[Evelyn's POV]
The training yard goes cold the moment I step through the archway.
The air is warm, salted with sea breeze and the tang of oiled steel. But what goes cold is everything else: conversations die mid-sentence, blades pause mid-swing…
Thirty warriors turn to look at me, and the silence that follows is thick enough to choke on.
I keep walking with shoulders back and chin up. My training leathers are laced tight, hair braided over one shoulder. The way I taught myself in Mintia's corridors when the whispers followed me like smoke.
The warriors who sparred with me last week won't meet my eyes. They find sudden interest in their boots, their blades, the texture of the courtyard stone. The ones who do look carry something between suspicion and open hostility.
Nobody offers to partner.
I take my position in the open circle and draw my training blade. I begin working through forms — high guard, low sweep, pivot, strike. Every pair of eyes on my back burns like a brand.
I move through them again, faster this time. My muscles warm, my breathing steadies, and the rhythm of steel cutting air becomes the only sound in a yard that should be ringing with thirty blades.
The silence is worse than insults. This careful, deliberate nothing is a wall made of air. There's nothing to swing at, nothing to push against, just absence where acceptance used to be.
Then footsteps cross the packed earth behind me.
I turn. A young warrior stands at the edge of the circle — Brennan, one of the newer marks. He is barely twenty, narrow face, ears that stick out beneath cropped brown hair.
I remember him from the qualifiers: he'd slipped in mud during the obstacle course, gone down hard, and I'd hauled him up by the collar before the proctor could disqualify him.
He doesn't speak, just raises his training blade into guard position.
I raise my blade to match. "Thank you," I say quietly.
"Don't thank me." His voice comes out thin, strained. "Just spar."
We do. It's stiff, formal, nothing like our easy exchanges before — when he'd laugh at his own mistakes and I'd show him the hip rotation that fixes a weak slash.
Now every strike is measured. Every parry is careful. He's sparring with me the way you handle something that might bite.
But he's here. He stepped into the circle when nobody else would.
We finish three rounds. Two more warriors drift in — a tall woman named Seren and a stocky man whose name I've never learned. They don't announce themselves.
Just raise their blades when Brennan steps back, their eyes flicking toward the senior fighters for disapproval.
I spar with each. The exchanges are cautious and distant, but it's contact. Steel meeting steel — the basic language of this place, spoken haltingly.
By the session's end, I've sparred with four people out of thirty.
The rest watched from the edges, arms crossed, stone-faced. Twenty-six people who looked at me and decided that whatever I'd earned in the arena, whatever the Protocol declared: I am still the daughter of the house that killed their people.
That stain doesn't wash out with training drills.
I sheathe my blade and walk out without looking back. My legs hold until I round the corner, and then the trembling starts: deep in my thighs, climbing through my core, spreading until my hands shake and my jaw aches from clenching.
I press my back against the cool stone and breathe. Not from exertion, but from the effort of holding my composure while twenty-six people decided I'm not worth the risk.
Venna wasn't in the yard. She hasn't been seen on the training grounds since the revelation — stripped of rank, carrying her treason like a brand. Her absence should feel like relief, but instead, it feels like a held breath.
The tunnels to the sea caves are familiar now: narrow passages winding through the cliff's bones, the air shifting from warm stone to cool salt. Torchlight gives way to pale glow seeping through the natural arch where moonlight enters, reflected off dark water.
Aspis is waiting.
Her wings fold against her flanks: massive, powerful, wings that could carry a rider. She lifts her head as I enter, violet eyes finding me, and a low croon echoes off the cavern walls.
I cross to her and press my forehead against her snout. The scales are warm beneath my skin, and the bond hums with a resonance that steadies everything the training yard shattered.
"It was hard today," I murmur to her.
"I felt it. Every cold shoulder and every turned back. Their fear tastes like copper through our bond."
"Four people sparred with me out of thirty. That's something."
"Well, it is the beginning. That’s where we live, you and I."
I smile despite the ache in my chest and run my hand along the ridge above her eye. She leans into the touch, a sound like a deep purr vibrating through her massive skull.
Then something shifts.
Aspis presses her snout harder against my chest, directly over my heart, and through the bond comes something I haven't felt before. A pull — physical, visceral, like a tide surging through my veins.
My muscles tighten, my heels dig into stone, and for a dizzying moment I feel what she feels: the cave walls pressing in, the ceiling too low, the water too still. The desperate, aching need for wind beneath wings that have never tasted sky.
The desire crashes through our bond with such force that my knees nearly buckle. I grab her jaw to steady myself, gasping.
"I am suffocating in this stone womb. My wings were built for the sky, Evelyn. Every day they grow stronger and every day the walls grow smaller. I cannot breathe down here much longer."
"I know, Aspis." My voice comes out ragged, stripped raw by the echo of her need. I press both palms to her face. "I feel it too. But the compound is fractured, Cassandra is still here, and if we—"
"You revealed yourself, and the hall knows my name. What remains to hide?"
"The timing. We need the household to see me as something other than a threat before they see us in the sky. If we fly now, every warrior who doubts me will see confirmation that Draven's judgment—"
"I have lived in darkness since I hatched." The words vibrate through my bones, resonant and deep. "I have been patient. I have waited while you hid, while you fought, while you bled for their acceptance. I am telling you now — soon, or I choose for us."
The ultimatum settles between us like stone.
I hold her gaze, feeling the truth through every fiber of our bond. She means it. My dragon has reached the edge of what captivity will allow.
"Soon," I whisper against her scales. "I promise."
Aspis says nothing more. But her wings shift in the half-light, stretching wider, and the cave suddenly feels very, very small.