She sat hunched on the stoop, threshing handfuls of dry wheat heads into a battered basin; the grain scattered like gold flakes into the bowl below. It was slow work, but the harvest was meager, and wheat was the only crop hardy enough to grow outside glass. But even precious grain wasn’t half as interesting as the Waters girl running with purpose after her first night in the guard.
I didn’t slow. “I’m sure you’ll tell both stories before noonday.”
She let out a snort, and I was past her. “Don’t trip on your leathers.”
I passed my home, where my mother still slept, though not without a jag of childhood longing to rush inside. But I kept on. So few were up now; if it had been twenty minutes later, I’d nevermake it down this street. Not after my first guard shift, dressed as I was.
“Eurydice,” a man’s voice said near the corner. Aldric. He stood with crossed arms, his fingertips permanently blackened with soil, his hoe slung across his back. His skin was as thick and sun-dark as my leathers. “Got lost?”
“I already got it from Jo.” My breath was hard. “Not you as well.”
Our people, the lowborn, were as generous as they were jealous. And Aldric, my sometimes-father, was no exception. He’d as easily sneak me a ripe tomato from his day under the glass dome as he would scythe me down like grass.
When you were poor, you sought pride wherever you could find it.
“Who else but us will keep you from getting too big for your leathers?” He paused. “Huh. I don’t suppose that much applies to you, though.”
He slapped me on the back as I went by, hard enough to pitch me forward. I caught myself in the next step and turned around, backstepping and gesturing with my thumbnail hooked against my front two teeth. “Remember who wears the scabbard now.”
He turned, arms still folded, watching me go. His smile was half pleased, half the scowl he always wore—a little bit pride, a little bit envy. Warring, of course, because he carried the hoe, but I was his sometimes-daughter. That meant something. “And remember who wields the scythe.”
Around the corner, past the pitched roof of the last home on the left, the southern spire came into view.
It rose as tall as the wall and, in direct sun, a blinding white where it jutted past the two-story buildings around it. A fenced circle of grass surrounded it, the only patch of green you’d find except at the castle’s courtyard. And right now, it was being carefully watered by one of the kingdom’s gardeners, his back bent over the stream of water from his long-necked can.
It was said that from a certain angle atop the wall, you could seeall three spires, connect them with your fingers to form a triangle. The southern spire, the western spire, and the northern, all three of them like birch trees shorn of their branches and leaves. They had no entrance and no exit, no practical purpose.
Well, the people needed some sense of power. Even if it belonged to three stupidly tall stacks of white stone.
Five more minutes’ jogging carried me through twisting streets and alleys to the southern barracks. I came into the yard and was nearly barreled into by a group of six guard running laps around the barren expanse.
They were night guard—from my shift. Others circled too, strung around the edges of the yard, running with hangdog heads and swinging hands. The ones who hadn’t heard the whistle; the ones who knew exactly who was responsible.
Their hard stares said as much.
Fresh guilt burned up my neck; I had forgotten about them. I suspected if I were to go to my bunk now, I wouldn’t be allowed to sleep, anyway.
With a blink and a breath, I made straight for the night regiment commander’s quarters. He had a house on the far side of the yard, which meant I had to cut a straight line through the circling night guard.
They couldn’t touch me here, in the yard. My only grace.
I came up onto the porch and straightened, one hand fisting behind my back as I stepped up to the door. I knocked twice and waited. We were supposed to wait ten seconds, but I couldn’t.
Three seconds later, I knocked again. I knocked until footsteps sounded within, along with that gravelly voice.
“Arxius’s hammer, the wall had better be coming down.”
The regiment commander’s half-bald head was shiny in the sunlight. He rubbed a towel through what remained of his reddish hair as he blinked green, red-rimmed eyes. I could almost see the young man he had once been, receded into the depths of his face.
“Oh,” he said. “It’s you.”
“Commander—”
He kept rubbing at his hair. “Forget titles, Waters. And the pose, too—it’s too damn early.”
I dropped my hand from behind me. Now that I could begin where I wanted to, with the decorum dropped, my words shriveled on my tongue. “At the end of my shift, I saw something.”
“Did you, now? Was it perhaps the sun? It is known to show itself at the end of night.”
