[ Marten ]
Torvald was drooling again.
A thin, glistening bridge of spit connected his lower lip to the pillow, catching the first grey light through the barracks window. It swayed gently with each breath — a small, disgusting miracle of fluid dynamics that I had been observing for approximately thirty seconds with the focused attention of a boy who was already awake and had nothing better to do.
This was the most reliable event at the Southern Shield. More reliable than the bells. More reliable than the bread. More reliable than Dek's daily complaint about the sand or Kess's daily silence or the daily, grinding, beautiful reality of waking up in a desert garrison three months from home and choosing — again, always again — to stay.
I threw my boot. It hit Torvald's shoulder.
The bridge snapped. He jerked upright, eyes wild, hair vertical. "SPIDER—"
"Raisin," Dek called from the far cot, face in his pillow. "It's always a raisin."
"You don't KNOW—"
"It's been a raisin fourteen times, Torvald. Fourteen. I'm keeping count. When we reach twenty, I'm writing a report."
"A report to WHO?"
"To Hallam. Requesting you be transferred to a barracks that accommodates your fruit-based night terrors. I'm sure there's a facility. Somewhere with padded walls and no dried goods within arm's reach."
The barracks erupted. Fourteen recruits in various stages of consciousness, laughing at a joke they'd heard a version of every week for eight months and that was still funny because the funny wasn't in the joke — it was in Torvald's face, which cycled through indignation, confusion, and grudging acceptance with the speed of a man who knew he'd lost but hadn't decided to stop fighting.
I swung my legs off the cot. Stone floor. Cold. The one mercy of desert mornings before the sun remembered it hated us.
Eight months. I'd been here eight months.
Before this — before the garrison, before the desert, before the three-month journey that had disassembled my understanding of the world and rebuilt it at a larger scale — I was a farrier's son. Aldric Tonn's kid. The boy who swept the garrison stables in Eden and knew every horse by name and temperament and could tell you, from the sound of a hoof on stone, whether the shoe was seated right.
That was the whole story. Father, stable, horses, bread. A life measured in hammered iron and mucked stalls, bounded on all sides by walls I didn't know were walls because I'd never stood far enough back to see their edges.
Then a prince walked into the stable. Eight years old. Wearing silk. Looking at me like I was a person.
That doesn't sound like much. A kid walks into a stable — so what? But you have to understand what Eden was. Eden was layers. Castle above, city below, and between them a distance that wasn't measured in stone but in assumption. The people above assumed the people below were functions. The people below assumed the people above were untouchable. And between those assumptions, a stable boy and a prince had no reason to share bread.
Edrin didn't know about the assumptions. He was eight. He walked in, saw a boy, and said "what are you doing?" — not with the curiosity of a prince inspecting a subject but with the genuine interest of a kid who wanted to know. And when I told him I was mucking stalls, he said "can I help?" and I said "you'll ruin your shirt" and he said "so?"
So.
That word. That stupid, simple, world-ending word. As if the shirt didn't matter. As if the silk and the crest and the name and the five hundred years of bloodline that separated us were less important than the fact that there was work to do and he wanted to be part of it.
He helped. He was terrible at it. He held the shovel wrong and got manure on his boots and laughed about it — laughed, genuinely, the way kids laugh when they're doing something new and bad at it and don't care because the doing is the point.
I had never heard a prince laugh like that. I had never heard anyone from above laugh like that. The laughter cracked something open in me — not painfully, not dramatically. Quietly. The way dawn cracks the sky. One moment it was dark, and then it wasn't, and the light showed me things that had been there all along but that I couldn't see until someone turned them on.
He came back the next day. And the next. And for two years, three times a week, the youngest prince of the Nimorlin Empire sat on hay bales and ate my bread and told me about the carnival and the puppet shows and the fire-eaters, and I told him about horses and the lower city and the way my father's hammer sounded in the morning, and neither of us understood that what we were building was the most dangerous thing in the empire.
A friendship between equals. In a world that didn't believe equals existed.
Then he left. The carriage, the gate, the bread wrapped in cloth, the "I'll miss you" that a prince wasn't supposed to say. And the stables were wrong after that — same horses, same hay, same hammer in the morning. But the light that Edrin had turned on didn't turn off when he left. It stayed. And in that light, I could see the walls. And once you saw the walls, you couldn't unsee them.
The recruitment poster was on the garrison board. SOUTHERN SHIELD. OPEN TO CITIZENS. AGE 12 AND ABOVE. I had walked past it a thousand times. Before Edrin, it was a poster. After Edrin, it was a door.
Why not?
I walked through it.
That was eight months ago. I was still walking. The drunk chicken was sobering up, the footwork was getting real, and the boy who had swept stables in Eden was becoming something that the empire didn't have a word for because the empire's vocabulary had been written by people who never expected someone like me to need a word.
"Marten." Dek, at the barracks door. "Mess hall. Now. If I have to listen to Torvald explain spider-raisins for one more minute, I'm going to commit a crime."
"Coming."
I pulled on my boots. Laced them tight. My father's way — even, checked, precise. The way you tied your boots said something about the way you lived your life.
Mine said: I'm still here. I'm still walking. And I'm not done yet.