General Slaugh waited a beat, then continued on. “It is good to see so many faces here this morning,” he said. “As you know, King Aolis has put out a call for young, able-bodied fae to join our ranks so that we can fight against the growing threat of the shadow creatures that plague our land. These tryouts are meant to assess both your fitness and your abilities to ensure that you have what it takes to be a warrior, so if you are crippled or deficient in any way, step out of line and turn back. We have no room for weakness here.”
A few of the fae shifted uneasily on their feet, but no one tried to leave, and I didn’t blame them. Doing so would be far too humiliating. Feeling the weight of someone’s stare, I glanced to my left to see Dune watching me from the front of his line. His eyebrows were raised, and the taunting expression on his face was easy enough to read.Take the hint. Go home.
I merely smirked back at him, confident that I’d be wiping that derisive look off his face soon enough.
“That’s what I like to see,” General Slaugh boomed. He punched his fist into the sky, and the ground beneath our feet rumbled in response. “Let the tryouts begin!”
The vibrations of the earth surged into my feet, and we all moved forward as one. The General’s sergeants leaped into action, ushering each line toward a different section of the field. As I anticipated, Dune’s line merged with mine into one group, and we ended up beneath the tents together. I made sure to sit at the desk right in front of his—close enough to taunt him, far enough away that he wouldn’t be able to look at my paper and cheat. Academics had never been his strong suit, and I had no intention of letting him profit off my superior intelligence.
As one of the sergeants—the same one who’d signed me in at the front desk—handed out quills, ink, paper, and a thick tome bound in treated bark, Dune leaned across his desk so he could talk into my ear. “You know that if you sit this close to me I’m going to do my best to make your life miserable, right?” he said in a low voice.
The tips of my ears quivered in response to the challenge in his voice. “Do your worst,” I responded in a honey-sweet voice, keeping my gaze forward. “It’s never been enough to stop me before.”
Dune huffed, but sat back as the sergeant returned to the proctor’s desk at the front of the tent so he could address the group. A timer sat on the desk in front of him, set to sixty minutes. “This first test is meant to assess your literacy level,” he told us. “You will have until the bell goes off to complete it. Please begin.”
The sergeant smacked the button on the timer, and it chimed, signifying the beginning of the countdown. A flurry of activity followed as everyone in the tent scrambled to open their books, and I smiled as Dune swore under his breath behind me. Unlike him, I had this in the bag and I knew it. Most of the villagers in Fenwood didn’t take literacy very seriously—they really didn’t need it since their magic was fairly intuitive—but Mother had taken it upon herself to ensure I was well-read so that I could study her herbalism and medical texts.
Looks like being magically incompetent is working out in my favor so far,I thought smugly.
The test was simple enough—the sergeant had listed which passages to read on the blackboard up front, and had also written down a series of questions that we were to answer for each passage that were meant to show critical thinking skills. The text wasn’t difficult to read at all—a collection of fables, much more enjoyable to read than1001 Herbal RemediesorFae Anatomy Explained.
I managed to make it halfway through the literacy test before Dune started tormenting me. I was in the middle of writing the answers to the fifth set of questions when my desk began to tremble. Sighing, I did my best to ignore it—it wasn’t as if I could turn around and punch him in the face—but the vibrations caused the tip of my quill to skitter across the page, ruining the sentence I’d been writing.
“This is low, even for you,” I grumbled, and Dune chuckled in response. Glancing down, I saw that two inches of earth had somehow crept up each one of the desk’s legs, making them look as if someone had dipped them in mud. I could hear his quill scratching even as he used the mud to make my desk vibrate, and I gritted my teeth. Clearly, I’d underestimated his ability to multi-task.
“Candidate.” The sergeant, who was pacing the aisles between the desks to make sure no one was cheating, stopped by my seat. “Is there a reason you’re talking during the test?”
The tips of my ears burned as every gaze in the room turned to me, and Dune coughed behind me to hide his laughter. “My desk seems to be vibrating for some reason,” I told him, as calmly as I could manage. “It’s affecting my ability to write my answers, so I got a little frustrated.”
The sergeant glanced at the legs of my chair, then at Dune sitting behind me. The dry look on his face told me that this wasn’t the first time he’d witnessed shenanigans of this sort, and he picked up my test and scanned what I’d written. His eyebrows rose, and he slapped the test back down on the table, picked up my quill, then scribbled a giant A at the top of the page and circled it.
“You’re obviously literate, Greenwood, so I see no reason to prolong your suffering. Report to the next tryout. You’ll have to wait for the rest of the group before you can begin, but you can watch what they’re doing to get a sense of the next challenge.”
“Yes sir.” Grinning, I got to my feet and nodded at the sergeant, then left the tent. I glanced over my shoulder on the way out to see Dune fuming in his seat, and I stifled a laugh. His attempt to bully me into giving up had obviously backfired, and I couldn’t have been more delighted about it.
I ducked out of the tent and headed to the next field, which was the obstacle course. They’d laid the course out on a quarter-mile long track, with twenty separate obstacles spaced out in intervals— I spotted a rope ladder, rock wall, fords, beams, trip wires, and at least two pits, amongst other things. A sergeant stood with a clipboard in the center of the track, a clipboard in one hand and a stopwatch in the other as he timed each candidate, and I watched along with the remaining candidates as the current one made his way through the course.
“I don’t know how he does it so easily,” a candidate to my left panted as the fae running the course crawled beneath the net of trip wires at top speed, then raced up the waiting ramp at the end and jumped straight down, landing in a crouch. The candidate who’d spoken was standing with three others that had obviously completed the course—they were all drenched in a sheen of sweat, some of them sporting scrapes and cuts for their trouble. “At the rate he’s going he’ll finish in half the time it took me.”
“I think his father is an officer,” another candidate, this one from the group that hadn’t gone yet, commented. “That’s why he’s better prepared than we are. The obstacle course our militia runs yearly has maybe half the number of obstacles this one does.”
“I’m just glad none of these obstacles are magical,” I chimed in. Though even if they had been, I would have been fine thanks to Mavlyn’s training. The obstacle courses she’d set for me hadn’t been as rigid as this, but she’d run interference constantly using her plants, forcing me to stay aware of my surroundings while remaining focused on each task at the same time.
The candidates gave me an odd look, and I became uncomfortably aware that I was the odd fae out in more ways than one. “I should hope not,” a female candidate said in a snooty voice. “They’re not allowing us to use our magic to complete the course, so it seems only fair that the obstacles aren’t magic, either.”
“What are you doing with our group anyway?” one of the fae who’d finished the course asked. “Weren’t you sent to the tent with Group A?”
“I was, but I finished my test early, so the proctor let me come over here to watch while I wait for the others.”
“Lucky,” the fae grumbled. “You’re getting a head start over your group.”
I thought about pointing out that having a head start over the rest of my group didn’t matter—after all, this wasn’t a competition—but then I remembered Dune’s face as I walked out of the tent, and swallowed the words. I’d promised myself that I would show Dune I had what it took to pass the tryouts, but I wanted more than that now. I wanted to outdo him in every arena, and if having a head start helped me do that, then I wasn’t going to spit on the opportunity.
The fae on the track finished the course, and the snooty female went next. It took her five more minutes than the last candidate to complete it on account of repeatedly falling off the balance beams, and the sergeant shook his head as she cleared the last obstacle, marking something on his clipboard. He tore the sheet of paper off and handed it to her as she finished, and the candidate left the field, looking dejected.
“I’m guessing there’s a minimum time?” I asked the candidate on my left, the one who’d spoken first. Considering that he and his friends were still on the field, I imagined that they’d all completed the course within the time limit.
He nodded, running a hand through his sweat drenched hair. It stuck up from his scalp in dark green spikes, making him look like an oddly colored hedgehog. “We each get ten minutes.”
