[ Marten ]
Hallam read the names at the end of morning drill.
This was unusual. Hallam didn't use names during drill — during drill we were "recruit" or "you" or, in Torvald's case, "the tall disaster in the back row." Names came after. In debriefs. In corrections. In the specific, private moments when Hallam stopped being a force of nature and became a person who remembered what you were called.
Names from a document meant orders from above.
"Torvald."
He straightened. The permanent slouch that lived in his spine like a tenant who refused to leave was temporarily evicted by the sound of his own name in Hallam's voice. I could see him trying to remember if he'd done anything wrong in the last forty-eight hours. The mental search was visibly extensive.
"Dek."
Dek's jaw tightened. The eastern boy didn't process surprise outwardly — he processed it through stillness, the way his grandmother had apparently processed bears through spoons. Everything went inward. The reaction would come later, sharp and precise and probably involving a comparison to livestock.
"Kess."
Nothing moved on Kess's face. The sun could explode and Kess would note it with mild interest before returning to whatever she was doing. She stood the way she always stood — balanced, still, watching Hallam with the focused attention of a person for whom every sentence was data.
"Marten."
My stomach dropped. Not from fear — from the specific, electric jolt that came from hearing your name pulled from a list whose purpose you didn't know. The feeling lived somewhere between excitement and the urgent need to review your recent behaviour for punishable offences.
"You four," Hallam said, folding the document with the crisp finality of a woman closing a chapter, "have been assigned to a rotation patrol in Alden's Cross. One week. You'll be attached to the local garrison under Commander Bryce. You leave tomorrow at dawn."
Silence. The training yard kind — fourteen recruits processing the same information at different speeds. The ten who hadn't been named were already calculating what this meant for their own trajectories. The four who had been named were calculating what it meant for their lives.
"Instructor." Torvald's hand went up. It always went up. The hand was a reflex — Torvald's body volunteered questions before his brain had finished deciding whether the question was wise. "What exactly is Alden's Cross?"
"A trade town. Two days' ride east. Sits at the junction of the southern trade road and the river route to the coast. Population roughly eight thousand. It has a governor, a city garrison, a market, and all the complications that come with humans living in close proximity and disagreeing about money."
"And we're going because…?"
"Because you've spent eight months inside these walls and the only civilians you've interacted with are the supply wagon drivers, who don't count because half of them are asleep. Field experience. Real streets, real people, real problems that aren't solved by running laps."
She looked at us. The four of us, standing in a row that was almost straight — almost, because Torvald's relationship with straight lines was adversarial.
"This is not a holiday," she said. "You will represent the Southern Shield. You will follow Commander Bryce's orders. You will observe, assist, and learn. You will not embarrass me."
She paused. The pause was the threat. Hallam didn't need to describe consequences. The pause did it for her — the empty space where the punishment would go, left blank so your imagination could fill it with something worse than anything she'd actually do.
"Understood?"
"Yes, Instructor."
"Pack light. Travel gear, weapons, standard kit. Stables at fifth bell tomorrow. Dismissed."
She walked away. The yard exhaled.
Torvald turned to me with the expression of a boy who had just been told that Christmas was real and happening tomorrow and also involved horses.
"A city, Marten. An actual city. With buildings. And food. And people who aren't covered in sand."
"We're covered in sand."
"EXACTLY. And for one week, we won't be. Do you understand the magnitude of this? I haven't seen a building with a second floor in eight months. I've forgotten what stairs look like. I'm going to walk up stairs and cry."
"You cry about everything."
"I cry about MEANINGFUL things. Stairs are meaningful. Stairs represent vertical progress. The desert is flat. My life has been flat. I need STAIRS, Marten."
Dek appeared beside us. "If you two are finished having a moment about architecture, we should probably pack."
"Dek, we're going to a CITY—"
"I heard. I was standing right there. I have the same ears I've always had. They work fine. Pack."
Kess was already gone. Halfway to the barracks, moving with the efficient purpose of a person who had received an instruction and was executing it while the rest of us were still having feelings about it. That was Kess. Action first. Feelings were for people who had time.
I didn't follow immediately. I stood in the yard for a moment — the familiar yard, the sand I knew, the posts I'd struck and the ground I'd fallen on and the wall Hallam watched from — and I felt the specific, complicated pull of leaving a place you hadn't realised had become home until someone told you to leave it.
Then I went to the stable.
Kael was inside. Afternoon brushing. Asha's left side. The rhythm that had become ours — two brushes, one horse, the silence that said more than talking.
He looked up when I came in. Read my face. Kael read faces the way some people read books — fluently, automatically, understanding the content before the words were finished.
"Assignment?" he said.
"Alden's Cross. Week-long rotation patrol. Me, Torvald, Dek, Kess."
He nodded. The nod was slow. Deliberate. The nod of a man placing a stone on a scale and watching the balance shift.
"First time outside the walls," he said. Not a question.
"Yeah."
He kept brushing. Asha stood between us, tolerating our conversation with the regal indifference of an animal who believed human communication was an inefficient use of time that could be better spent on brushing.
"Alden's Cross is a trade town," Kael said. "River junction. Three minor noble houses run the local economy. The garrison there is small — forty soldiers, maybe. They report to the regional governor."
"How do you know all that?"
"Commander Aldren briefs me on regional geography. Part of my—" He stopped. The word he didn't say was "training." The training that the Emperor had assigned. The preparation for whatever role the empire intended for the bastard prince. "Part of what I do here."
I waited. Kael had more to say — I could see it in the way his brush slowed, the way his shoulders shifted, the weight of words being assembled behind the wall before being released through the window.
"Watch the nobles," he said. "In Eden, the Twenty-One Houses operate above everyone. In small towns, it's worse. Small nobles have small power and small power makes people small. They push because nobody pushes back."
"Fenn — one of Bryce's soldiers — Callum mentioned her. She handles the noble complaints."
"Then stay close to Fenn. She'll teach you things Hallam can't."
"Like what?"
"Like the difference between how the empire is supposed to work and how it actually works. Hallam teaches you to fight. Fenn will teach you why fighting isn't always the answer and why the system exists and why the system sometimes fails and what happens when it doesn't."
He looked at me. Full attention. The wall had a window and the window was open and through it I could see something that Kael rarely showed — concern. Not the controlled, managed, filed-away concern that he wore like armour. Real concern. The kind that a person felt for another person they cared about who was about to go somewhere they couldn't follow.
"Be careful," he said.
"I will."
"And Marten."
"Yeah?"
"Come back with stories. Dren is running out of material and I can't listen to the honey merchant saga again."
I grinned. He almost smiled. Asha exhaled impatiently. The stable was warm and the light was golden and tomorrow I was leaving and tonight this was enough.
"I'll bring you something from the market," I said.
"Don't. Bring stories. Stories are lighter than souvenirs and they don't go bad in the heat."
I left the stable. The garrison was buzzing — word had spread, the way word always spread in a compound of sixty people who had nothing to gossip about except each other. Recruits were asking questions. Soldiers were offering advice. Dren, somewhere in the mess hall, was loudly volunteering to take my place because "the boy needs supervision and I need a holiday and both of these problems have the same solution."
I packed. Light, like Hallam said. Travel gear, practice sword, standard kit. My bedroll. My boots — the ones that had tried to kill me and that I'd defeated and that were now the most reliable relationship in my life.
I lay on my cot that night. The barracks was dark. Torvald was already asleep — the man fell unconscious like a stone dropped in water, one moment vertical and talking, the next horizontal and drooling. Dek was quiet. Kess was quiet in the specific way that suggested she wasn't asleep but wasn't interested in conversation.
Tomorrow I would ride east. Away from the sand. Away from the stable and the posts and the table and the misfits. Into a town I'd never seen, with people I'd never met, to learn things that couldn't be taught inside walls.
I was twelve. I was pending. And the world was about to show me something new.
I closed my eyes.
The desert was quiet.
For now.