By day eight, her steps grew sharper. Her eyes steadier.
She felt ready.
Escaping a pitchfork, pixies, a weird mirror and some mercenaries has a weird way of giving a girl some much needed confidence.
Which was good, because looming on the horizon was Silverkeep.
And everything she needed waited behind its walls.
The city was chaos.
Caravans jammed the gates. Horns blared. Street hawkers shouted about goose legs, amulets, miracle soap. Elara slipped through the crowd, head down, hood up, ears hidden.
"Remind me again," Fig said, perched inside her cloak, "why we're doing this?"
"The War Academy is the fastest path to power. And it opens its trials next moon."
"Great. Just you and three hundred sword-happy lunatics with nothing to lose."
"They'll regret it."
"I already regret it."
At the square, she found the noticeboard. A proclamation glinted under the frost:
CALL TO ARMS
His Majesty's War Academy invites all warriors, mages, and creatures of uncommon skill to test for Winter Intake. Scholarships awarded. Survivors expected. Glory to Lirael.
"'Survivors expected,'" Elara read aloud. "Charming."
"See?" Fig said. "Your exact skill set: not dying."
Then she felt it.
Like a thread pulled tight in her gut. A bond humming low and dangerous. She turned—just as a tall figure crossed the square.
Wolf-grey cloak. Sword at his hip. Black curls brushing his jaw. Silver eyes searching the crowd like something haunted him.
Kaden.
Her stomach dropped. Not Alpha yet, but still unmistakably him.
"Oh," Fig said lightly, "it's him. He hasn't aged a day. Still looks like a tortured library statue."
Elara ducked behind a cart of sausages.
"Why are we hiding?" Fig asked. "You came here."
"He's not supposed to see me yet."
"Oh sure," Fig said, "ambush romance. Love that journey."
Kaden turned toward a merchant, distracted. Elara bolted.
They spent the next four weeks surviving on grit, scraps, and sarcasm.
Elara using Kaden's face- now fresh in her memory- as feul.
Elara trained in the alleyways behind the South Docks, where rusted anchors and discarded barrels doubled as obstacles. Each morning she rose before dawn—often curled up beneath a broken stairwell behind a cooper's shop—and drilled her strikes in silence. There, in the echo of morning gulls and fishmongers shouting over crates, she honed footwork on slick cobbles and practiced dodging imaginary blades between laundry lines and crates of rotting onions.
She slept in a half-collapsed watchtower just outside the city's east wall. Fig called it "the Leaning Tower of Questionable Hygiene." She called it home. Its roof was missing on one side, but it offered shelter from the wind, and if she wedged herself into the third-floor nook just right, she could pretend she was back in a real bed.
The floor was cold, the rats judgmental, and she was fairly certain one of the beams was held together by spite and pigeon droppings—but it was hers.
For weapons, she'd carved her own practice blades from her ashwood staff, sanding the handles smooth with stolen bricks and wrapping the hilts in strips of old tunic. Every dent and nick felt personal, like her effort was being etched into them one slice at a time. She trained until her arms ached and her blisters split open, and then she trained some more.
She studied the guards who patrolled the upper ring of Silverkeep, watching their stances, listening to their grumbling. She paid a barkeep in silver buttons to steal her an old trial map and another in whiskey-stained copper to explain how the combat rounds worked. She made her own flashcards from parchment scraps. When she couldn't afford parchment, she used the walls.
"Studying by graffiti," Fig said one night, watching her scratch wolf hieroglyphs into the stone. "A bold academic strategy."
"It's practical."
"It's illegal."
"Add it to the list."
By the second week, she had memorized the footwork for sixteen stances of the Silver Guard, ten of which she improved. By the third, she was climbing city scaffolding by night to build arm strength and balance—Fig flying lazy loops around her like an alarmed, glowing parrot.
"If you fall," he said, "I'm not catching you. I'm decorative."
"You're floaty. Same thing."
"Glowy. And traumatized."
By the fourth week, her name was known in five taverns—usually as "that barefoot girl with the scary elbows."
She made coin where she could. Cleaning stables. Carrying crates. Hustling arrogant recruits-in-training who underestimated her size and got a sharp lesson in humility—and the occasional broken nose.
One drunk had tried to flirt mid-duel.
"Sweetheart," he'd slurred, sword swinging wide, "how's a pretty little—"
Crack. Her palm met his nose with a satisfying snap.
He dropped like a sack of flour.
Later, as they walked away down an alley still smelling of sweat and stale beer, Elara muttered, "It's not that I hate men."
"No no," Fig said sagely, perched on her shoulder, "you just enjoy the sight of their egos crumbling into powder."
She smirked. "Exactly."
He tapped his chin with one tiny paw. "You know, if we live through this, you'd make a terrific professor of feminist swordplay."
"Would I get an office?"
"With a window. Overlooking the battlefield."
Elara laughed.