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by Jaymin Eve
“Why aren’t you moving? Why is your stupid bag filled with stupid pots still in your stupid hands?”
I lunged at her, tickling her in all the places where she was most vulnerable. Which was every place with exposed skin. She was the most sensitive person I knew when it came to tickling.
“You need to chill the hell out!” I demanded, while she snorted and fought off my hands, trying to stay mad. “I swear to the gods you look like you’re forty life-cycles old right now!”
Footsteps sounded outside our little box, and I knew that Emmy or Jerath would actually kill me if we were late to our first assignment, so I straightened my clothes, dropped my stupid bag on the other bed, and followed my best friend from the room. I remained quiet and demure, not voicing my many opinions on what a shit-hole it was that they had shoved us into. I thought this was supposed to be an honour? I’d have preferred to stay in the village, if anyone wanted to know my opinion on it all. I hadn’t stayed because I wouldn’t leave my sister, but it was still my preference.
I’d give Emmy something: the trip up the stairs did seem a lot shorter than going down. We emerged from our rat-hole-in-the-wall and since I expected to see Jerath standing there, hands on hips, I was astonished enough to trip and knock down fifteen or so dwellers, because there were three sols waiting for us.
The dwellers who tumbled with me jumped quickly to their feet, all of them looking around, trying to figure out who had knocked them down. I was doing it too, looking around with a confused expression on my face … because survival was kind of important. The three sols stepped forward, moving just a little closer to us, and I found myself caring less about my tripping and more about how shiny these people were.
There were two men and a lady. The female was in the centre, dressed in shimmering white, her dress floor-length, demonstrating how slim and tall she was. Her hair was bound in golden curls, her eyes a dark, stormy grey—scary and exotic, all at once. I couldn’t look away.
“Welcome dwellers,” she announced coolly. “I am Elowin, the Head of the Dweller-relations committee here at Blesswood. You are honoured to be here this sun-cycle, to serve the sols and the gods.”
We are honour … was this speech for real?
“We only allow the best dwellers in all of Minatsol to attend our sols in Blesswood. Dwellers who have demonstrated their intelligence, skill, grace, and discretion. You speak to no one of what goes on inside these walls. You are not to be seen or heard. You do your job right and you will be rewarded. After you spend seven life-cycles here, you will be offered a position with a family of worth in Soldel, Dvadel, or Tridel. This is your future; don’t mess it up.”
The men were clearly her pretty arm candy. The one on the right, a brunette with longer hair that he had tied at his nape, started handing out sheets of parchment to us. We all knew how to read; it was one of the few things the villages made sure every child could do. Read and write the common language. Each ring had its own dialect, but everyone spoke the common language. The language of the gods.
It was a timetable, schedule, and assigned job list. I ran my eyes over the list, noticing that Emmy had library and kitchen duties, as well as classrooms 325, 2010, and Study Hall 8. She also got the female dorms 10-15. I searched for my name next, hoping that I would at least be close to her. They were going to have us working for the entire sun-cycle, every single sun-cycle, and I was already fearing that I would never see her again.
Finally, I found it, way past all the girls’ names. Will Knight. Oh crap, made sense for my curse to screw me like this. I was assigned to arena and training duties, classrooms 346 and 2213, Study Hall 8, and male dorms 1-5.
“I guess that explains the name on the bedroom then,” Emmy said, her face drawn as she clenched her fists tight around the paper. “They think you’re a boy.”
“But—”
Emmy shooshed me. “Just take it, Willa, they said you can’t ask for any changes. This is all preordained by the gods.”
I snorted, unable to keep my voice down. “Actually this is preordained by our idiot village leader who was probably too drunk to notice he filled my name in wrong.”
“It’s no big deal.” Emmy was lying through her teeth now, trying not to cause a scene as Elowin split us up into two groups to tour the grounds, sending the boys off with one of her henchmen, and the rest of us off with the second. “Just borrow some clothes from one of the male dwellers—maybe a hat, too? They probably won’t even mention the fact that you look like a girl because that’s super rude.”
“Rude like … I don’t know … shooting a crossbow through my chest?”
“It didn’t go through your chest.”
“I think it snagged a few hairs. From my head, I mean, not my chest …” I trailed off, because one of the girls hurrying along with us was giving me a strange look. I blinked, momentarily stumbling over my own feet as something else occurred to me. “Dammit. Boobs, Emmy. I can’t pretend to be a guy. What about my boobs? Or is it rude to mention that a guy has boobs, clear as the sun, standing right there—”
“Will!” Emmy was catching my arm every few steps now, because I couldn’t seem to keep my footing with all the excitement. And by excitement, I definitely meant terror. “Can you stop talking about boobs, please? We’re getting weird looks.”
“Oh yeah,” I drawled, “change the subject. Real smooth, Emmy, real smooth.”
She rumbled with that chilling, forest-cat growl again, making me shut up. Okay, so maybe she was right. I couldn’t change the dorm assignment, but maybe the sols would request a change themselves, after discovering that I was a girl?
“And this is the dining hall,” Henchman Number Two announced to the group, pushing two heavy doors apart to give us a glimpse into a massive hall with floor-to-ceiling windows and heavy, velvet curtains. There were bronze chandeliers hanging from the ceiling, with so many candles stuck into their brackets that I was sure they had to be a hazard of some kind. Most likely the fire kind. Dozens and dozens of circular wooden tables were spaced apart around the room, with a long bar of empty aluminium dishes stretching along one wall, a kitchen area barely visible behind it.
“The final prep-kitchen is on this level, allowing the sols to request certain dishes outside of the set menu each mealtime, but most of the work is done below, in the basement kitchens. No recruits are allowed in the basement-kitchen. Resident dwellers only.”
He backed away from the doors, letting them fall shut, and then proceeded to drag our group from one end of the academy grounds to the other. We also toured the female dormitories and the bathing chambers attached to the ends of each dormitory corridor. I could only pray to the gods that the male dormitories were set up in a similar way, but that was kind of futile … because the gods had allowed me to get assigned to the male dorm in the first place.
Correction: they didn’t really allow it, so much as they just never paid any damn attention to me in the first place.
I mean, I got it, I did. I wasn’t that important. I was just a little dirt-dweller with a little Danger! sign hovering over my head. Why would the gods bother to watch over me, unless it was for entertainment?
Oh my gods …
“Emmy!” I bounced up from her bed—the one we had collapsed against as Henchman Number Two allowed us a short break after the touring. “Do you think they do it deliberately?”
“Who?” She blinked, her head snapping up, her eyes flying open. She had fallen asleep, apparently. She jumped up with me, finding her feet, her eyes darting about wildly. “What? Who?”
“The gods!”
“The gods what?”
“Do you think they do this crap to me deliberately? All the accidents?”
Emmy groaned, her posture deflating as she sank back onto the bed, her hand wiping down her face. “Dammit, Will … of course they don’t do it deliberately. Why the hell would they do that?”
“Well they’re supposed to love the sols fighting against each other; that’
s why they come down to the arena every moon-cycle to watch them battle, right? So … what if they’re making my life hell just to laugh about it?”
She sighed again, but this time it was a pity sigh. She grabbed my hands, pulling me down onto the bed beside her. “Will … just stop thinking about it, okay? It is what it is. We can’t change it, so we need to live with it. I know this whole …” she shook her hand around, indicating the stone walls surrounding us, “situation has shaken you up a bit, but the gods definitely aren’t making you clumsy just to amuse themselves. If they really wanted that kind of entertainment, they’d be doing it to the sols. We’re just dwellers. It’d be like poking ants just to see them scatter. It’s really not that entertaining. Certainly not for eighteen life-cycles on end.”
I opened my mouth to answer—probably to say that she could call herself an ant, if she really wanted to, but I was totally an eagle, or basically anything cooler than an ant—but I wasn’t afforded the chance, because the bells were ringing again.
“Free time is up,” Emmy unnecessarily announced.
Henchman Number Two had told us that we would be expected to attend the dining hall for the Commencement Celebration that night, in the presence of every sol at the academy. Apparently, they had a feast at the beginning of every academy life-cycle, and the new dweller recruits were one of the main attractions. Emmy was staring into the tiny, oval reflection glass stuck to the wall between the two single beds, fussing with her hair. She would have changed, too, if she hadn’t already been wearing her best clothes. I waited until she was done before moving over to the reflection glass myself and peering at the image of my own face. It was an okay face. Kind of like my mum’s. I had naturally pink lips, and naturally flushed cheeks—probably from the adrenaline of almost dying all the time. My eyes were a brown that seemed strangely translucent in most lights. The kind of brown that reflected other colours. It wasn’t at all odd for a person with blue eyes to think that mine were slate-brown, or a person with green eyes to think that mine were mossy-brown.
I didn’t really see all those different shades and highlights that other people mentioned. I thought they were tawny. Tawny brown eyes. Plain and simple. I also had tawny skin, a golden-brown from having spent far too much time outdoors. I was lucky that I didn’t also have tawny brown hair, or else I’d probably be blending into walls and trees. My hair was similar to Emmy’s—a white-blond, with a scruffy curl to oppose her sleek locks. It was also a little darker, with less silver. I pulled all of my hair back from my face now, slapping a hand over my forehead to see what I’d look like in a cap.
“Not bad,” I muttered. “But there’s still the boobs.”
“Okay, we’re leaving, before you start talking about that again.” Emmy lead the way, taking us through the many corridors and back into the dining hall.
The sols were already seated at their tables, indicating that we were probably late, but I was really good at being late, so I took Emmy’s arm, dragging her for once. We plastered ourselves to the wall, moving along the line of other dwellers toward the middle of the room, where it would be easier to see all the tables. It wasn’t until we were properly stationed that I noticed the group of dwellers hovering out in front of the kitchens, a few sols standing in front of them. I recognised most of their faces, because they were the other dweller recruits.
Crap. We were standing with the resident dwellers.
“Welcome, dirt-dwellers!” One of the sols shouted, even though he was only standing a few feet away from the first line of recruits. “Welcome to our city, welcome to our academy, and welcome to the commencement ceremony! Now … strip!”
Wait … what?
The demon-sol laughed, his head thrown back, his dark, golden-onyx hair tousled perfectly around his face. Was that …? He looked exactly like Siret, except that I could see Siret standing right beside him, wearing the same clothes as this morning. The trickery-gifted sol had a twin? I could tell them apart, but the twin thing was clear. That wasn’t good. That definitely wasn’t good. But what was worse was the fact that the recruits actually appeared to be … stripping.
The seated sols started laughing, a few of them jeering rudely, and one of the resident dwellers next to me sighed.
“Why do the sols find this so funny, anyway? Why can’t Yael think of anything better to use his Persuasion gift for?”
I had no idea who the guy was talking to, but I decided it wouldn’t hurt to let out a matching sigh, lean back against the wall, and fold my arms casually. “I know, right? It’s getting old. And don’t even get me started on the twin thing. One of them is enough, am I right?”
The guy snorted. “Yeah, and five is overdoing it, just a little bit.”
Five? Five! Holy fu—
“I feel sorry for whoever’s assigned to their dorm rooms,” I whispered back, applauding my even tone.
“It’ll be one of the recruits,” my new friend informed me, lowering his voice even further and leaning my way. “You know it’s been absolute chaos in here since they turned up a few moon-cycles ago. They’ve had twenty resident dwellers assigned to them already, but they dismiss them like it’s in their schedule to get a dweller fired every few weeks. After the last one, Elowin announced that she’d start assigning them recruits. You wouldn’t know that because you aren’t one of the slaves attending the dweller-relations committee—I know, because I am. Anyway, I guess she thought that if she gave them someone ‘fresh,’ they’d be able to mould them however they wanted.”
“Sounds creepy. So is Elowin giving them special privileges?”
“They’re the most powerful sols here. You didn’t know that? They’re our future gods—”
“And on that note,” Emmy broke into our conversation, leaning over me to glare at the guy, “you two should really stop gossiping about them.”
“Sorry,” I muttered to the guy, after pushing Emmy back. “She hasn’t eaten yet.”
He chuckled. “No problem. I’m Atti, by the way.”
“I’m Willa, and my grumpy friend here is Emmy.”
Atti shook his head, his short curls jumping around a little like they were trying to escape his head. “Why haven’t I seen you two around before? I know Elowin keeps us locked down in service to her, but I thought I’d crossed paths with most resident dwellers by now.”
Before I could fess up to my mistake and our recruit status, a commotion across the room stole all our attentions. The recruits—who were now wearing no more than underclothes—were dragging themselves out to stand in the centre of the room. They were being paraded around. The two almost-identical demon-sols—Siret and Yael—remained standing at their table. Just standing. Smug, arrogant, assholes. They had these half-smirks on their faces, like they were enjoying the discomfort of the dwellers—feeding on it, even. Their huge bodies seemed to grow even larger, the perfect planes of their faces deepening. The shimmers of gold which tinted the darkness of their hair was stronger, almost as if they had this inner light which was shining brighter.
I was starting to see the gods-in-training thing, to really see it. There was nothing dweller in these sols, no matter what the history said of the origins of the gods and sols.
“Why does no one stop them?” I murmured, my feet shifting. I had to force myself to remain against the wall, I couldn’t stand to see others humiliated like this.
It was different when I was humiliated. I was used to it; I could handle it. They couldn’t. They had once been the brightest, the smartest, the most honoured amongst their own people … and now? All of a sudden, they were less than garbage.
Atti answered. “The teachers tend to leave sols to deal with things themselves. They don’t monitor them outside of lessons. They say the gods are always watching, and that usually keeps most of them in line.”
Except for the Abcurse brothers. Clearly they weren’t worried about the gods and their spying eyes. I tilted my head to the right, my gaze catching on Emmy. She started shaking her head franti
cally at me.
“Don’t you move, Will. Don’t move a freaking muscle or I will kill you. Drawing the attention of any sol is a bad thing; drawing the attention of those five sounds like it’ll be catastrophic.”
She had a point, but I was a pro at catastrophic. With that in mind, I took a deep breath and stepped off the wall.
Four
No one noticed.
No one!
Where was my clumsy curse when I needed to make a scene? I had no idea what to do short of stripping off my own clothes and running naked through the gaps in the tables. But how could that help the shaking recruits out there? Just as my hands went to my shirt, fists clenching the sides, another short, tinkling bell rang out, and the scent of food drifted in through a set of now-open doors.
Siret waved a hand then, and the room shifted. I blinked twice to make sure I was seeing things clearly. How in the hell? All of the recruits were back against the wall, fully dressed. It was as if none of the last few clicks had even happened. My mouth was open, like right open. A damn flying mantis could have walked right in there with no problem.
“He tricked us,” I muttered, managing to speak around my shock. As if he had heard my words, Siret shifted his body in my direction, and those shimmery golden-green eyes slammed against me. Hard.
Now someone noticed me?
I was grabbed from behind; either Emmy or Atti yanked me back against the wall, probably trying to save my life. If Siret or his brothers retaliated to my tiny attempt at making a stand against dweller-abuse … well, it would probably be the second time this sun-cycle those bullsen balls would try to kill me. How many times would it take for them to succeed?
A line of resident dwellers brought forth the sols’ dinner, looking completely oblivious and unaffected. I braved a glance from under my lashes, and managed to breathe deeply when there were no jewel-like eyes staring in my direction. Like most men, the Abcurse demons had one true love.
Food.
Emmy kept two eyes on me for the rest of the dining time. No other humiliation was dished out for the dwellers, if you discounted the normal shitty way they were treated. Trays thrown at them when the sols were done eating, barked orders for more drinks and food, mutterings about dirt-dwellers and their ineptitude at all things. All things.