“Too late now,” Theo said. “Get in form or you’ll be running laps until dusk tomorrow with all the rest.”
I tried once more to whistle. Only air slipped through my lips, a ghost of a sound. “Stand,” I yell-whispered to the next guard, fifty feet off. The battlement hid his face. He wasn’t as close as Theo, and my voice was no more effective than my failed whistle.
Footsteps sounded, faint and far-off down the wall. The regiment commander. It was too late.
I turned, back to the dark plains, hands clasped behind me. Amidst the chill of night, my face burned. My eyes stung.
The regiment commander passed by Theo, and then me. And his footsteps continued on, down fifty feet to where they stopped. His voice sounded in the night, a sharp report. The words were garbled by the wind, but their meaning was not.
“Vallorn have pity,” Theo said from my side.
Have pity on me, or them? Perhaps both; heat scorched my face with shame. One task—I’d had one real task besides standing: whistle loud enough to keep the line going. It didn’t matter now that I was the only one who’d been standing. It didn’t matter thattheyhadn’t sieged the walls.
They hadn’t sieged the walls since before I was born. It was all pomp—and what mattered was what lay in the firelight and between it.
The regiment commander’s voice cut again through the night, and I swallowed.
I stared into the thick darkness. I didn’t move, not until dawn crested at my back, graying the sky once more, and Theo set his hand on my shoulder. I hadn’t even noticed him approach.
“Come on, Eury. Night’s done.”
Still I stayed, rooted. Not until I could see the plains and the evergreens and I knew we were safe from darkness. Not while the other guard filed past me, on their way to their bunks and sleep—or laps around the yard, until the regiment commander told them to stop.
I couldn’t leave before anyone else. I wouldn’t.
And it was in the stillness between the changing of night guard to day that I stood staring at the plains and the still-dark evergreens. My vision swam from cold and wind-burn and standing all night.
Out there, amidst the trees, my eyes fixed on a moving shape.
My gaze sharpened, and I squinted. A shadow, upright, faster than a human, emerging from the trees. It stood in the shade, as unmoving as me, until sunlight spread across the plains and gilded the pines.
I swiped at my eyes. I hadn’t seen it move back into the trees, but the shadow was gone.
CHAPTER TWO
I came downthe circular steps from the wall, twelve stories of them from the walltop to the cobblestones below. At the bottom, the day guard gathered, massing and yawning as they tightened their leathers and prepared to take their posts. Some eyed me with surprise, some with passing interest, most with disdain, and a few with a narrow-eyed smile I’d long ago learned to avoid.
Not one of them would believe I had seen anything in the trees, at least not from the girl on her first night as a guard. Shadows faded with sunlight. I must have imagined it.
I wasn’t sure I believed it myself. Standing all night, my vision uncertain with fatigue and shame… It could have been a wolf. A deer. Even a bear. Bears sometimes wandered the barren land for food this late in the season.
But this had not walked on four legs.
I moved down the street without seeing; I had seen these cobblestones thousands of times. This close to the wall, the pubs proliferated. Whiskey was its own religion on the fringes of the kingdom.
A man grabbed a pub’s doorframe as he lurched out, his eyes finding me. He offered a slurred invitation, following briefly—for as long as he could keep up with me—down the street. Such drunkennesswas only allowed on a citizen’s once-monthly day off. And no one begrudged it.
I turned a left onto the smiths’ lane. Anvils pounded their daily chorus on this street, and the short sword I wore at my hip a testament to it.
Our first pledge was to the people, the kingdom. To stay silent about what I had seen would be a dereliction. Which meant I had to catch the regiment commander before he took to bed. He knew me, at least—should I speak to any other higher-up, I’d be rolling three dice instead of one.
I ducked down the quick route, through alleys. One of them was so tight my scabbard rubbed on the stone, and emerging out the other side, I fell into a jog into the Dip, called so for how it sat mostly under the wall’s shadow. Which was nearly half the day.
I had to pass by the street where everyone knew me. Where I had grown up.
On this street, there had been no expectation of Eurydice Waters. Our family was named after the kingdom’s curse—the acid rain. Which meant I, less than anyone, could ever be expected to transcend our caste.
“Running laps already, Eury?” an old woman’s voice called. Jo, our busybody. “Or just fell asleep on the wall?”
