1. It's an irregular usage of the word "spoon". It's trying to state the the squire was trying to get the leader into his armor, much like you would try to spoon food into your own mouth. The fact that he's spooning the leader into the armor and not putting the armor on the leader gives the impression that the armor is very heavy and he has to move the leader around to get him into the armor. 2. Counterthrust is the same as a counterattack. They attack, you attack back. They thrust forward, you thrust back into them. I personally would use a hyphen for this word and make it "counter-thrust" as I don't think it's common enough to combine into one word. 3. "Three inches thick" here combines with the word "armored". It just means he has a lot of optimism, like if you were wearing armor that's three inches thick, it's a lot of armor but it's not necessarily "too" much. Spent arrow here means useless or ineffective. A spent arrow is an arrow that has lost to much velocity to be effective anymore. "Spent arrow" in most other contexts usually means arrows that have already been fired. (e.g. you can retrieve spent arrows)