Bound to the Fallen King

The gates of Ashveil did not open for the weak. I stood before them anyway, my trunk in one hand and my mother's blade strapped to my hip, and told myself I had every right to be here. The iron gates rose three times my height, black and ancient, wrought with sigils that pulsed faintly gold when a hunter's blood-marked hand pressed against them. Mine was not yet marked. Not yet blooded. But it would be. Behind me, the carriage that had carried me up the mountain road was already turning back toward the village, wheels grinding against wet stone, and I did not watch it go. I had learned, this past year, not to watch things leave. "First years wait in the courtyard," a voice said, flat and bored, from somewhere above the gate. A boy no, a young man, maybe my age, maybe older; it was hard to tell in the torchlight leaned against the stone archway with his arms crossed, watching the trickle of new arrivals with the particular exhaustion of someone who'd done this before. "Don't wander. The wards don't distinguish between trespassers and idiots." I didn't answer him. I had not come to Ashveil to make friends with hunters who thought themselves clever. I had come because this academy, more than any other in Veyrath, trained its students to kill what had killed Tomas. The name still cut going down, even silently. Even now. The courtyard was already filling when I crossed into it, dozens of hopefuls in traveling cloaks, clutching weapons that ranged from ceremonial to genuinely dangerous, all of us pretending not to size each other up. Ashveil took perhaps one in five who applied. I did not intend to be counted among the four who left. I found a space near the old fountain, dry and cracked, its statue of some long-dead hunter worn featureless by centuries of rain, and set my trunk down. Around me, conversation rose and fell: nervous laughter, someone reciting the Ashveil oath under their breath like a prayer, a girl near me crying quietly and trying to hide it. I understood the crying better than the laughter. I simply didn't have any tears left to spend on a courtyard full of strangers. That was when I saw him. He was not doing anything remarkable. That was, perhaps, the first thing that struck me as strange, though I couldn't have said why at the time. He stood alone near the far wall, dark-haired, dressed plainly enough to blend into the crowd of new students, and yet something about the stillness of him made my eyes catch and hold in a way the others hadn't. He wasn't nervous. He wasn't performing bravado to cover nerves, either, the way half the courtyard was. He simply stood, watching the gates the way I imagine a man watches a door he has walked through many times before. He looked back at me before I could look away. His eyes were dark, so dark they read as black in the courtyard's grey light, and for a single, unsettled second, I had the absurd impression that he already knew who I was. Then he looked away, unhurried, as if I had been no more interesting than the fountain, and the moment broke. Ridiculous, I told myself. Grief made a person see meaning in everything. I had learned that lesson too, this past year, how easy it became to find omens in strangers' faces when you were searching hard enough for a reason the world still made sense. A bell tolled from somewhere within the castle, deep and resonant, and the courtyard's chatter dropped away as an instructor emerged from the great doors, a tall woman in the grey and black of the Order, a scar bisecting one eyebrow, her expression giving away nothing. "You are here," she said, without preamble, "because you believe you have what it takes to stand against what hunts in the dark. Most of you are wrong." No one laughed. I didn't either, though a year ago, the old version of myself might have found that funny. "The Order of Ashveil does not train soldiers. It trains hunters, and there is a difference. A soldier fights because he is ordered to. A hunter fights because something out there took something from him, and he has decided the debt will be paid." Her gaze swept the courtyard, and for one unbearable moment, I was certain it landed on me and stayed. "If you are here for glory, leave now. If you are here for revenge—" she paused, and something almost like sympathy crossed her scarred face, "—know that revenge alone has broken better hunters than you." I kept my chin level and my hands steady at my sides, and I did not leave. Beside the far wall, the dark-haired stranger hadn't moved either, though I caught, at the very edge of my vision, the ghost of something crossing his face at the instructor's words not fear, not the grim resolve worn by half the courtyard. Something closer to recognition. As though revenge were a language he understood better than most. I filed the thought away and didn't examine it further. I had not come to Ashveil to wonder about strange boys with unreadable faces. I had come to become the kind of hunter who could put a blade through the heart of a demon and not miss. The instructor turned toward the doors. "Follow me. Your trials begin at dawn." I picked up my trunk and followed, and I did not look back at the wall where he'd been standing, though some small, unguarded part of me noted, with an unease I couldn't name, that when I finally did glance back at the gate, he was already gone.