Excerpt: Knighting

Sighing deeply, he rolled his feet out of bed and onto the cold wooden floor. The candle on the nightstand was low, just barely able to light half of the room. It must have been late in the night because the moon had already risen above their window to cast its light elsewhere on the castle. Percy, for lack of better entertainment during his wakefulness, rose silently to his feet and pulled out the drawer from beneath his bed. Inside was a mess of papers and books, maps and several of his half-drawings that had been the results of nights such as this. Pushing these aside, he dug for something to write with until at last his fingers grasped the slim figure of a charcoal stick. Percy grabbed a random piece of paper before pushing the drawer in and climbing back onto his bed.
Cross-legged, the young man smoothed the wrinkles out of his paper on his knee, then set the charcoal to it, first lightly tracing an outline, then beginning to shade it in. Minutes turned into a hour, and the impulse was finally satisfied when he held the paper up to the dying candle light. There, looking back at him, was a rough sketch of Julianne’s wandering gaze. He stared at it, curious as to why he'd done it, then folded the paper up and slipped it between the straw mattress and the bed frame.