Page 2 of Black Wing and Shadows
I turned slightly to see the cadet the instructor shouted at, trembling on the floor. I tried not to be obvious, not wanting to draw attentionto myself. The cadet—a small female with vibrant red hair—was clearly struggling to maintain composure, her body shaking violently.
“At-ten-SHUN,” another instructor commanded. This one’s voice wasn’t as deep, but just as sharp. Everyone stood tall, hands to their sides.
“I am Drill Instructor Asselin. I am one of many who will be here pushing you to your limits for the next eight weeks. Let’s cover some ground rules: One: Do what you’re told, when you’re told. Two: You should have nothing on you except the clothing you wore. Three: The next eight weeks will be hell, and some of you will not make it out alive—and a lot of you will wish you were dead instead. Four: If you have magic, you will not be able to use it. Don’t even try. To my left, starting close to me: Instructors de Grignon, Minet, and Ramuel. To the right, starting close to me: Rivet, Pascal, Ossent, and Quillet.”
The deep-voiced instructor was de Grignon, and the female I saw on the staircase earlier was Ossent.
“There will be eight hundred and seventy-five cadets starting training this year. If you didn’t know, we hold one basic training session each year, which starts on May twenty-ninth and concludes on July thirty-first. Courses start tomorrow, you were the last group to arrive for this year’s cadets. You will eat breakfast, lunch, and dinner here. Following dinner, you will stand in formation in the courtyard outside this dining hall. Now line up for dinner.”
Asselin strode off, and the room broke into motion as boots scraped, and trays clattered against metal. The line surged forward, the smell of grease and stale biscuits clinging to the air. A hard biscuit was placed on my tray, with the meat that looked entirely too old to be served. Great. If we didn't die from training, it would be food poisoning.
I carried it to an empty seat, the wood sticky beneath my hand as I pulled the chair out. The first bite turned to paste on my tongue, chalky and dry, tasting the way damp cardboard might if left in the sun. My jaw ached with the effort of swallowing.
I kept my eyes on the plate, counting each breath to ten, using the rhythm to anchor myself. Voices rose and fell around me, chairs scraped, aspoon clinked against a bowl, but I forced the sounds into the background. I reminded myself not to snap my head at every noise, not to let the chaos peel my focus away from the food in front of me.
Clink. Clack.
Boom. Smack.
Chewing mouths.
A cadet sobbing.
Voices overlapping.
Tune it out, I told myself. Bite by bite.
The clock on us ticked, though no one had said how long. My father had warned me—they would return, and when they did, we’d pay for every wasted second.
“Get the fuck up.”
“Whhhaa… whaaa… whatttt did I do?”
“You didn’t eat fast enough.”
“Was… was… was… was there a time limit I missed?”
“Was there?”
“Uh… uh… uh… no… no, sir.”
The cadet, another female taller than me with dark brown hair braided down one side of her face, looked petrified. From her constant stuttering, I felt bad for her.
After that little show, every cadet finished their meal and rushed outside to the courtyard, falling into formation. Instructor Pascal paced back and forth in front of us, surveying us. He stood six feet even, with light brown hair. From my quick calculations, there were two hundred of us standing there—shoulder to shoulder, twenty across, ten rows deep. I stood in the second row.
He stopped in the middle of us, glanced at the other instructors, and announced that they would be walking us as groups to our barracks to join the rest of the cadets who arrived earlier. He would take rows one and two, Quillet would take three and four, and the other six instructors would each take one row. The row we stood in now.
Wait. What. The. Fuck.
My mind spun. They were not going to place us with our intended branches. We would be bunking all together. I swallowed the lump in my throat. We were not technically assigned to the branch we selected until we completed basic training, and even then, there was no guarantee we would graduate into that branch.
No branches. No certainty. Just strangers piled into barracks like sacrificial lambs.
The forty of us followed our instructor across the courtyard and into another building. We climbed seven flights of stairs, turned right, then left into a vast room filled with bunks. I scanned the room, doing the math. On each side stood twenty triple bunks, making one hundred and twenty beds in one room. At the opposite end, two doors waited—one marked “Male Latrine” and the other “Female Latrine.”
“Attttennnnn-tiooonnnnn!”
The cadets already in the room immediately stood at the ends of their beds, creating two lines facing each other.
