."

She did not, to her considerable credit, faint at the kitchen table.

She did, however, make them sit down on either side of her and walk her through, very slowly, every single part of the jump. The takeoff position. The shape of the arc. The landing technique. The rock in the brook. She asked them, when they were finally done explaining it, if they could promise her to do it the same way every time. They both said yes, immediately. She believed them. She had to believe them, given the alternative.

By the time they were ten years old, the twin knights could jump from one prong to the other in either direction. They could jump over obstacles in the saddle between — a low-flying bird, a wandering goat, a very tall person crossing the saddle on foot. They could jump from a standing start. They could jump while carrying lunch in both hands. They could land on the rock without scuffing it.

By the time they were fifteen, they had figured out something rather more interesting than the basic jump.

They had figured out that, on certain days, when the wind was just right and they had practised the timing all morning, they could jump in two directions at once.

They had been practising the two-direction trick, in secret, for nearly a year before the scout came to find them.

The trick required two people leaping at the exact same moment from the exact same spot, going to two different landing places at the end, and not landing in the brook by mistake. It required practice. It required communication. It required, more than anything else, twins.

What they realised, over hundreds of practice jumps spread across an autumn and a winter, was a quiet thing that had not occurred to anyone before.

If you take off from the right place, you can threaten two places at the same time.

You don't need to actually be in both places at once. You only need to be able to reach both. The threat — the readiness to land on either one — is the thing that does the work.

They called it, with the kind of teenage seriousness that doesn't normally survive into adulthood, the fork. You can see, perhaps, where this naming is going.

The kingdom's chess scouts came around at the start of the next spring. This was during the early reign of King Pumble, who had just instituted a youth-programme for unusual movers across the kingdom. The scout was a polite older woman named Brindle, who wore a long grey travelling-coat and carried a small folded chessboard in her bag for emergencies. She arrived at Fork Hill on foot one morning and asked, at the cottage door, whether the children of the house might be available to demonstrate whatever it was they were said to be doing on the prongs.

Their mother, peeling apples again, said yes. She always said yes by this point in their childhoods. The twins were sixteen.

They took Brindle up to the eastern prong without ceremony. They asked her where she wanted them to land on the far side. She pointed across to two flat stones on the western prong — one each, about ten paces apart. The knights nodded together. They took off together. They landed on the two stones. They turned, in unison, and waved.

Brindle did not speak for a long moment.

Then she said, almost carefully, "Have either of you ever played chess?"

The first knight said, "No."

The second knight said, "Is that the one with the board?"

Brindle said, quietly: "Yes. It is the one with the board."

She brought them down to the capital that month, on the next available coach. She walked with them part of the way on foot, and at the gates of the city she handed them off to the academy master, who watched them play their first three games and then said, to nobody in particular, what he had said about so many of them over the years: "Oh. Good. Another pair."

They have been at the academy for two years now and they have, in that short time, taught more students to spot a fork than the entire previous decade managed without them. They teach in alternating sentences. They never trip over each other. They never confuse the children. The children figure out the pattern within the first lesson, and from then on they expect it, and it works for them.

This afternoon, after the demonstration on the wall, the knights walk among the children on the flagstones. They have set up a smaller board on a low table at the side of the yard. Two wooden knights — this time not themselves — are placed on the board in starting positions. A rook and a bishop sit nearby on adjacent squares.

The fox in the green scarf — Inkling, who is by general consensus everybody's favourite student — looks carefully at the position on the small board. She points, very deliberately, to a square in the middle of the board.

"If a knight moves there," she says, "it attacks the rook and the bishop."

"Yes," says Knight One.

"Both at once," says Knight Two.

"You can only save one."

"Pick the one you can save."

"Don't pick the one to defend."

A girl with a fork-shaped pin in her hair (this is Adela Marrowstone's niece, though nobody at the academy yet knows that) asks the question that always arrives at this point in the lesson: "What if the rook just moves? Doesn't that solve the problem?"

The knights look at her. They look at each other. They look back at her.

"Yes," says Knight One.

"That solves it," says Knight Two. "Then we take the bishop."

"You traded a defending move for a captured piece."

"You did not get away free."

"That is how a fork works."

Sir Pinwell, watching from the doorway of the academy hall, observes the lesson without comment. The knights have, twice now during this same lesson, jumped over his neat row of demonstration pieces on the side table — they did not need to jump it for any tactical reason, the table was not in their way, they did it because they could. Pinwell has straightened the row twice. He has not said a single word about either incident. The knights know perfectly well that he has straightened the row. They appreciate him for it. They have, in fact, recently learned his name properly, which they took as a sign of growing maturity. They are still privately proud of this achievement.