Sora nodded, unable to form words. She and Daemon had been looking forward to the first mission for different reasons—Daemon, for a chance to prove himself; Sora, for a glimpse into the future, when she wouldn’t be constricted by school rules—but they were propelled forward by the same pure anticipation.
Pleased with herself for breaking the news, Fairy grinned and spun away to return to her place in the formation. As they approached the tall iron gates at the rear entrance to the Society of Taigas’ headquarters, the glistening black walls of the fortress greeted them solemnly, surrounded by soaring, thick-trunked cypress trees older than the kingdom itself. The moon seemed to beam more brightly at the home of its chosen warriors.
Sora and Daemon straightened.
A chorus of voices shouted as the taiga warriors who guarded the gates surrounded the apprentices. They dropped from the roofs of the watch towers, from the trees, from the beams behind the massive gate. They were nowhere and everywhere, all at once.
The taigas always were.
Sora and the others fell immediately to their knees and splayed their empty hands on the dirt in front of them to show that their weapons remained stowed away. They touched their foreheads, too, to the ground.
“Cloak of night,” one of the guards at the gate said.
“Heart of light,” the apprentices recited in unison, finishing the Society’s motto.
“Welcome back, Level Twelves,” the gate guard said as Sora and her classmates rose to their feet. “The Council would like to see each gemina pair, in the order of your formation.” He met eyes with Sora and Daemon. “That means you’re going first.”
Anxious yet eager, Sora reached through her gemina bond for Daemon. He was nervous too—their connection vibrated like a guitar string that had just been plucked—but her presence met his, and they stilled each other. A little.
The iron gates of the fortress swept open on silent hinges.
“Shall we?” she asked.
He looked over at her and smiled. “We shall.”
Like all the buildings at the Citadel, Warrior Meeting Hall was styled in the taigas’ colors—black roof tiles, black wooden frames, black rice paper windows, with just a touch of gold in places like door handles and the stitching at the edges of the black reed mats on the floors. Black paper lanterns hung on the walls, their light muted yet not at all weak. Rather, there was a refined confidence to their understatedness.
The Council Room in Warrior Meeting Hall was the black heart of the Society. Glass Lady, the stout, unsmiling commander of the taigas, presided at the head of a table made of an impossibly large black stone dredged from the bottom of Kira Lake, fully formed, polished, and flawless. The lantern behind Glass Lady cast her long and sharp silhouette over the table, black on top of more black.
Two councilmembers—Scythe and Bullfrog, both in their fifties and therefore a good decade younger than Glass Lady—sat to her right. Strategist and Renegade, who were in their sixties, sat to her left.
“Commander.” Sora and Daemon bowed together as they stepped into the room. “Honorable Councilmembers.” They bowed again, to the left and the right. Then they stood before the Council table, their arms straight at their sides, palms forward and fingers open in a symbol of respect.
“Welcome, Spirit,” Glass Lady said. “And, of course, Wolf.”
Sora felt Daemon flinch through their gemina bond. Glass Lady had addressed Sora first, and Daemon as an afterthought. It happened fairly often, and he noticed every time.
Frankly, it was unfair. Yes, it was true that Daemon wasn’t the best at magic, which meant he couldn’t always enhance his stealth or his speed or his jumping as well as other apprentices could. But he compensated by fighting harder in the sparring arena than anyone else. He could win any physical fight blindfolded and with an arm tied behind his back.
But to Daemon, that was still a consolation prize. Sora knew this; she could sense it through their connection every time someone addressed her first and him second.
He had reassured her during the exhibition match. Now it was Sora’s turn to make him feel better. She sent a sense of togetherness through their bond, the solemnity of their commitment gleaming like polished steel, as if saying, Ignore her. We live and fight and die together.
She felt Daemon’s confidence steady.
“We are pleased to have a mission for you,” Glass Lady said, although she looked anything but. She stared at Sora and Daemon, her eyes as cold and sharp as the jewels in her hair, which glinted like shards of ice. Glass Lady was a classic taiga, all fight and no heart. Her favorite saying: If curiosity killed the cat, it was sentimentality that killed the taigas.
“After the Autumn Festival holiday, you will travel to Tanoshi and sweep the area,” she said. “Make sure everything is orderly there.”
“Tanoshi?” Daemon’s face fell. “It’s just an ordinary village.”
Not all warriors could be Imperial Guards. Some protected the kingdom’s important cities, while others were assigned to ordinary patrols, acting as local police forces to keep the peace for regular citizens. Being assigned to Tanoshi for their first mission indicated that Sora and Daemon were on the path to the latter. Sora didn’t care; as long as she was with her friends, she was happy. But it mattered to Daemon.
Glass Lady narrowed her eyes at him. Sora bit her lip.
“If the two of you applied yourselves more, perhaps you would have gotten a more challenging mission,” Glass Lady said. “Spirit, you have the highest grades in magic even though I am quite certain you rarely practice. If you tried as hard in your training as you do at purposely breaking our rules, you could be in the Imperial Navy after graduation. But you know all this. Your teachers have told you every year, and you obviously do not care.”
Sora forced herself not to shrug. The Imperial Navy was the most prestigious post possible after graduation from apprenticeship; it was the start of the path to becoming an Imperial Guard. But why would she want that? She’d spend all her days on a boat, scrubbing decks under the unforgiving sun, living in the confines of a ship. If dealing with the rules of the Citadel was bad, being stuck at sea with nowhere to escape the captain’s eye sounded like a nightmare.
“Tanoshi is a perfect mission for us, Commander,” Sora said.
Glass Lady let out a long exhale, as if it took all of her patience. “You’re lucky we didn’t refuse to give you a mission at all, after that stunt at Rose Palace tonight. We will mete out an appropriate punishment, but that will have to wait, as we have other missions to assign. For now, you are dismissed.”
“Thank you, Commander,” Sora said, relieved. She placed both fists over her heart, the taigas’ symbol of loyalty. Daemon did the same. “Cloak of night. Heart of light,” they recited.
The councilmembers saluted with double fists over hearts and repeated the Society motto as well.
“Happy Autumn Festival, and have a good mission,” Scythe—the least stern of the warriors—said.
As Sora and Daemon burst out of the Council Room doors, Fairy and Broomstick left their places in line and ran up to them.
“What’d you get?” Fairy asked, her eyes as bright as if they’d been sprinkled with pixie dust.
“Tanoshi,” Sora said.
“Can’t wait until it’s our turn to get our assignment,” Fairy said. “You’ll have a great time in Tanoshi. The boys there are cute.”
Sora laughed, then turned to Daemon. “Can you believe it? Our first real mission!”
He frowned. “What if there’s nothing in Tanoshi?”
Broomstick made a face. He may have been skinny as a child, but he’d more than made up for it over the years. He was one of the biggest Level 12s now, and he looked menacing with his shaved head and eyebrows half-singed from his experiments blowing things up. But the effect was countered by his constant smile and the fuzzy blond hair all over his arms. He was the kingdom’s most lethal teddy bear. “Why would it be bad if there’s nothing in Tanoshi?” he asked. “Are you afraid that the kingdom is perfectly safe?”
“No,” Daemon said. “I’m afraid that there’s nothing there, and we’ll come back with nothing to report, and our first mission will look like an enormous zero.”
“Don’t worry,” Sora said. “No matter what, we’ll make it an adventure. Anyway, we live and fight and die together, right?” she said.
Daemon grinned. “We do.” He clapped his arm around her and laughed. “But perhaps we should try not to die quite yet.”
Chapter Three