The Royal Academy

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## Chapter One: The Envelope



I sat on the floor of my room with my back against the bed and my knees drawn to my chest, tears pouring down my face so hard that the world had blurred into a white smear between my hands.



The envelope.



I stared at it for a long time. It was crumpled from how tightly I'd been gripping it, its corners bent, the top edge torn where my shaking fingers had ripped it open. Half of the red royal seal still clung to the flap, like a wound that hadn't healed. I had read the letter inside only once, but I knew its words by heart:



*Mandatory conscription for all who have reached the age of eighteen and above. Report to the gates of the Royal Academy at sunrise, two days from the date of this notice. Failure to appear is punishable by death.*



It felt as though an iron fist had closed around my heart and begun to squeeze. I couldn't breathe. I opened my mouth and no air came in, and I pressed my palm to my chest, gasping like a drowning girl.



Eighteen.



I had turned eighteen only last week. One week! Father had baked me a small honey cake and lit a single candle, and he'd smiled his tired smile and told me I was a woman now. We had laughed. We had eaten every last crumb. And that night I had gone to sleep thinking the worst thing about my new age was that I would have to decide who I was going to be.



I hadn't known that the seven days that followed were a final gift, granted just before the roof came down on my head.



---



The messenger arrived before noon.



I heard his horse's hooves on the gravel in front of our house, then three even knocks on the door, unhurried and merciless, as if whoever knocked knew that what he carried needed no urgency. I was hanging laundry in the back yard, and through the window I saw Father standing at the front door, his face gone rigid. The messenger said only a few words. Then he handed over two envelopes. One bore Father's name. The other bore mine.



I don't know how I knew. Maybe it was because Father didn't turn his head toward me. Maybe it was because his back bent all at once, the way a man's back bends when someone has laid a boulder on his shoulders. I went inside and stood behind him, reached out, and took the envelope with my name on it, *Lina*, written in an elegant, looping hand that resembled nothing in our little village.



I ran to my room and shut the door. And there, on the floor, I read it.



---



This was not the first time the young people of our kingdom had been asked to take up arms.



Since childhood, we had grown up on stories of the First War, when the shadow beasts poured out of the scorched lands of the north. They were creatures with no fixed shape, wearing the form of smoke one moment and charcoal the next, devouring everything they touched until nothing remained but a pale stain on a wall. They said whole villages had vanished in a single night. They said armies that met the beasts with swords came home without their men. Humanity won only after long years and at a terrible price, one that mothers still wept over.



The elders said the war was over, that the darkness had been sealed behind the mountains. But the elders said so in whispers, glancing north out of the corners of their eyes.



Then came the last few months.



The rumors started at the market: flocks that vanished from northern pastures, woodcutters who never came back from the forest, the lanterns of the night watch dimming on their own at midnight. Then trade with the border towns stopped. And one evening I saw with my own eyes a flock of birds fleeing south in eerie silence, without a cry or a chirp, as though they were running from something they didn't dare name.



And now, this envelope.



The Second Great War was at our door, and the kingdom needed every hand that could fight. In the king's eyes, every hand meant everyone who had reached eighteen, whether a knight, a blacksmith, or the daughter of a worn-out baker from a village nobody remembered.



---



I knew I couldn't go.



Not because I was a coward. Because there was something inside me that no one must ever see.



I curled my right hand against my chest and stared at it, and I saw what I had seen a thousand times before: ordinary skin, thin fingers, a few small scars from household chores. Nothing to suggest anything at all. But I could feel it beneath the surface, that strange warmth that pulsed to a different rhythm than my heart, as though a small river ran through my veins in the opposite direction.



Since I was seven, Father had repeated the same words to me every night before I slept, so softly, like a prayer:



*"No one knows, Lina. No one, however much you trust them. No one."*



I grew up on those words the way other children grew up on fairy tales. I learned to hide my hands in public. I learned not to get angry when anyone was near. I learned to press down on that pulse when it swelled, to breathe slowly, to snuff it out like a candle between two fingers. And each time I succeeded, Father let out a breath of relief and kissed my forehead.



But I hadn't known then what would happen if I failed. I learned that later, at sixteen, when the king's men passed through our village on inspection and I heard with my own ears what they did to an entire family in the next village over. What they did to the father, to the mother, to the neighbors who hadn't reported them. They didn't stop at the one who carried the gift. They took everyone who had known them.



That was when I understood why Father trembled when he kissed my forehead.



And now I was to walk into the heart of the Royal Academy itself. To the place where they examined recruits one by one, measured their strength, and pried into their deepest secrets. To the place where there was no escape from the king's eyes.



They would execute me.



And before they did, they would ask me about everyone I knew.



A choked sob broke out of me and I pressed the back of my hand against my mouth so the sound wouldn't carry to the next room. But the tears wouldn't stop. And the warmth beneath my skin began to pulse faster, answering my panic, as if it wanted out.



*No,* I whispered to myself, my voice shaking. *No, no, no. Calm down. Breathe.*



I closed my eyes and began counting my breaths the way Father had taught me. One. Two. Three. Slowly the warmth ebbed and sank back into its deep place, and I snuffed it out as I always did.



But my hand kept trembling.



---



I heard his footsteps before he knocked.



Father had a distinctive walk, a heavy step and then a lighter one, because of an old injury to his knee that he had never once talked about. He stood behind the door for a long while without coming in. I pictured him there, his hand raised in the air, searching his weary face for words.



"Lina," he said at last. "Open the door, little one."



I wiped my face on my sleeve, hurriedly, then got up and slid back the bolt. I couldn't look him in the eye. But he came in and closed the door behind him, and sat down on the edge of the bed, and I sat on the floor at his feet, as I had done as a child.



We stayed silent. In his hand was the other envelope, his own, open now and read and defeated.



"I went to the governor's office at dawn," he said in a low voice. "Before the messenger arrived. I'd heard the decrees were coming, so I went to beg. I offered them everything I had. The land, the mill, even your mother's ring."



I finally lifted my head. His eyes were red, and beneath them were dark shadows I had never seen before.



"What did they say?"



He gave a short, joyless laugh. "They said it was no longer in the governor's hands. Nor anyone's. They said the north is falling, and the king allows no exceptions. Even the governor's own son has been conscripted." He fell silent for a moment, then added, more quietly, "I couldn't stop it, Lina. I'm sorry. I'm so, so sorry."



My father, the man who had carried me on his shoulders through three brutal winters, the man I hadn't seen cry even the day Mother died, was sitting in front of me with hands that shook like autumn leaves.



"Don't say that," I said, my voice failing me. "It isn't your fault."



"And if they find out..." he began, then swallowed the rest. He didn't finish. He didn't need to.



"They won't," I said quickly, too quickly. "I'll be careful. I'll do what you taught me. No one will find out."



He looked at me for a long time. There was something like love in his gaze and something like despair, and the two had blended until I could no longer tell them apart.



"You don't believe yourself when you say that," he said, with a gentleness that hurt.



I didn't answer. Because he was right.



He reached out his rough hand and took my right one, the very hand I had hidden from the world for ten years. He lifted it to his lips and kissed it the way one kisses something sacred, or something one is about to lose.



"Listen to me carefully," he said. "We don't have much time, and I'm going to say what I should have said years ago. Trust no one there. Not a teacher, not a friend, not anyone who smiles at you more than they should. Don't defend anyone if it costs you your secret. And if the moment comes when you have to choose..."



"Don't say that, Father."



"...choose yourself. Please. Choose yourself."



I felt the tears come again, but this time I didn't try to hide them. I leaned my head against his knee, and his hand moved slowly over my hair, the way Mother's used to.



And in that moment I realized I wasn't afraid for myself alone. I was afraid for him. For this tired man who had spent his whole life hiding me. If I was exposed, I wouldn't be the only one to pay. They would drag him out of his home, and out of his mill, and away from Mother's grave, which he visited every Friday. They would take the neighbors who had fed me when I was small, the old teacher who had taught me to read, the girl who shared her secrets with me by the river.



Everyone I knew. Everyone I loved.



The price of my secret was greater than my life.



---



When evening fell, Father went to prepare what I would carry with me, and I was left alone in the room.



I stood at the window and pushed the curtain aside a little. The sun was sinking behind the fields, staining the sky the color of embers. Below, the neighbors stood in small groups along the fences, faces grim. The fruit seller's mother was clutching her eldest son. Two young blacksmiths stood in silence, each holding his envelope. A little boy ran between them all, understanding nothing.



Then I raised my eyes to the northern horizon, where the forest loomed like a black line at the edge of the world.



And for a moment, I swear I was not imagining it, I saw the darkness there move.



It wasn't the wind. It wasn't swaying trees. It was something else. As if the gloom itself were breathing, spreading slowly, studying the world with the patience of a creature that knows time is on its side.



I shivered and let the curtain fall.



In two days, I would stand before the gates of the Royal Academy. I would look into the eyes of officers who didn't know me, and shake their hands while carrying in my veins enough to condemn an entire village. I would learn to fight, and pretend to be weak. I would smile when I should, and stay silent when I should, and sleep every night with one eye open.



And perhaps, and this was what I didn't dare admit even to myself, perhaps a day would come when I wouldn't be able to snuff out that warmth.



I looked at the crumpled envelope in my hand one last time. Then I folded it carefully, with fingers that no longer shook as much, and placed it in the small box under my pillow, where I kept everything I didn't want anyone to see.



I was afraid. Afraid beyond what words could hold.



But Father was right about at least one thing: I no longer had any choice but to survive.



And I would.