Six years later.

“Seth! Get your worthless ass out of bed.”

I woke, sweat pouring down my back. Yennis shook me hard, the meat of his hands digging into my shoulders—the boy with the black hair and dark eyes from the train was six years older, it was six years later. I lashed up, my aching spine peeling off the cot, digging my fingers into his wrists and twisting his grip, splaying his hands. My hot forehead was on his, my pulse beating in my skull. My chin jutted forward so we were almost kissing. “Touch me and I’ll kill you in your sleep, bastard.”

“Shut up, Seth. Unhand me.” He met me with apathy, like I was stupid. I wasn’t stupid. I just was having a nightmare in the early hours of the morning.

The student bunkhouse was submerged in a cold, blue darkness that lingered, every space filled with dim shadows. For a half-instant, I expected the room to lurch forward, as if a car on a track, caught between worlds. The thin hemmed-in aisle between the rows of abandoned bunks felt long and narrow. I sniffed. My lungs were still burning, cooling down like an engine that had been pushed to overheating. Too quiet. I slid my bare feet over the half-dried muck on the floorboards, and a splinter slit through the callous and into the sole of my foot.

We’re late.

I swore viciously under my breath and tore out of the bunkhouse, tripping into the swamp. Slick, ancient stilts that raised the bunkhouse above the waterline, but there were no stairs down into the water. I was in up to my knees, the line of students was far ahead of me. The water was three times as cold once your feet sunk more than a few inches down.

I sloshed like a shot duck and soaked myself to catch the line of barefoot boys wading through the muck with their britches rolled up around their white, muscled thighs. I elected for a filthy combination of words under my breath.

“Language!” Thomas shouted at me from halfway up the line, loud enough to wake the whole village, his dirty brown hair lashing with his head.

“Shut it, Thomas,” Yennis complained, catching up behind me. Even in soaked, mud-slick clothes, he was witheringly collected. I wasn’t. Neither was Thomas, fortunately. His family had been living in this godforsaken place for seven hundred years since it was founded in the First Apocalypse, guaranteeing that 1) every male in his lineage was a warrior, and 2) he was an inbred. He’d have no trouble making an apprenticeship.

“Or what? You’ll start a scrap on his behalf?” Thomas demanded to Yennis. “You want to be associated with him?”

You’d better hope it’s him and not me, I almost replied, licking the inside of my teeth, feeling my eyes following him like a snake follows a vole. But I held my damn tongue. I had more to lose. I was an easy choice to send upstream, so I saved my sass. My chances of making an apprenticeship were already almost nonexistent.

Yennis scoffed and moved on. Thomas splashed Yennis. Yennis sneered at him like he was a pile of droppings in the woods and he’d stepped in it. But he didn’t defend me. I grimaced. Every day, the feeling that I’d been chosen was growing. I knew, for years, how this would end. The water requires blood, the Misfortunes require appeasing. In the wood, the stare of an owl inevitably strayed to the young, the weak, the outliers. I could fit myself under the wing of one of the warriors, or I could be sent upstream like a helpless piece of meat. And unless a miracle happened, no warrior was going to invest time in training a black sheep, especially not one that underperformed.

Or you could run. There’s nothing keeping you here, Seth of None.

I pushed the thought away. Our feet sunk into the sucking silt of the shore of the student training ground—a fallow field where the ground had been raised from the swamp by the backbreaking, sloughing work of the village ancestors. The people here were isolationists, but they believed in their military.

The village grew wild, built on grassy, muddy flats of artificial ground in the swamp, riddled with canals cutting between the blocks of buildings. The rich lived on the precious plots of solid ground in high, multi-story homes with oil for lamps. The poor lived in huts on stilts in the water with the risk of open fires. Sheaves of wild rice that overtook and covered the water. There were some shorter trees growing in the swamp itself, but the whole village was surrounded by old forest, trees thicker than the span of my arms.

The cultivators were just coming out into the fields to harvest the first crop. The rice matured quickly, but there was only so much time to pick and reseed when eight months of the year were frozen over. There was plenty of food in the woods, but they were afraid of the things that hid between the trees. It didn’t help my reputation, but I disappeared into them anyway. I only ever felt like myself in the deep wood, where light barely reached the ground. Where it was rare to have sun dapple on the back of my neck.

We’d taken our positions in neat, regimented lines on the training field, but Master Byron did not signal for warm-ups and forms to start.

The back of my neck prickled. I turned my head, saw them coming from the central area of the village. The Elders were being rowed to the training field in gondolas, solemn-faced attendants propelling them silently through the water with long, thin poles digging into the silt at the bottom.