Bound to the Fallen King

Chapter 3: First Trial

Dawn at Ashveil did not arrive gently.

A bell tore through the dormitory wing before the sky had fully lightened, and I was on my feet and dressed before I'd finished deciding to be. Around me, doors opened and closed in a ragged chorus, sleep-thick voices asking each other what the bell meant, though Junie's warning from the night before had already told me. Trials start at dawn. No one had thought to mention they would start quite this early.

The training yard, when I reached it, was already half full, first years clustered in loose, uncertain knots against the cold, breath fogging in the grey half-light. Frost silvered the stone underfoot. Somewhere beyond the yard's high walls, the mountains were just beginning to catch the first color of morning, indifferent to whatever was about to happen to the dozens of us shivering below them.

Instructor Reyes appeared at the yard's far end without any of the ceremony that had marked her courtyard speech. She simply arrived, flanked by two others I didn't recognize, and let the silence do the work of gathering our attention.

"Today is not a test of skill," she said. "You have none yet worth testing. Today is a test of instinct: whether you know how to move when something moves against you, before your training tells you how." She gestured, and one of the instructors beside her produced a length of chain, ordinary-looking, until she saw me notice the faint etching along its links and understood, with a small cold drop in my stomach, that it wasn't ordinary at all. "You will each be paired. One partner restrained, one partner tasked with freeing them before the chain's binding takes hold fully. You have less time than you think."

The pairing was assigned, not chosen, called out from a list in Reyes's flat, unhurried voice. I listened for my name with the particular tension of someone bracing for bad news, and when it came, it was worse than I'd braced for.

"Marchetti. Thorne."

I did not know the name yet, had no reason to attach it to anyone in the crowd, until the dark-haired stranger from the dining hall stepped forward from the knot of first years near the wall, unhurried, exactly as he had been unhurried in every other moment I'd seen him in. He didn't look surprised to be paired with me. I told myself that meant nothing, the same way I'd told myself the dining hall meant nothing, and found, standing three feet away from him for the first time, that I believed it a good deal less than before.

"Thorne," he said, by way of introduction, when Reyes moved on to the next pair. His voice was quieter than I expected, low and even, without the nervous edge most of the courtyard still carried. "I'll take the chain first, if you'd rather watch how it's done."

"I don't need to watch," I said it sharper than I meant to, and something that might have been amusement crossed his face before it smoothed away again.

"Suit yourself."

The instructor bound my wrists before I could decide whether I regretted my own stubbornness. The chain was colder than any metal had a right to be, and the moment it closed around me I felt it a faint pull, not physical, exactly, more like the sensation of a held breath, some old and patient magic testing the edges of my will to see how long before I stopped fighting it. Reyes's warning made abrupt, uncomfortable sense. Less time than you think.

Thorne knelt in front of me, unhurried even now, and studied the chain's etching with an attention that seemed almost too careful for a first year who, by rights, should have known no more about binding-work than I did.

"You've done this before," I said, before I could stop myself.

"Everyone's done something before they come here." He didn't look up. His fingers found the chain's clasp with an ease that struck me, again, as wrong in some small way I couldn't name- clumsy, not hesitant, nothing like the fumbling I could hear from the pairs around us. "Doesn't mean any of it was this."

The chain's pull sharpened while he worked, a slow cold spreading up from my wrists, and I understood, with the particular clarity of real fear, that Reyes had not exaggerated. I felt something in me reaching for stillness, for surrender, some old current the binding wanted me to follow, and I set my jaw and refused it out of pure stubbornness rather than any technique I actually possessed.

"Hold on," Thorne said, low, not quite a question. His eyes flicked up to mine, dark, steady, and for one unguarded second, something in them that looked almost like concern, gone before I could be certain I hadn't imagined it. "Almost."

The clasp gave a moment later, the chain's cold pull breaking all at once, and I staggered half a step before catching myself, breath coming faster than the effort should have warranted. Around the yard, other pairs were still struggling; one boy had gone entirely still, eyes glassy, his partner shaking him with rising panic until an instructor intervened. I understood, watching it, exactly how close I'd come to the same stillness.

"You're fast," I said when I trusted my voice again.

"You're stubborn." Thorne rose, brushing frost from his knees with an unbothered economy that made the whole ordeal look, in retrospect, almost easy. "It helped. Most people fight the pull with their body. You fought it with something else."

"Spite, mostly."

Something like a real smile crossed his face then brief, unpolished in a way his earlier calm hadn't been, gone almost as soon as it appeared. "Spite works."

We traded places for the second half of the trial, and I found, freeing him from the chain in turn, that his stillness under the binding was different from mine: no visible struggle at all, no flicker of fear crossing his face, as though the chain's cold pull found nothing in him it particularly wanted to take hold of. I told myself it meant nothing. I was becoming, I noticed with some discomfort, rather practiced at telling myself that.

By the time Reyes called the trial to its close, the sun had fully cleared the mountains, and half the yard stood shivering with the particular exhaustion of people who had just learned, in the space of an hour, exactly how much they didn't yet know.

Thorne fell into step beside me as the yard dispersed toward breakfast, unhurried as ever, and said nothing further, but I was aware of him beside me the entire walk back, in a way I could not yet name and did not, if I was honest with myself, especially want to try.