Chapter 1
CHAPTER ONE
On the battlements, you kept your eyes open or you paid in blood. Monsters roamed beyond our kingdom’s high walls, or so the stories said.
I tightened my grip on the stone edge, willing the night to remain as still and placid as a blank canvas.
But the wind, devious little bastard, had other ideas.
Up here above the plains, the wind toyed with you; first it hit you like a hundred frigid needles, then it slapped your braid in your face.
But that wasn’t what kept me standing.
Beyond the stone walls, across barren plains stripped raw by acid, the sun was a thin red blade against the distant evergreens. Those trees, straight as spears, were the only thing stubborn enough to survive here.
Still here. Still hanging on.
The sun passed the tree line fast at this hour, racing toward night. From the moment it touched the treetops, I could almost hold my breath long enough to see it gone.
“Waters,” a deep voice called from the tower, set higher atop the high wall we stood along.
I turned fully toward the tower, though I couldn’t see the face inside. The wind whipped my braid into my face with a flail’s sting. Remember your training. But it didn’t come naturally on my first night. “Yes, Regiment Commander?”
Those were the right words, though stiff and pitchy. I had spent so many secret nights up here as a child, trespassing where I should not, that the top of this high wall felt like it was mine. Mine to climb, mine to claim. Back then, I was beholden to no one as I watched the sun set.
“Eyes on the plain,” the regiment commander said.
How could he even tell which way my eyes were cast? That familiar old sting of defiance rose in me; I couldn’t help myself. “But they won’t come from the plains, Regiment Commander. They’ll come from the trees.”
A snicker sounded from my right. Theo, always eager to witness trouble.
The regiment commander’s voice came again, now deep with gravel. “Can you see the trees by night, Waters?”
“No, Regiment Commander.”
“You’ll see neither plains nor trees with your eyes on the commander’s tower,” Theo’s voice rang out.
I shot him a lethal glance over my shoulder. He stood straighter than I’d ever seen him over at the next battlement, red hair blazing in the slant light. His guard’s pin—three interlocking circles—glinted on his breast. “And what of your eyes?”
“Shut up, greenhorns.” The regiment commander’s voice was loud enough that we could hear him up and down the walkway atop the southernmost wall.
“Eurydice Waters, though she’s chewy as an unripe grapefruit, is right.
Regiment, you know your work: eyes on the plains, if you want to keep your people alive. ”
I’d never even tasted a grapefruit.
Chewy. Unripe. And yet it was us greenhorns assigned to the watchposts.
How did the people of our kingdom sleep gently in their beds knowing their lives were under Theo’s care?
And I a woman, no less—meant for baking bread, for milling wheat, never for guarding.
Yet I’d persisted, so they’d trained me for three months to stand here.
If anything ever emerged from those trees, we were fucked.
When I turned back to the evergreens, the sun had fallen. Only the pink pastel sky remained, the grayness of dusk sliding over our heads toward it.
Gone.
I shifted in my leathers. Within minutes the night winds had come, the air cooling as though the goddess Caelara breathed over us.
The only light came from within and atop our walls, as the torchbearer came around to illuminate each battlement’s torch.
Soon, firelight flared beside me and for as far along the wall as I could see.
Beyond that, darkness. An ink so deep and full the trees might have been enveloped in a pot of black paint.
Now it was only to wait for them, should they ever decide to return.
Whole religions had spawned around the hope that they would not.
Sometimes, awoken by a noise as a child and clutching my blanket, I had seen fit to pray to two or three deities.
Arxius, the wallfather. Vaelen, the bleeding sky.
Caelara, the nightmother. None had answered.
Or maybe they had, which was why I stood here tonight.
The trembling of my knees was because of the wind, that was all.
I wasn’t used to standing up here, unmoving for hours.
When the sun set, that was when I used to creep back down the circular stone steps toward the safety within the walls.
I would walk and run and jog and peek into alleys on my way back home, thinking all the while of the marvelous guard standing on the wall.
They had seemed so large, so unyielding, like statues against the night. Perhaps more so because no one had ever called me anything except “small” or “fragile”—the two worst traits you could possess in our kingdom.
Anything but small and fragile. Anything.
You could be ground down under “small” and “fragile.” You could be riven to dust before you were old enough to be useful. I hated those two words; I would dig each of their graves and bury them under six feet of fresh dirt, if I could.
Maybe that was why I’d forced my way into the guard—that a child might see me standing here in my leathers, with my bow and quiver and scabbard, and think me something other than small and fragile.
Or maybe so that the child I had been might think so.
I straightened. The regiment commander had come down from the tower and begun his patrol along the wall, boots tapping behind me with his second-in-command alongside. Within a minute they were past me, and I was left to my post.
I stared into the blackness below. I stared and stared until my vision swam with spots and my hearing became attuned to the smallest of sounds—the crackle of torchfire, the occasional shifting of leathers and metal.
Eyes on the plains.
But in the darkness, the plains were as invisible to me as everything else.
Two hours in, Theo said from my right, his voice low, “You don’t have to stand the whole night, Waters.”
I glanced his way; down the wall he was seated with his legs dangling off the edge. His orange hair was restless in the firelight, flaring and dimming as though it too were made of flames.
“Fuck off, Theo.” I shifted my weight onto my less achy foot. “Eyes on the plains, right?”
“Don’t tell me you’ve been holding that bitterness for the past hour. It’s not healthy, you know. Just swallow.”
My mouth twisted. “I’m sure you can teach me all about swallowing. And I’m not bitter.”
“I’ve known you since you shat your swaddling every day, and I can see the quirk of your mouth from here.”
I forced my lips flat. What did Theo know? I angled my face away, toward a different part of the plains.
He let out a soft chuckle, carried to me on the air. “You and I both know you can’t see a damned thing out there, no matter which way you turn your flaxen head.”
I didn’t respond.
“Come on, Eurydice,” Theo said. “That was hardly a hazing. Here’s your real hazing: ‘I’m just like you, but I am not you. What am I?’”
Another of Theo’s riddles. I took on a prim stance, eyes still elsewhere, and ignored it. I’d never solve them before he told me the answer. “Hazing’s illegal in the guard.”
He chuffed. “So’s sneaking up to the wall when you’re not even in the guard.”
I sighed, and it was a relief to turn my eyes on him. Finally, something material to study—the freckled face of the only boy who didn’t hate me for how small I was. And now here I was, bedecked and standing taller than him.
My gaze must have been imperious, because he revealed his crooked smile. “Nobody stands all night.”
“Surely the regiment commander will come through later.”
“Surely,” Theo said. “And when he does, we whistle.” At that, he pressed his lips together and let out a soft three-note sound.
My mouth twisted again. “And he hasn’t caught on to that?”
“We stay ahead of him down the line. The wind takes it.”
“And how long has this been a thing?”
He shrugged. “I was told about it my first night. Not like this is an honor post, Eury.”
After those three months of training, all the grueling mornings and hours in the yard and that graduation ceremony where we were told the importance of our work as guard, and this was what it came to.
My first night, and I was invited to sit on my ass and dangle my legs off the wall.
“I don’t care what kind of post it is,” I said, facing forward. My hands went to the small of my back, clasping there in the position of attention. “You do as you like, Theo.”
“Well, gods spare your legs. It’s all pomp, anyway,” he said. “We’ve got no vision past the backs of our outstretched hands. What are we going to see?”
He was right. But that didn’t mean I had to answer.
“Nothing,” he went on. “We’ll see nothing, and that’s all the kingdom wants. They want their walls, their vigilant guard, and their torchlight. Keeps them sleeping well.”
I snorted. “It’s been a good first year for you in the ranks, has it?”
“You get used to a numb ass.” He let out a one-note laugh. “And sometimes one of the boys sneaks around a flask.”
The boys. Yes, that was right: every one of the guard to my left and right was a boy between the ages of seventeen and twenty-one. Girls didn’t join the guard; at least, not in the past twenty years. Not unless you were weighted down by need.
Everyone knew I had something to prove. I could protect this kingdom—the land of acid storms; the last bastion of humans—as well as any boy.
Better, even. Boys were born into the expectation of strength, of power.
They were gifted it before they even knew what a gift was—the promise of it, at least.
And girls…
Girls had to stand all night if they wanted to prove anything at all. They could never sit, not for a moment.
So, in the silence that fell, I stood for two more hours.
“You’re really going to stand all night?” Theo called out after the fourth hour. “It must get uncomfortable jutting your chin out so far.”