Third Month, Year 97, Sun Dynasty

  The young woman in the cell, by those of this land, would immediately be recognised by the manner of her dress as one of the Robinfolk— with a plain grey coif, drab brown-grey long sleeved dress and ochre-red apron, the colouring was a hallmark of the strange religious towns of the hills. With pale hair curled below the coif, pinned back in an attempt to keep the unruly curls hidden and pale eyes, the young woman is a strange thing even for the Robinfolk. A peculiar folk, their houses had been built in the borderlands three generations ago, land where no one would fight them for it and they could be left to their own devices.

  No people could remain so isolated for so long however— and the mountainous borderlands of the Northern Reaches were treacherous by summer, and doubly so by winter, and so it was trade these folk grew accustomed to. Severe faced, unhappy and quiet folk they proved, their women quieter still and devoted to marriages, to weaving, to needlework, to the birthing of children, to the running of houses, and leaving the men to the right of the world. The path of the world, of learning, of books and writing and speaking was theirs, not to be disturbed.

  Illysa is starting to think she should have just kept her mouth shut, but she wouldn’t dare vindicate the first-wife. Not even, or perhaps, especially in the sanctity of her own mind.

  The stone floor of the cell is filthy and there is a groove in the middle that she traces her own steps along as she paces, a little black humour to balance out the utter shit-show this day had turned out to be. The first-wife would have a fit of hysterics at the amount of dirt here. The cobblestones, uneven and decades old, match depressingly well with the drab grey of her skirts as she paces.

  She turns, over and over, turning the day over and over in her mind like a lady at her needlework, trying to make sense of the tangle of threads. Except unlike Illysa, most young ladies had meticulous stitching and neat work, so the amusing comparison falls apart just as soon as it amuses her.

  Not that Illysa has any room to be amusing herself, in the dim gloom of the holding cell. She can hear the world outside, guards making rounds with squeaky leather and hobnail shoes, some through the tiny air grate and others from inside the hallway the holding cell connects to.

  Illysa should’ve kept her damn mouth shut, her hands to herself and her head well on her shoulders. Her mother has told her, time after time, with a voice harsh like caustic soap and hand heavy where it strikes at her ears, that her tongue carries her head off so far she’s likely to lose it and Illysa is starting to fear she was right. The thought is a dreadful one.

  It starts— she can hardly say it started so recently as she wants it to have, because Illysa is no good young Robinfolk woman and nor was she a good Robinfolk child. It starts, first, with her feet dragging and the first of her father’s wives watching her with shrewd, hard eyes. Sickly children did not live long, and Illysa at least outgrew childhood sickness- but it was a minor thing, compared to the greater sin of her wilful disdain of the laws of their world.

  Or, as Illysa likes to put it, wanting to read and refusing to marry.

  The latter is the true catalyst, she thinks, somewhat spitefully, for the circumstances she finds herself in now. That, and hunger that made a hungry bird snatch a piece of bread from the wrong man at the wrong time, three days from home and hungry, hungry like she had been when she hit her brother as a child and was denied her food for a day, but worse. She’s still hungry, the bread gone so quickly and there is nothing to eat here except her own sorrows, hunger gnawing at her belly.

  She paces the floor again, shoes scuffing the floor and not unlike a bird at the bars of its cage, trapped. She wonders if they’re looking for her. She wonders if they’ve given up. Both thoughts rankle, and she takes the moment to check for a familiar scrap of soft, silky fabric tied to the inner band of her apron. She’s checked a thousand times in this dank little cell, but she is relieved every time her fingers find it again, tracing over unseen but long-since memorised stitches. There, at the corner is the maril, the flower of love, a delicate bloom and thorny stem. Her fingers travel down, over the soft shapes of a flower for lovers, like a pair of lips ever parted for breath, waiting, fyril. She knows the shapes of the flowers by touch alone, rough against the silk. She will never speak to her mother, but she finds unspoken words in the works of her hands.

  The pattern, tracing the flowers her mother once made for a woman in a town far away, is a comforting one. It has gotten her through many long days, many hard nights, cold winters and breezy summers spent with her mother’s embroidery tucked against her skin. The comfort is hard to focus on when she realises, slowly and then all at once, that the guards have not passed outside in some time. They come by, without pause, a steady march of time she can predict and they have stopped. Illysa presses her ear to the door, hands slipping out from behind her apron to brace her against the wood, and strains to hear.

  She’s not rewarded with much more the quiet murmur of voices near the stairs they had dragged her down early in the morning, much too quiet for her to hear.

  The scrape of boots on the cobble she can hear, footsteps that move in her direction after a few moments and she skitters back from the door, away from the tiny barred grate in the wood, hands tight at her side as the sounds of the footsteps stop outside her door.

  She’s a robin. Nobody is here for her, except perhaps her father and her heart is starting to run wild.

  “This her?” a voice asks: male, gruff enough to be old, she thinks. But it’s not her father. It’s not a voice she recognises from home at all. That’s worse.

  Shit.

  “Yes, picked her up for theft,” the guard says, or so she assumes. It’s a woman. Something bright settles, deep in the gaps of her ribs with. A woman. A guard. She might know how to read. If Illysa wasn’t in a cell for theft, she might be even giddy with it. “The chit lucked out and tried to nab bread from old Greyver.” There’s a pause. “That’s the baker on south street, right bastard of a man.”

  The silence that follows stretches out far too long before the woman clears her throat awkwardly. “You said you had business with her, ser?” Illysa can hear the scepticism clear as day.

  “Yes,” the man says, short and clipped.

  Another pause, before Illysa assumes the woman shrugs it off and the sound of metal on metal fills the cell and she drags herself out of her daydream to step back from the door as it’s dragged open and the torchlight of the hallway reveals the guard is a woman, cropped hair and breeches and leather cuirass. She watches them from below her lashes, shrinking back because she’s occasionally thoughtless, not terminally stupid.

  The man is finer dressed, or at least, she thinks he is. A long cloak over sturdy leather armour, built light, beard short— he’s easily as old as her father. She can’t see his face all that well, the torchlight behind him but that doesn’t matter for long as he enters the cramped holding cell, confirming her guesses. He watches her, grey eyes narrowed and taking her in, like one does when choosing between which cow to sell for meat and which to sell for further use, assessing. He’s silent, and for once in her life, Illysa is too as he scans her.

  Illysa was a sickly babe, and it has left its mark, short and thin and hair pale, ill-suited for the heavy task of running her own home one day and a fact her mother once despaired over. It’s not like she had any skills or talents that made up for it. She wonders if that’s why it took so many summers for a marriage offer to even be offered in the first place.

  The man watches her for one more moment before he turns for the door, not addressing her. “Are you sure we’re in the right place?” he asks, something tired and long suffering in his voice. “The poor thing is skin and bones, and Robinfolk to boot.”

  She was right. There was another in the hallway, a woman she could barely even see with the torchlight, something almost like a trick of the light around her and she steps forward now, peering into the cell. Her nose turns up a little at the dirt, holding her skirts up from the floor. “We’re in the right place,” she says, light and the woman is beautiful, soft pale skin and dark hair and Illysa has never seen a noble before but she imagines this must be one, fine clothing and not a single sign of hard work on her. “I could see her all the way from Hightower, I don’t know why you doubt me so, Helmaer.”

  “Because you’ve led us past three towns so far that you swore you saw something in, my lady,” the older man drawls, something amused but equally annoyed in it.

  The woman waves a hand to the words like they’re just a fly to be swatted, ignoring him and refocusing on—

  Illysa, as she shifts awkwardly at being caught staring and entirely, utterly confused at what is going on.

  “Well now, I suppose you’re very confused,” the noble woman says, light and warm to her. There’s maybe the slightest softening of her mouth, a gentling of her manner. It makes Illysa’s own shoulders tense.

  “Yes, Lady,” she offers, unsure with it, voice still hoarse and dry, before she manages to wet her mouth again.

  “Well, never mind, all with be well,” she says, light with it and like there is nothing wrong with a noblewoman in a holding cell with a Robin recently turned thief. “Pay our guardswoman here, Helmaer, so we might be on our way with our new friend for a meal and a drink.”

  Helmaer grumbles, just for a moment, before he offers the sack of coin to the guardswoman and she pockets it, stepping back from them. The noblewoman smiles, stepping back out of the cramped cell once more. “Come on,” she says, warm.

  Illysa finds her feet rooted to the floor. Anger surges up in her chest, in a wave, something in this confusing buying freedom like her father drawing up the price for her hand, for her to start her new life running a house and married to the worst man her first-mother could find, to break her into this life and she has already run from being bought and sold once.

  Illysa will not do it twice.

  “Tell me what is going on,” she says, something uncertain in it but far more anger in it, confusion, standing her ground. “Not that I don’t mind the freedom, Lady, I do and you honour a Robin girl— but I’m a poor thief, and a bad one at that. I don’t know you, and you don’t know me.”

  Helmaer’s eyes are watching her with it, something flickering over his face. The noblewoman looks rather confused, for one long moment before something like clarity crosses over her face.

  “You are right,” she says, stepping out of the cell proper for her. “My manners had all but flown out with my excitement. I am Lady Mira, of the lower Blue Tower and this is Ser Helmaer, of the empire employ. My task is to seek out the worthy, and to deliver them a choice.” She pauses then, adjusting a sleeve. “I am aware that as a member of the Robinfolk, your— knowledge of our ways and the practices of our land may be… limited.”

  Illysa knows almost nothing but what she has gleaned from rare trips to the closest Nethkar town, knows her people exist on the borders of a great land, ruled by a great empire, tall tales of the town’s children of glowing horses and great winged lizards. Her agreement must show on her face, because Mira moves on quickly.

  “Every year, a choosing is called,” she says, steady and simple. “The empire enforces its borders, its military and its control over this land by taking in those who have skill, ability, talent or all three that might serve us well in the future. Most of those, you will come to find, will come from noble houses who pride themselves on their heirs and children entering into this great choosing and coming out on top, those born into an inheritance of magic, power.”

  She pauses, as if checking if Illysa is following along, seemingly taking her wide eyes as confirmation of it as she continues. “For the borderlands and further towns, there were assigned seekers, such as yours truly,” she says. “To find those with the most potential, with the potential for the Gift, to be given this chance as well.”

  Mira falls silent there, hands crossed over her front and long sleeves draped elegantly, waiting patiently.

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  Illysa spends the next few moments parsing through the given words, something deeply confused. “But you’re searching for someone with potential,” she says, quiet. “Are you looking for me to lead you somewhere, to someone?”

  Mira watches her, eyes just a shrewd as her companion’s for a long moment. The guardswoman, having been paid for her time, has sidled off at some point in the conversation. Illysa envies her.

  “You are being offered this choice, Illysa Eyriechild,” Mira says, clear and steady after a long moment. “You may use your freedom now to return home, to your impending marriage and you may do so without punishment from the empire. We will provision you, that you might make it safely and pay recompense to your family.”

  It rings in her ears, for a long moment and Illysa stares exactly how she should not, eyes wide as her hands clench on her apron front, smeared with dirt still. Mira continues onwards.

  “If you choose to accept, you will accompany us and those we offer this choice to back to the capital,” she says, blue eyes watching her. “You will have a great many chances, if you succeed. You will owe military service, for a period of seven years but you will be fed, clothed, housed and taught at the expense of the empire, so that you might serve her best as you can. You will own your own self when you are finished, and if you serve well, there are many pathways forward, to noble marriages, to being gifted land. It will be in no way easy.”

  She cannot think as Mira finishes, hands folded still and the woman watches her. Illysa can barely hear over her own heartbeat, thudding behind her ribs and it’s just as well the woman has finished talking. She doubts she would hear her properly.

  A future, land and never being married, never being trapped again, the world around her laid out like the map in her father’s study, no limits to where she might go, for the price of fighting and succeeding. Illysa has never been able to keep her mouth shut or her head on her shoulders when her tongue leads, but a future sits before her. It feels like a dream. She wonders if she’s truly somewhere in a ditch, waiting to wake up with a nasty headache.

  “Will I learn how to read?” she asks, the words not the ones she means to say but they tumble out all the same, something wide eyed and eager in it.

  “You will,” Mira says, something again gone soft around her eyes. She always forgets, every time, how eager some are to learn. “Letters, writing, numbers and sums, the arts of war, of riding and magic, you’ll learn them all.”

  It feels, to Illysa, far too good to be true. It feels like her brother, offering to teach her to read and dragging her before their father when she has so eagerly agreed, a snare waiting to snag her feet out from under her. She’s no longer home, no longer trapped but there are no backups here. The eyrie will not fight for her, if she found herself trapped, not for a badly behaved, wilfully disobedient girl-child more likely to receive a box around the ears than any sort of praise for her duties.

  Illysa knows if she fucks up here, there will be no one coming after her to fix it— and in the same breath of fear is the freedom of the choice she is being offered. There is no one coming after her, there will be no one coming to take this from her. Her father cannot make this decision for her, the headman cannot and she holds the first true freedom in her hands, a spark onto kindling moss already starting to burn and for once, there is no hand to snuff it out. If she goes back, she walks there on her own two feet, just like how she fled in the first place— but she doesn’t have to.

  “If I say yes,” she starts, slow and her mouth is dry with more than just lack of water. “I don’t need to go back?”

  Helmaer is watching her with something like surprise, tucked away after a moment and Illysa cannot blame him. If she was someone offering this choice to what she assumed was a quiet little Robin girl, she would be surprised too.

  “You will not be forced back, even if you choose to deny this choice,” he says, gruff after a long moment. “We’ll provision you either way.”

  “And of course, find you somewhere to settle, to find work and lodgings,” Mira adds, voice warm. “Even if you wish to find work in the capital, we’ll escort you there. I’m sure a Robinfolk young woman like yourself has plenty enough skills to carry you through, if you don’t want to enter.”

  Illysa doesn’t quite wince, but it’s a close thing.

  “I do,” she finds herself saying, her hands tangled in the front of her apron, the cloth grimy after days of walking and no washing. “Want to, I mean. I want to enter.”

  Mira’s face lights up, satisfaction clear on her face as she steps further back from the door. “Then I suppose you’d best come out of that dingy little cell,” she says. “I’m sure you could use a good meal.”

  Illysa steps out in a heartbeat with that, hunger gnawing on her empty stomach and she couldn’t agree more.

  ***

  It’s later than she thought it was, when they finally get out of the stone building that functions as the town’s gaol and magistrate, the sunlight warm and it must be after noon at the very least. Helmaer stands to the left of her, the noblewoman having climbed the stairs to the rooms above the entrance when they had left the cells behind with a flap of her hand to the soldier. Illysa couldn’t have dared to call the expression on his face amusing.

  The town is busy at this hour as they stand for a moment in the street, Illysa watching the town that she’d truly only seen for less than an hour early this morning and most of that time spent tracking down food, not taking in the sights. It’s the largest city she has ever seen, houses as far as she can see and Illysa thinks there must be a hundred houses in the town proper. There’s a market, the smell of spiced meat mixing a little sickeningly with the stench of animals for auction and manure.

  It turns her stomach something awful. Her queasiness with the stench on an empty belly must be obvious on her face, because Helmaer takes one look at her and takes her elbow to steer her away and down the street. “Don’t empty your guts in the street, girl,” he says, low.

  She wants to point out that she has nothing but water to cough up, but it doesn’t quite seem worth it, to argue to the man straight to his face. She also thinks she’ll vomit the moment she opens her mouth, so she wisely keeps it shut, dizzy and hungry as she follows the guiding hand at her elbow.

  She smells the inn before she even realises what it is, Helmaer guiding the both of them through the door and to a table so smoothly Illysa forgets her own manners, sitting in the chair before she can realise he has not sat first. Not that it matters at all, since Helmaer has made a beeline for the innkeeper.

  But gods, it feels good to sit and Illysa thinks she can hardly be blamed for enjoying the support of the chair below her, sinking back with her eyes shut. The air smells of stale beer, fresh beer, a stew somewhere on the fire that has meat in it by the smell alone and Illysa is suddenly ravenous.

  The stew turns out to be a vegetable and unidentified meat chunk stew when Helmaer sets two bowls on the table, thick from boiling on the heat. It’s a simple enough meal, but it smells just as good as any yearly feast meal she’s managed to eat in her life, if not better. She has no clue as to what this might’ve cost, but it doesn’t do anything to affect her appetite, half the bowl gone before she even recognises that there’s bread on the plate as well, or that the older solider has bought two mugs of… something.

  A single sniff tells her it’s a small ale, barely more than watered down malt and sugar, a relief in it. She doubts she’d trust the well water of a town she barely knows the name of, and the mug in front of Helmaer is clearly stronger stuff if the smell of it is anything to go by. It does the job, wetting her mouth and throat well as she sips it, hunger keen in her belly still as she falls on her stew once more.

  Helmaer watches her from the corner of his eye, and it’s enough to make her eat a little slower. He doesn’t speak otherwise, watching the inn around them, barely occupied this time of day, when field workers would be toiling and the wives turning over vegetable patches, the children collecting eggs.

  She’s almost done with the stew when the man finally speaks, his own bowl empty. “Y’made a good decision,” he says, short and clipped. “Joining the choosing’s a good plan for a lass like you.”

  He pauses, eyeing her. “Or most like you,” he admits.

  Inspiring, truly, she thinks. Really getting her confidence up here.

  Her unspoken sarcasm does little to halt his words, strangely enough, Illysa watching as the man takes a drink of his ale, setting it back down. “It’s a good decision,” he repeats, slow. “But a foolish one, y’know. You should- go home, get married, follow your other path. You’ll probably die on this one.”

  She pauses with her own small ale halfway to her lips, staring at him. That doesn’t stop him.

  “You’re going up against nobles, lass,” he says, grey eyes watching her. “Little lordlings and ladies who have been training for this their entire lives, with more gold than you’ll see in your lifetime crammed into their training and education and clothing.”

  Illysa stares. “It must be- fair, right?” she asks, slower. “Why make a big affair out of this- choosing, why make it open t’people on the borderlands if it wasn’t?”

  “Ah, you’re thinking with that nice polite robin head,” he says, wiping his mouth on the back of his hand. “They don’t want no country upstart with foreign manners and bad ideals making it all the way into their upper military and nobility. They’re gonna give you a choice, if you even qualify, to go for choosing or just get trained and do your service. Pick the latter, or you’re going to die, and then you’ll just be dead without any of those funny little dreams of freedom you’ve got going through your head.”

  He sets his mug down then, eyes flat. Illysa can’t form a single word, mouth gone dry. She feels like the rabbit her brother pinned down over an ant’s nest, just to watch what happened.

  “So, lass, either tell Lady Mira you want to go home, or wait until your testing days, and just go into service,” he advises, flat. She would think he was trying to be cruel if not for the honesty of it.

  “I’m not going home,” she says, somewhat surprised when the words come out at all.

  “Figured you’d say that, considering you ran from a match,” he says, watching her. “Least that’s what the guard said you told ‘em.”

  She’s quiet after that response, sinking back as she tries to find a way to veer away from it, drinks the small ale because it’s something to do, avoiding his gaze as the words spin in her head. “What-“ she hesitates, then continues. Illysa never holds her tongue anyway. Why start now? “What is this choosing?” she asks. “Where does it lead?”

  “The military college of Nethkar,” he says, slow. “A captaincy, retainer guards for lords and ladies. Apprenticeships with the Towers, if you prove better suited to the Gift than to the battlefield, end up like the good lady you met. As for what it is, it’s as close as war gets between the great houses, as close a thing as our land gets to war within its borders and it’s the reason we have a military strong enough to hold the area we do.”

  Illysa knows almost nothing about the land she stands on. The Robinfolk have made the land their own, rarely ever accepting those outside the fold, no history of this land taught to them. The Way was theirs, and it was all they needed, every rule absolute and every Law just. She must look confused, but Helmaer spares her none of the pity Lady Mira had, continuing on.

  “What you would enter is a vicious, back stabbing, intense mess of training with nobles who do not want your kind there, who do not want each other to succeed, and will do anything to make sure none but them and theirs make it through,” he says, draining his ale and glancing out the open doors of the inn.

  “You’ll enter a war and I doubt you’ll survive it, lass,” he says, something dark in it as he sets the mug down. Silence reigns for a long while as she stares into her mug. He sighs, breaking the tension. “Eat,” he mutters, gesturing to her stew as he stands to head for the innkeeper once more, leaving her to it. The stew tastes like dirt going down now.

  Illysa should’ve kept her fucking mouth shut.