Chapter 52

Chapter 52: Chapter 52

The portcullis of Shepfold slammed down behind us, and the crash of iron on stone rattled my teeth.

After weeks in the rot and damp of the southern marshes, the 7th’s old fortress felt foreign and far too familiar at once. It smelled of wet cobblestones, coal smoke and cold steel, with no trace of stagnant water left in the air. Black granite walls climbed into the overcast sky and threw long, sharp shadows across the military city inside them.

I walked through the lower ward with the Rune of Antiquity hidden under the sleeves of a fresh wool tunic. Merchants stared. So did the blacksmiths and the garrison patrols, and then they stepped aside and found something interesting in the mud. Astra rode my right shoulder. He gave a low, clicking trill, his black eyes sweeping the crowded street like a hunter’s.

I didn’t go to the barracks. Before I reported to high command, there was a debt I needed to acknowledge.

I wound through the alleys of the lower rings until I reached the Blind Owl, a run-down tavern that fronted for the fortress’s underground network of informants. Those were the people who’d told me what I needed to know in my first days as a scared recruit.

I shoved the door open. Inside it was dim and stank of stale ale and pipe smoke. The talk stopped the moment I crossed the threshold.

Silas sat in the back booth with three scarred enforcers around him. He hadn’t changed: the same spotless dark velvet doublet, the same silver rings crowding his fingers. Then he looked up and saw me, and the smooth, oily smile slid off his face.

The girl he remembered was fourteen and had paid him in copper and desperation. What he saw now was a battle-hardened giant with a glowing right eye and a runed sword that hummed with static.

"Lieutenant Elvit." His voice had lost its usual silk. He waved his enforcers back, and they went, hands drifting away from their weapons. "The rumors from the marshes... they said the earth swallowed you."

"I crawled back out." I unhooked a leather pouch from my belt. It was full of silver Imperial marks I’d taken off the legionnaires who’d attacked the Lizard Tribe village. I tossed it on the table, and it landed with a solid thud.

Silas looked at the pouch, then at me. "What’s this for?"

"Settling old accounts." My voice came out low, and something tight sat in my chest. "And keeping a line open. I’m not the scared kid who came to you months ago, Silas. But the 7th is blind to what happens in the shadows, and I need eyes I can trust. Keep my name in your ledgers."

Silas laid a ringed hand over the pouch and nodded. There was respect in it now, with a good deal of fear mixed in. "Always, Lieutenant."

I left the tavern and climbed toward the training grounds in the middle ward. Practice swords clashed somewhere ahead, the noise bouncing off the stone walls.

Twenty recruits were running drills in the mud. I stopped at the wooden palisade, hands on the damp wood, and watched. I knew every face. They were what was left of my cohort, the boys and girls whose Dormant Buds had woken at the same time mine did.

Teenagers, all of them. They were quick and they hit hard, the faint shimmer of their basic Embers rising off their shoulders. But I watched them fight to hold their formations, panting and sweating under their iron practice swords, and a dull ache told me how far I’d gone from them.

One of them, a lanky boy named Jace, parried a blow, turned, and found my eyes.

He froze. His sword sagged to his side. The others followed his gaze, and the whole yard went quiet. They stared at the thick scars crisscrossing my neck and the breadth of my shoulders, and last of all at my right eye, where pale starlight leaked out from the edge of the iris.

They didn’t see a comrade, or the girl who’d shared their fear in the medical tents. They looked at me with the same wide-eyed terror I’d seen on the Coalition barbarians.

I wanted to lift a hand. I wanted to call out to Jace and ask whether the quartermaster still served that awful barley porridge. I opened my mouth, and the words were right there.

Even briefly, before I went to Trivi, I did not socialise much with my fellow recruit, partly because my mind refused to entertain kids half my mental age, and partly because of my incessant desire to grow.

Nothing came out. The gap between us was too wide for a shout to cross. I’d become something else.

I looked down, dragged the collar of my cloak up against the wind, and turned away.

Myra was waiting at the iron gates of the military cemetery.

She stood in her dark, spotless uniform with her hands clasped behind her back. She didn’t salute when I came up. She just fell into step beside me and said nothing, and with her there the loneliness in my chest eased a little.

We walked down rows of identical black iron markers. The Empire didn’t bury its dead with poetry or flowers. It gave them a rank and a number.

We stopped at a patch of freshly turned dark earth in the vanguard section. The iron marker read: Elara. Recruit. 7th Legion. Died in Service.

I sank to my knees in the wet grass. Mud soaked through my trousers, and I let it. I stared at the cold iron.

I shut my eyes and tried to call up her face. The color of her hair. The sound of her laugh drifting down the barracks. The Bud had rebuilt my mind for survival. To make room for a sense of space and a fighter’s reflexes, it had burned out the fragile parts of me, and her face had gone with the rest.

The memory ran through my fingers like dry sand. All I could find were blurred edges, and then the knife in the dark that killed her.

A ragged breath tore out of my throat. I pressed the heels of my hands against my eyes. I could shatter iron and bend starlight, and I couldn’t hold on to my friend’s face.

"I can’t see her." I whispered it, and my voice cracked as the tears finally spilled over. "Myra, I can’t... I can’t remember her face. The memories just slide away."

Myra knelt beside me. She said nothing about time healing anything, or Elara dying with honor. She put an arm around my shoulders, pulled me against her side, and leaned her head on mine.

Astra hopped off my shoulder and landed on the iron marker. He tilted his head, gave a soft, low chirp, and rubbed his beak against my scarred knuckles. The rune under his wing pulsed, and a slow warmth settled in my chest.

We stayed there in the cold rain for a long time. A weapon, an administrator and a falcon, grieving for a girl who’d deserved better than the mud.

The summons from high command came two hours later.

I stood in the middle of Commander Erula’s private quarters in the upper keep. After the cold, wet cemetery it felt like another world. Velvet tapestries worked with gold thread hung over the stone walls. A great hearth roared, and its light slid over polished mahogany furniture and thick, imported Myrish rugs spread across the floor.

Erula sat behind a broad desk of dark wood, pouring a glass of deep red wine. She wore a gown of black silk, and her red eyes weighed me coldly.

"You look dreadful, Elvit." She took a slow sip. "I assume you’re done wallowing in the graveyard?"

I stiffened, and the Ember flared up in my chest. "I was paying my respects to a fallen soldier, Commander."

"You were mourning your lost humanity." She said it without malice, as plain as a fact. She set her glass down and steepled her fingers. "You’re trying to square the girl you used to be with the monster you’ve turned into. Every Swelled Bud goes through it. The mind rebuilds itself to fit the body."

I said nothing. I looked at the desk.

"Your strength has no equal in this fortress." Erula rose and began pacing around the desk. "With the Rune of Antiquity behind it, your instincts in a fight are nearly flawless. But you’re incomplete."

I frowned and looked up. "Incomplete?"

"To progress towards the summit of what we can become," Erula said, stopping right in front of me, "you have to achieve the Bud Burst. That isn’t a matter of muscle, Elvit. You can’t train for it by swinging swords in the mud. It takes real understanding of the Ember: the magic in the world around us, the history of the Ancestral Runes, the basic laws of shaping energy."

She reached into the folds of her gown and drew out a thick cream-colored envelope, tied with black ribbon and sealed in golden wax with the crest of the Imperial Throne: a roaring lion crowned with stars.

"You evolved too fast." She held the letter out to me. "You skipped the years of study everyone else sits through. Stay in Shepfold swinging at barbarians and you’ll never reach what you could be. You’ll only ever be a blunt instrument."

I took the envelope. The paper was thick and obviously expensive. "What is this?"

"An admission letter." Erula smiled, sharp and hungry. "You’re leaving the 7th Legion, Lieutenant. I’ve pulled every political string I own to get you a place. You’re going to the Imperial Academy."

I stared at the golden seal. "The Academy? Where?"

"In the heart of the Empire." The hearth fire glinted in her red eyes. "The Crown Jewel. You’ll sit in classrooms with the pampered, arrogant children of the high nobility. You’ll learn the theory of the Ember and master the starlight in your arm, and you won’t set foot in this fortress again until you’ve achieved the Bud Burst."

She went back to her desk and picked up her glass.

"Pack your things, Elvit. The capital is a month’s ride from here, and the roads are rarely kind to a lone traveler in a Vanguard uniform."