Page 3 of Daughter of the Ninth Line: Part One

“How’s that for gratitude…” I muttered to myself, walking into the kitchen portion of the communal room. There was a cafeteria here, but I’d start smuggling snacks down to my dorm as soon as possible, so I didn’t have to spend too much time with the other conscripts. There were already a few cans of vegetables, some kind of dehydrated stew in a jar, and things that had gone moldy and I didn’t want to think about too hard. I guess no one had time to just clean out some random kitchen.

On the wall to the left of the doorway, the names of past Ninth Line conscripts had been carved into the wood paneling. There were some family names I recognized. Lorson. Mertridge. My own cousin, Mattlock Halhed. He’d gone on to be a high-ranking member of the army—well, as high ranking as someone from the Ninth Line could get. I’d read his journal years ago.

Next to some of the names were X’s. The conscripts who’d never made it out of Boellium War College. Walking to the kitchen, I grabbed a knife from the drawer and scratched an X beside the name Sly Lorson. He hadn’t returned home from this hellhole and would serve as a warning to me. Keep my head in the game, or it would be my own name with an X beside it.

Getting to work, I carved my name at the bottom of the list.Avalon Halhed.Daughter of the Ninth Line.

That ritual completed, I changed out of my traveling skirt, which had blood soaking the hem already, and set it in a bucket to soak. Walking to my bags, I pulled out a pair of my pilferedpants. I wasn’t going to die in this place just because I was hampered by the voluminous skirts favored by my Line. I’d stolen these from my brothers, and while they were a little long in the legs, they fit well enough. I folded up the hems and noted that I’d have to cut and re-hem them tonight, as well as the others I’d stolen.

Not that my brothers wouldn’t have given them to me if I’d asked; they didn’t hate me the way my father did. Whatever had happened to my mother, they’d mostly been too young to remember, except for Kian.

My older brother and the Heir to the Ninth Line had been ten when our mother had died. He remembered every moment, but had never blamed me. More than once, he’d hidden me from my father’s enraged grief. He’d ensured I was cared for, fed, safe. I’d been barely more than a toddler, but I’d known that Kian meant safety, even at that young age.

No, I’d stolen my brothers’ pants, not because they wouldn’t have just given them to me, but because I knew my father had forbidden them from providing me with any aid. My preparation for war had begun as soon as I agreed to come to Boellium. I’d had my wits, what I could gather with my charisma or by theft, and a long walk down south.

Shoving the melancholy thoughts from my mind, I slipped the pants on and buttoned them up. They were snug across my hips, but they fit better than they had when I’d left. Starving on the road would do that to a girl.

I was hardly a girl anymore, and that’s probably why my father had sent me here. I was twenty-three, and no one would marry me. I wasn’t a son. I was useless for anything but conscription fodder to him.

Sighing heavily, I shook off the thoughts of my family and my obvious father issues, and climbed the stairs back up. I was old to be entering the Boellium War College, though not theoldest. You could offer anyone between the age of sixteen and twenty-eight. Some Lines sent their conscriptions young, before their best years were gone, before they had wives and children and emotional attachments to anything but the idea of being a badass warrior. Others waited for as long as they could—the more humane option, I believed, considering there was a chance we wouldn’t return. You had a chance to live your life before it was stolen from you.

Reaching the main landing, I cursed the fact that no one had given me a map of this place. I looked at the crowd, the setting sun, and decided to just follow the majority of the other students in the direction they were going.

The food here was free, and if nothing else, the Lower Six Line conscripts wouldn’t miss mealtime. Food wasn’t plentiful in the outer lands of Ebrus. We struggled and toiled, and some years, we just plain starved. It was bad for us in the north, where the Ninth Line fiefdom was, but I knew it was even worse for the other Lines lower than us, relegated to the most barren outer rims of our country.

We moved from the main building of Boellium to one of the large outbuildings. It was basically a stone barn, a thatched roof holding tight against the ocean breeze. Boellium War College was on an island, ostensibly to protect it from marauders in the early days, but I suspected it was to prevent us from escaping once conscripted.

Something about the sea breeze was reassuring, though, reminding me of home. Crashing waves against the cliff sides and the loud call of seabirds were the lullabies I’d fallen asleep to for most of my life.

As someone jostled into me from behind, I gritted my teeth. The ocean of people before me, however, was far too new. Until Ovl—the sea port governed by the Fourth Line, which supported the only ferry from the mainland to Boellium—I’d never seenmore than a hundred people in a room together. The lands of the Ninth Line were vast, and our population was sparse. It was a rare occasion that would bring us altogether to the Keep.

But on that one dock in Ovl, there’d been more people than I’d seen in my whole life. Hundreds of people from different classes, Lines, and professions, all crammed together perilously on a dock that I was sure couldn’t hold us all. It was by sheer will that I hadn’t had a panic attack right then and there.

Too many people. Too much noise.

And it smelled like ass.

Ass and rotten fish.

The misery of the day had been exasperated by the fact that I wasn’t a natural seafarer. I’d spent half of the six-hour ferry journey throwing up over the side and feeding the marine life in the Alutian Sea. All that meant I was starving now.

Walking into the food hall, I saw the room was segregated by Lines. I didn’t need to ask which one was mine; it was the only one that was empty in a sea of people. Heading over to the trestle tables that ran along the sides of the room, I grabbed a tray and a traditional Falain dinner plate. They were segmented plates with high edges, so you could scoop many different types of food into the one dish without any of the items touching, unless you wished. They were popular mostly here at Boellium War College, and more particularly on Boemouthe Island, the home of the Tenth Line, who cared for the college and lived out here in social exclusion by themselves.

Despite their isolation, one look at the Tenth Line table showed they were happy enough with their lot in life. Twelve conscripts sat around their table, which was a lot, but I could understand it. Many would come to work here at the college, or join the armed ranks that protected it. To the Tenth Line, Boellium War College was their way of life.

The next most populated table had twice that many people. Maybe more.

“They’re the Twelfth Line,” the girl behind me in the food queue said. “They’re in the middle of a famine after all their crops failed for the last three years running, so they’ve sent as many of their young people as they can to Boellium. Better to die at the end of a sword than from a hungry belly.”

I lifted my head in agreement, but didn’t turn to answer her. What a decision to make out there in the far western plains of Ebrus. To send away all your young people, or hope the next year’s crop took so they wouldn’t die.

“I heard that Master Proxius is turning them away now,” the next guy down the line added, and the girl behind me sighed heavily.

“Be real, Jacob. They’re never going to turn away cannon fodder for war.”

Normally, I’d agree. But that was the weird thing about our conscription laws; we weren’t actively at war. Hell, we hadn’t been to war in over five hundred years. But we still maintained a highly skilled army, and if I was a betting woman, I didn’t think it was for use against forces outside Ebrus’s borders.

I finished piling food on my plate, then turned from the buffet tables without responding to the people behind me. Their words, however, played on my mind, and I couldn’t help but look at the Twelfth Line table once more. The conscripts were stacked on top of each other, two to a small chair, with some even sitting on the table as they ate. I could see which ones were fresh recruits because they were so gaunt, their eyes sunken into their skulls and their hair stringy. They were falling on their food like savages.

---