The cheering poured from the arched entrances.
My wrists were bound to an iron ring inside the carriage. Ghost had tied the knots at the capital boundary, exactly as Brandt had promised. Tight enough to look real. Tight enough that I couldn't have freed myself even if I changed my mind.
Once we crossed the boundary, the choice was made.
Brandt opened the carriage door. Beyond him, guards watched from the nearest archway.
His eyes found mine. Now. I pulled against the rope.
"I thought I was being taken for training," I said, pitching my voice loud enough to carry across the plaza. "That's what you told me."
"This is training," Brandt replied. His tone gave nothing away. "The first stage is surviving the Coliseum."
"Surviving," I echoed. "The Coliseum. As in the place where they kept slaves."
My eyes moved from Brandt to Ghost to Roen.
I was performing for the guards.
Their faces held the bored disinterest of men who had watched this scene many times and no longer cared how it ended.
Brandt's dark gaze didn't waver.
"What," he said quietly, "did you think you had become?"
That line had not been rehearsed.
Ghost stepped forward. No warmth. No apology.
"The moment you were requisitioned," Ghost said, his voice precise, "you became property of the Iron Cross. Not a recruit. Property."
"A slave, until you prove valuable enough to be considered otherwise."
The ropes around my wrists suddenly felt tighter.
I thought of twenty days on the road.
They had given me a choice.
"You said I'd receive a training weapon," I snapped. "You said there'd be an evaluation."
"We said all of those things," Ghost interrupted, smooth as glass. "And all of them were true. You will receive a weapon. You will be evaluated inside."
The fear in my chest sharpened the performance into something real.
"Fuck you," I snarled at Ghost. "When I get out of this place, I'm going to beat you so badly your grandchildren will feel it."
Ghost's expression didn't change.
"If," he corrected, "you get out."
I bared my teeth.
"When."
Even if it takes a thousand lives. Even if I die every day for a year inside those walls.
I will walk out.
I yanked against the ropes. The hemp bit into my wrists and the iron ring groaned against its bolts.
"Untie me," I demanded. "Right now. I'm not going in there like cargo. I'm not—"
Brandt's chin dipped.
A fraction of an inch. The smallest possible nod.
Roen moved.
For a man his size, he was horrifyingly fast when he wanted to be. One enormous hand closed around the rope at my wrists. The other produced a strip of cloth that he wrapped around my jaw and the back of my skull before I could get another word out.
The gag tasted like old leather and horse sweat.
I screamed into it. The sound came out as a muffled, furious hum that vibrated against the cloth and went nowhere.
Roen lifted me off the bench with one arm.
My feet left the carriage floor. For a nauseating second I hung in the air, suspended by the grip on my bindings, legs kicking at nothing.
He set me down outside the carriage.
Roen took the rope in both hands and began walking toward the Coliseum.
I followed. The rope made sure everyone else believed I had no choice.
Roen's strides were so long that I had to half-jog to keep from being yanked off my feet. My breath came in short, harsh snorts through my nose.
"It's not so bad," Roen said, his deep voice carrying the conversational tone of a man discussing weather. "I was in the Coliseum myself. When I first joined the Iron Cross."
I glared at the back of his bald head.
"It was actually pretty easy," Roen continued. "I just had fifteen fights and became the leader. Didn't take long."
His massive shoulders shrugged.
"Only broke four bones. Maybe five. I don't remember exactly."
I growled through the gag.
That response required no acting.
The lower level was a network of corridors in the same dried-blood stone, ceiling low, walls wet, air thick with sweat and iron.
Torchlight lined the passages at uneven intervals.
Two figures stood at the transition point between the entrance corridor and the deeper passages.
Garrison Knights in polished armor met us. They snapped to attention when Brandt appeared behind me.
"New recruit," Brandt said. He produced a folded document from inside his coat and extended it.
One of the garrison Knights took it, unfolded it, read it, and nodded.
“Good. At this rate, you’ll surpass the quota. How many have you brought in this semester?” he asked.
Brandt just shrugged.
“Understood. I’ll take him from here. You’re welcome to come along,” the knight continued.
The rope changed hands. Roen's enormous grip was replaced by a gauntleted fist that pulled me forward.
The garrison Knight led me deeper.
We descended. A hall of undyed linen and ledgers. The garrison Knight handed my document to the nearer monk.
The monk unfolded it. Read it. His eyes moved with the speed of someone who had done this a thousand times.
He reached for a fresh sheet of parchment and a quill. Dipped. Wrote.
I watched the ink form characters I could now read.
Slave 147.
The number stared up at me from the wet ink.
I felt the gag press against my clenched jaw.
From behind me, Brandt's voice carried a note of something that might have been surprise.
"One hundred and forty-seven," he said. "That's a large crop."
The monk looked up from his ledger.
"The recruitment drive has been aggressive this season," he said. His voice was flat, administrative. "Command wants maximum throughput for the next cycle."
He set the quill down and leaned closer to Brandt, lowering his voice.
"There are rumors," the monk said, "that the order has developed a new technique. A method of channeling mana externally without forming Circles."
My ears sharpened despite the gag.
Brandt's expression shifted. A tightening around the eyes.
"Is it real?" he asked.
The monk shook his head. "Only the senior hierarchy has access to anything like that. But the rumor alone has been enough to triple the volunteer rate."
"Volunteers and... otherwise."
His gaze flicked to me. To the ropes. Back to the ledger.
He thought I belonged to the second group.
How many of the other one hundred and forty-six had been given a warning and a road out?
He turned to face me. His dark eyes settled on mine.
"Take care of yourself, Kaspar," he said.
"If you make it out," Brandt continued, "perhaps someday our paths will cross again."
I couldn't answer without breaking the performance.
I held his gaze. Unblinking.
Thank you for telling me.
He turned and walked back down the corridor.
Ghost fell into step beside him. Then Konrad. Then Idris, whose grin had finally, for the first time in days, gone flat.
Roen was last.
He paused at the mouth of the passage. His massive silhouette filled the archway. He looked back at me over one boulder of a shoulder.
His mouth opened, closed. He left.
The monk gripped the rope at my wrists and pulled. We descended again.
Another staircase. The stones here were older, rougher, slick with condensation that made each step treacherous. We reached a corridor lined with iron doors, each one identical.
The monk stopped at a door near the middle of the row.
He produced a key. Not a rune-tipped key like the one Vael had given me.
The door groaned open.
He pushed me through.
The cell was occupied.
Four bodies lay on thin pallets arranged against the walls. They were dressed in the same rough linen as the monks, though their versions were stained and threadbare. Their faces were turned toward me as I stumbled through the doorway.
One by one, they rolled over and went back to sleep.
The monk stood in the doorway. His posture was rigid, his face blank beneath the hood.
"The rules," he said.
"You do not attempt to escape. You do not resist orders. Violation of either rule is punishable by immediate execution. We have authorization given by the Emperor himself."
"Training begins each morning at dawn. You will be escorted to the grounds. You will take part in whatever exercise is prescribed. Refusal is treated as resistance."
Another pause.
"Each afternoon, names are drawn for combat. Fights take place in the arena above. The results determine your ranking. Only the top fifty are selected for the next stage."
His gaze found mine through the gag.
"Selection occurs once per month. Maintaining a position in the top fifty for a single day is insufficient. You must hold your ranking at the time of selection, or your progress is void."
He stepped forward and drew a short blade from his belt.
The rope parted.
My hands fell free. Blood rushed back into my fingers. I yanked the cloth from my mouth.
The monk watched me.
I stood in the center of the cell, rubbing feeling back into my wrists, and looked at my sleeping cellmates.
The monk retreated through the doorway. The iron door groaned shut. The lock turned with a final clunk.
His footsteps faded down the corridor.
I exhaled slowly, letting the last threads of rage settle.
I turned toward the far corner of the cell.
A narrow strip of floor, unclaimed by the four pallets.
I made it two steps.
"Not going to introduce yourself, rookie?"
The voice came from directly in front of me.
I stopped.
The corner I'd been walking toward wasn't empty.
Someone sat there, pressed into the angle where the two walls met, legs drawn up, arms resting on knees. The mana-glow barely reached this far, and the figure had been so still, so folded into the shadow, that I'd walked right past without seeing them.
A girl, sixteen give or take. My voice died. I stared.
Behind her shoulders, folded against her back, pressed tight against the stone wall as if she'd been trying to make them disappear...
Wings.