Chapter 1 – The Arrival
The carriage rattled over the last span of cobbles and onto the academy's drawbridge, iron chains groaning like a warning. I leaned my palm against the door and counted the beats of my pulse, not to calm it but to memorize it. First entry. First tell.
I wasn't a girl arriving at lessons. At twenty-five, I'd already outlived the border's expectations for what a woman should want. This was not school. This was a crucible—post-collegium, post-comfort—where the Empire filed its edges on people and sent the sharpest to war.
The walls rose in layered angles that pleased me: watchtowers staggered for overlapping sight lines; narrow walkways that forced bodies into single file; arrow slits that doubled as listening vents if you knew how stone carried sound. Even the shadows were arranged. The place was built like a lie that wanted to be told properly.
Inside the gate, cadets moved in precise currents across the parade ground—men and women my age, faces already set by choice rather than youth. No one gawped. People assessed. Some tallied names quietly, others sparred with their eyes. My kind of room.
"First time?" a voice said, close enough to test my flinch.
I turned. He stood with the posture of someone who had no need to announce himself: broad-shouldered, uniform fitted without vanity, hands easy but never idle. Dark hair. Scar along the knuckle, poorly healed—self-stitched or field-stitched. His gaze held me the way a hunter holds stillness: hazel irises flecked with gold that caught the light like filings. They did not wander; they categorized.
"First time," I said.
He nodded once and looked away without dismissing me, which was a rarer courtesy than most people know. The weight of him lingered a moment—the sense of being read rather than seen—then released.
The grand hall swallowed noise. Vaulted stone arched overhead, its carvings more map than ornament: campaigns traced in relief, rivers I could follow with a fingertip, mountain ranges I recognized from border winters. Torches hissed in sconces, the heat just enough to blur edges. If you spoke, your words would climb and return a heartbeat late. It would be a good place to test for lies.
General Marov stood at the dais with the unstudied authority of a man who'd survived more than ceremony. Ranks of officers flanked him—captains and lieutenants whose uniforms read like dossiers: scuffed boots, mended seams, one woman with an old burn trailing up her collar. Active service, not instructors playing soldiers.
"Welcome to the Academy," Marov said. His voice carried cleanly, the hall returning it without distortion. "You are here because you've proven yourselves useful to the Empire. You will learn to be indispensable."
A current moved through us, subtle but real. Even the arrogant held still.
"You will train together," he continued, "in the disciplines all soldiers share: endurance, combat, survival, fieldcraft. You will also be assigned to specialty tracks. Combat. Strategy. Alchemy. Espionage. Politics." A beat. "Others exist. Some are not listed."
That last line made something bright spark low in my chest. Espionage had always been a word that fit in my mouth too well.
He let the silence work. "Every year, one cadet is selected as the Mole—embedded among you. Their orders are to sow doubt, misdirect inquiry, and avoid exposure. Every two weeks, you will vote on one of your peers for interrogation. If the Mole is revealed, the cadet who exposes them earns an immediate active-duty commission. If the Mole survives the year, they do."
No one laughed. This was an academy that didn't pretend its games were safe.
Whispers uncoiled behind me, the kind people think are quiet when they're loud with intention.
"They choose the Mole years in advance—files thick as a ledger."
"I heard last year's almost slipped. 'Expelled' is a generous word."
"The Duke's son is in this intake, did you hear? They'll never let him fail."
"Someone from the fallen nation, too. Saw him at the gate."
I did not turn to see who said what. I watched the officers. The smallest tells live in those who already know the answers.
Dismissal came like the snap of a blade back into its sheath. Cadets flowed out toward posted rosters, the human tide breaking against boards where names were inked in tight, official hands.
BARRACKS ASSIGNMENTS.
DAILY REGIMEN.
SPECIALTY ORIENTATION—WEEK ONE.
My name sat in Barracks Twelve, third column, neatly caged between two strangers I would know by midnight. Specialty orientation blank for now, to be assessed after baseline tests. Of course it was. You don't let people choose which masks they'll wear before you've measured their faces.
The hazel-eyed cadet reappeared at the next board over, his attention cutting through names without lingering. Even at rest, he moved like a tracked thing—quiet where others sought to be silent. When two men at his shoulder traded a look—fallen nation?—his expression didn't shift. Discipline like that isn't born; it's rebuilt.
A different voice brushed past my ear, all easy charm sharpened at the edges. "They say the Duke's son talks his way out of drills. Or into worse ones." Laughter in the group, the kind that needs a crowd to exist. "Cassian, if the name rings."
It did, from a dozen border papers and one dull embassy dinner where I poured wine and learned more than the guest list intended. A duke's heir in our intake meant politics braided through our training whether the notice boards admitted it or not.
By late afternoon, the baseline tests began. The whole cohort ran as one—no specialties yet. We sprinted, climbed, leapt, crawled, fired, bled. On the sparring floor, I kept my face still and my weight forward, which made me look brave and kept me alive.
Across the mat, the hazel-eyed cadet dismantled someone with economy and care, like folding a blade into a sheath without cutting either. He spoke to his opponent after, not much. I couldn't hear the words, but I saw the effect—shoulders unbunched, chin up, the kind of correction you remember because someone wanted you to survive. My curiosity sharpened into a needle and threaded through that.
By night, Barracks Twelve had claimed me. Twenty cots in a stone room. Twenty strangers who were now my world. Privacy was gone. Observation was survival.
The game had begun. And I could not wait to know it.