Page 60 of Kissed By the Gods
“Ok, so no shaving or cutting hair,” Faelon says. “But still, we celebrate after an unnaming. We go to the Crimson Feather as a cast. All of us. We have drinks. We eat cake. Leif gets drunk and sings his stupid folk songs from the coast too loud, and we all laugh at him. Nyrica and Thalric sit in a corner and whisper. You sit in a corner and brood.” Faelon’s voice gets louder and more desperate with each word and his arm tightens around my shoulder. I don’t know what he’s talking about with the Crimson Feather, but a celebration sounds much better than training.
Ryot’s hard eyes flick to Faelon for a brief second before he focuses on me. Faelon drops his arm. “Not this time,” he says. “Leina’s already behind, which means the whole cast is behind.”
The festive atmosphere dies out, like someone snuffed out a candle. Nyrica is watching Ryot carefully now, too. “Ryot, she’s not?—”
But it’s Thalric who cuts him off, holding up a hand. “Ryot’s right,” he says. “We’re only as strong as our weakest, and we can’t afford weakness. Not now, not with Kheris turning her gaze toward us.”
Toward me, he means.
No one’s laughing now. Faelon mutters something under his breath and leans back against the wall, arms crossed, visibly sulking but not arguing.
My palm is still bleeding, and I’m exhausted down to my bones, but I meet his eyes anyway.
“Then let’s train,” I say.
Ryot nods once. Behind me, the cast—mycast—says nothing, but I can feel their presence like a wall at my back. Solid.
We turn, as a unit, and head for the training grounds.
“Sigurd is no beast of burden, no wild animal. He is the other half of every step I take. We have not survived three centuries by fighting beside each other. We survived by fighting as one.”
E
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
This is my first wardcall,and I’m exhausted.
The kind that makes your limbs feel like rusted steel and your thoughts swim like they’re treading water in a bog.
We trained in the Stormriven yard well into the night, until the moon had climbed high and the rest of the world had gone still. We used no weapons, no armor—nothing to “fall back on,” Thalric said. Just hands and bodies and pain. We never even made it back to the barracks to sleep.
Ryot was merciless. He calls it foundational. My only consolation is that Leif and Kiernan are as exhausted as I am, as we wait in our rigid formation for the archons’ inspection.
The wards at the Synod gather each month when the moon turns, before the sun fully rises over the cliffs, when the first hints of daylight start to soften the night and the stars fade. Here, the archons conduct inspection on any wards in residence. Today, Archon Robias walks through the lines, taking roll. There’s a nasty-looking whip hanging at his side.
I’m in the middle of a small group of wards, and some of the boys keep shooting me nervous glances. The one to my left even went so far as to edge slightly more to the left, one step out of theneat column. Like if he stood too close to me, he was at risk of being struck down by the gods.
“Aeron,” Robias calls out.
“Present,” the boy to my left calls out. I hate to use the term “boy,” since “girl” has been used so pejoratively, but in this case I think it’s accurate. Aeron still has a spattering of acne across his nose and forehead; he’s that kind of skinny that means he recently had a growth spurt, and his weight hasn’t yet caught up with his height.
The whip flies out and snaps Aeron across the shoulders and the back of his neck, the tip missing me by the slightest margin. His cry is muffled, because he bites his own lip until it bleeds. He doesn’t react otherwise.
“Fix the line, Ward Aeron.”
Aeron shuffles precisely one step to the right, the column of Fellsworn wards now perfectly even. “Archon,” he answers. The back of Aeron’s neck starts to ooze blood, and the tang of it is sharp on my tongue.
Satisfied, Robias moves on.
“Velorin.”
“Present,” Velorin replies.
Robias moves to the front of my row.
