Chapter 2
CHAPTER TWO
I came down the 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 drunkenness was 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?”
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 never make 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 see all 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.”
Irritation warred with eagerness. “It was in the trees. A… creature.”
The towel stilled; he let it drop around his neck. “Do go on. I’m dying to hear more about this creature.”
“It was bipedal,” I said. “I couldn’t make it out—it was in shadow, but it walked on two legs. And…”
His sparse eyebrows rose, glinting in the early sun. “Yes?”
“It moved faster than a human.”
“Imagine that.” His arms folded, slabs of decades’-old muscle pressing against his loose skin. “And was this creature of shadow so remarkable that your sighting of it outweighs breaking the line?”
Surprise and confusion broke in. “The line, Commander?”
His eyes lifted to the night guard running laps, their footfalls in the dirt sounding not ten feet behind us. Their heavy breaths neared and then evaporated as they passed by. “The line’s not been broken in twenty years. I was there the night it began.”
The commander pressed his lips together until they turned white. With a movement of his Adam’s apple, he let out a three-note trill, a perfect approximation of a night bird.
It was exactly the noise Theo had made for me last night, which I had heard echoed around the wall. Except the commander’s whistle was more confident, almost beautiful in its depth.
It was a whistle he had practiced a thousand times.
I stared at the regiment commander. He bore a soft, far-eyed look, like the part of him that lived inside his body wasn’t here at all. Then those eyes sharpened on me. “Until you, of course.”
I hardly knew what to say. This was beside the point. Ridiculous. “Commander, I’m trying to tell you—”
His gaze shut my mouth. “I know what you’re trying to tell me. Do you know how humans stay sane, Waters?”
I sought for an answer. The right answer. Finally, I settled on there not being one. I shook my head.
His voice lowered, as though we were conspirators. “It’s not because we build a tall wall. It’s not because we guard it from creatures of shadow. They’ve not been seen in two generations. Do you know how long a generation is?”
I didn’t move. Didn’t take my eyes off his.
“No,” he said, “you don’t. And you won’t for some time, and by then perhaps you’ll understand what I’ve said to you on this day.”
He stepped closer. “Our sanity depends on one crucial thing. And it is not made of stone or steel.” His chin lowered, green eyes boring into mine. “It depends on each other.”
He was right—I didn’t understand. I didn’t understand why he cared more about a night bird’s call than a threat on the plains. But as he turned away from me, two things became clear:
The regiment commander would never believe me. And for him—for the guard running laps behind me—the true danger lay in the interruption of ritual. The three-note trill. The connection to one another, the trust.
I had broken that.
On her first night, Eurydice Waters had proven to him—to Theo, to the whole night guard—exactly why a woman should not stand on the wall.
“Run,” the regiment commander said. “You’re twelve laps behind.”