Page 7 of The Daughter of the Scarred Elf

Meet everyone?

Now that she had stepped foot in the base, with all the soldiers training around her, her stomach knotted itself into a tight ball and she didn’t know how to act. She didn’t come here to make friends—and she highly doubted she would—but the thought of making enemies, which was more probable, made her uneasy despite her and Nollar’s earlier bold plans.

“Your new uniform will be in your room,” Sijur continued, stretching his long arms as they exited the stables and thestrong, eye-watering smell of manure, hay, and animal urine. “I’ll see you both later tonight, then.”

Joran bobbed his head and watched as Sijur walked toward one of the buildings. He then turned his golden-haired head to Kolfinna, his vibrant green eyes appearing like two polished emeralds. “I’ll, um, lead the way?”

If he was hoping to inspire confidence, Kolfinna didn’t feel it. She waved for him to go forward and they approached the main building. Joran fiddled with the gray cuff of his sleeve, his shifty eyes flicking to the soldiers and then back at Kolfinna.

Most of the soldiers ignored them and were focused on their training—sparring and wrestling with each other—but Kolfinna noticed a few curious looks shot her way. Even at a distance, her white hair made her stand out.

She tucked a strand of white hair behind her ear distractedly.

“Are you nervous being here?” he asked quietly.

She tried to appear calm. “A little.”

“You don’t have to worry about … um, people bullying you.”

She stiffened. Did he know the Royal Guards bullied her? “Why do you say that?”

“No reason … I can just imagine …” He shrugged and stared straight ahead.

They were quiet for some time. The nearby soldiers trained with magic, splashes of water and streaks of lightning filling the space between them, while others trained with swords, the clash of steel against steel clanging all around. The air about the military seemed so much busier than it had been at the Royal Guards.

Kolfinna had hoped the inside of the building would be less cruel and brutal-looking and that it actually housed a cozy interior or even a coldly lavish one like the royal palace or the Royal Guards’ headquarters—but she was disappointed by thestony gray walls, the cold gray tiles, and the tiny windows that didn’t allow enough sunlight to filter into the hallways.

The only comfort she could find was that the floors and walls were made entirely of stone, which was perfect if she was in a battle inside here, since she had plenty of material to use for her stone magic. But she truly hoped it never got to that point.

When she glanced over at Joran, at the white badge stuck to his breast pocket and the way his burnt gold hair fell over his eyes, she wondered briefly if he could manipulate the stones better than her.

“You’re not a white rank,” Kolfinna said with a nod to his badge. White ranks were people without magic or with very little enhancer abilities. “Why continue to lie?”

Joran’s eyes widened and he quickly looked around himself at the hallway, at the trickling of soldiers going in and out of rooms. “Don’t say that out loud,” he whispered. “Please.”

He was very obviously keeping it a secret that he was fae, and he was blessed with brilliant green eyes that could pass off as human if no one was looking or thinking too hard about how unnaturally bright they were, or that there were tiny threads of orange in them. Kolfinna should’ve respected his decision to remain hidden—after all, she had done the same her whole life—but it somehow prickled under her skin that he was able to walk around without fear of discrimination. That he could pretend to be human.

When they reached a door on the third floor with a simple 304 etched onto the dark wood, Joran knocked, waited, and then twisted the wobbly doorknob. The room was cramped with three beds neatly placed in a row. Each bed had a small nightstand and a trunk at the end of the bed. The nightstand on the left was cluttered with things—a stack of papers, a half-eaten hunk of bread, socks—while the nightstand on the right was neat and only contained a small stack of books. The bed on theleft matched the nightstand in the way it was disorganized—the sheets were crumpled, undergarments were strewn on top, and a comb full of tangled fiery-red hair wrapped around the teeth sat in the center of it. The right side was, once again, the complete opposite. It appeared one of Kolfinna’s new roommates was organized and one clearly wasn’t. The bed in the center of the room was likely Kolfinna’s. For a moment, she stared at it, her chest tightening. This was really happening. She was a soldier now.

Joran stared at the interior of the room with mild interest and jerked a thumb behind him. “The, uh, washroom is at the end of the hallway. You’ll have to share it with everyone on this floor. Don’t worry, though, this is the women’s section of the barracks. The women have the first three floors on this wing of the fort, while the men have the upper three floors and the whole right wing of the fort.”

Kolfinna quickly did the math. “So … there are only one-fourth of women here in the military?”

“Um, yes, roughly. At least here in this base.”

“What stops the men from coming to our floors?”

His gold eyebrows pulled together. “What do you mean?”

She glanced at the doorknob, which didn’t have a lock. “Is there anything stopping the men from entering the women’s rooms?” she reiterated. He couldn’t be so dense as to not realize that women didn’t usually feel safe surrounded by a slew of men from all walks of the earth.

Joran shifted on his feet and eyed the end of the hallway. “There’s nothing like that here. Anyone can enter and go, even though they’re notsupposedto.” He messed with the cuff of his sleeve again. “The men and women aren’t allowed to go to the opposite gender’s barracks at night, but there’s nothing actually stopping them.”

That wasn’t reassuring at all. She could imagine a group of hunters in the military ambushing her in the middle of the night to seize her like Hilda had two weeks ago. The thought made her shudder.

Joran was already backing away from her. “If you need anything else?—”

“Are there—” Her throat closed up and she looked out at the single window above the middle bed. “Are there any hunters here?”

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