But women were harder to gauge, probably because we were the same gender.
While Delia held her court, not every female cadet was against me. Some were simply watching, which was fine. I wasn’t collecting allies. I just needed to get through training and get my sister back.
When the laughter subsided, snickers and low talk buzzed in its wake. Something in me recognized the closing window—speak now, or let the factions harden and lose the room entirely.
I pushed my tray back and stood. My height, for once, played in my favor.
“Can we quit this?” I didn’t shout. My voice carried on its own, low and rough, cutting through the ambient noise. “All of it. The staring, the mean commentary, the rumors, and the fucking scoring points off each other.”
The hall hushed.
I swept my gaze across it. Hundreds, thousands of faces, most of them turned toward me now by choice rather than reflex.
“We’re training to be soldiers,” I said. “One day we’ll be on the same battlefield. What happens that day, whether we hold or we break, depends on what we’ve built here. Not our bloodlines. Not who we’ve fucked or haven’t. Not our past. What we’ve built.” I paused, then let my voice climb. “We fight together or we fight divided. That’s the simple truth, with consequences that don’t give a fuck about mess hall politics. When we bleed, we all bleed red.”
Several faces turned toward me in surprise. I’d always been a woman of few words and occasional dry humor.
“The federal government is gone. The old system wiped out,” I said. “But we’re still here. Still Americans, most of us, or the children of Americans. That used to mean something—what we owed each other. It still can. We still fight for freedom. Fight for the right side of history.”
I glanced at Delia’s table without stopping on it. “So how about we stop comparing whose tits are prettier or whose dick is bigger and start fighting to keep each other alive?”
A beat.
Applause broke from somewhere, scattered and genuine. A few hoots from the nearer tables. Some booing, predictably, from the quarter of the room that had already made up its mind.
“One last note,” I added. “Good-looking men, princes included, should not get in the way of fighting to live another day.”
More laughter, easier this time. The tension in the room released a notch.
I sat back down.
“Stand on the table next time,” Bryn said.
“Absolutely not.”
“You’d be magnificent.”
“I’d look ridiculous.” I pulled my plate back toward me. “And you know it.”
The mess hall let me eat my breakfast in peace after that. But I knew it wouldn’t last.
Chapter 17
Max
The north wing of Vossmark Training Center smelled of oiled leather and sweat. Two stories of bone-gray structure, rack after rack of practice weapons along the walls, heavy timber dummies bolted to the floor, a bank of narrow windows set high near the ceiling. Gray morning light came through at an angle and cut the mat-covered floor into stripes.
Weapons master Jack Xiao called us to attention before the last cadets had filed in. Compact, Asian, mid-thirties, with the settled economy of a man who’d stopped wasting motion decades ago.
“Dull blades.” He selected a practice sword from the rack. “You earn a sharp edge when I decide you’ve earned it. These will still break a wrist if you’re careless. Break a wrist in my class, you run the obstacle course left-handed until it heals. Are we clear?”
“Yes, Instructor Xiao!” We snapped to attention.
An hour of foundation forms. Guard positions, footwork, the geometry of a proper parry—the same sequence until muscle memory took over. Jack Xiao corrected my over-extension four times.
“You’re not a spear,” he said each time. “Stop using your arm like one.”
I adjusted. At Greyhold, Frost and Marco had given me the basics: stance, grip, the logic of lunging and parrying. But basics were not fluency, and the gap showed.
