Chapter 1
Kael
The day began, as it always did, with a lie.
It started in my ribs, a dull, familiar ache from the bindings I’d cinched tight in the pre-dawn dark. I’d wound the coarse linen around my chest until my lungs burned and the soft, damning proof of my womanhood was crushed into a flat, unremarkable plane. The pain was a shield. The pain meant the lie was holding.
I swung my legs over the side of my cot, the splintered wood cold against my calves. Our barracks were a long, drafty stone building, smelling of wet wool, stale sweat, and the damp chill that seeped through the mortar no matter how high the fires in the central hearth were stoked. Outside, two days of relentless rain had turned the city’s dirt streets into a quagmire of thick, greedy mud. Grayfang Pass wasn't a temporary camp; it was a scar, a fortress city carved into the foot of the mountains—humanity’s last, uglyoutpost before the Orc territories. And today, it was drowning.
“Rise and shine, you miserable bastards!” Sergeant Marius bellowed, his voice a rusty saw blade against the relative peace of the morning.
A chorus of groans and curses answered him. Around me, men stirred, shadows detaching themselves from lumpy straw mattresses. I kept my head down, my movements economical as I pulled on my worn leather brigandine. Keep quiet, keep small, don’t draw the eye. It was the mantra I’d lived by for five years.
Five years since I’d last heard my own name. Five years since I’d become Kael.
It was my brother’s name. A good, strong name. He’d died, alongside our parents, when the weeping fever swept through our village. He was all of seventeen. I was fifteen. The fever had left me an orphan in the care of an aunt and uncle who saw me not as grieving family, but as a commodity. A warm body to be married off to a pig-faced man of their choice to consolidate a miserable patch of farmland.
They saw a future for me filled with a swollen belly and a man’s heavy hand. A life inside four walls, my only value measured by the sons I could produce.
I saw a cage.
So I ran. I cut my hair with a stolen sheep shear, bound my chest with strips of our mother’s wedding dress, and took the only thing my brother had left to give me: his name. I walked into a recruitment office and became Kael, a grunt in the Magistrate’s army. A disposable boy with nothing to his name but the dirt on his boots.
It was a miserable life. But it was mine.
“Move it, Kael! Or are you planning on growing roots?”
The voice belonged to Torvin, a brute of a man with fists like ham hocks. I grunted in response, my voice intentionally low and gravelly, a sound I’d practiced in secret until it became second nature. I grabbed my helmet and headed for the door, but wasn't fast enough. Torvin fell into step beside me, casually draping a heavy arm over my shoulders and leaning his full weight down on me. The top of my helmet dug into my scalp.
“Damn, you’re a short little shit,” he chuckled, using my head as a convenient armrest.
I grit my teeth, my neck muscles straining. I was a full head shorter than most of the men here, a fact that provided them with endless amusement. They called me "Runt" or "Pebble." They used me as a leaning post, a living joke. Every time, raw fury coiled in my gut. The urge to drive my elbow into his ribs and my boot into his knee was a physical thing, a dragon I had to wrestle into submission a dozen times a day.
But I couldn't. A reaction like that would be noted. Scrappy was one thing; I’d earned a reputation for being a vicious little bastard in a brawl. But there was a line. Too much pride, too much fire, and men like Torvin would decide it was their duty to beat it out of you. And in that kind of beating, a secret like mine could easily be laid bare.
So I just shrugged his arm off with a grunt. “Piss off, Torvin.”
He just laughed, a booming sound that made my teeth ache. “Touchy this morning, Runt? Don’t worry, a little mud and misery will set you right.”
The mud was even worse than I’d imagined, a slick, brown sea of filth. The path to the mess tent wasa battle of its own. I kept my head down, avoiding the assessing gazes of the officers. They were the real danger. Men like Captain Valerius, who found sport in the suffering of others. To him, we weren't soldiers; we were pieces on a game board, to be sacrificed without a second thought. He was the kind of man who would take one look at a discovered woman, smile a slow, cruel smile, and claim her as a prize of war.
The mess hall was a cacophony of clattering metal trays and shouted conversations. The morning stew was the consistency of dirty dishwater with a few sad, floating lumps of what might have once been a vegetable. I ate it standing up, my back against a post, my senses on high alert. A careless jostle, a hand landing in the wrong place… my armor of leather and linen was all that stood between Kael the soldier and the girl he was hiding.
Joric, a grizzled lifer with more scars than teeth, sidled up to me, his bowl of stew steaming in the cold air. “Heard anything?” he asked, his voice low.
“Heard what?”
“Scout patrol came in just before dawn. Rode their horses half to death. They went straight to the Captain’s office.” His eyes, pale and washed out fromyears of staring at the horizon, darted around nervously. “They looked like they’d seen the devil himself.”
A cold knot formed in my stomach. “Orcs?” The word was a dry whisper.
Joric just nodded grimly. “It’s been quiet for too long, kid. The Red Tide was due.”
The Red Tide. That’s what they called the Orcish horde. A force of nature that swept down from the mountains and washed away everything in its path. The priests told us they were mindless savages, beasts who lived for slaughter. But the veterans, the ones with haunted eyes like Joric, they told different stories. Stories of terrifying discipline, of tactics that outmaneuvered our best commanders, and of their leader, a monster of a general named Korvak who had never lost a battle.
My fear of the Orcs was a deep and primal thing, fed by campfire stories of tusk and claw and the screams of dying men. But my fear of being discovered, of being handed over to Captain Valerius, was sharper. More immediate. I knew exactly what kind of monster he was. The Orcs were, at least, an unknown quantity.
The sharp, shrill blast of a horn cut through the morning chatter. It wasn’t the call to muster. It was the alarm.
