The boat had left the village at dusk, and by the time the sky began to pale the next morning, few of the recruits had slept. They sat along the rails with their packs at their feet, watching the coast slide past. None of them had ever been more than a short walk from home. A boy near the stern kept pointing at things on the shore, a collapsed pier or a lone crooked tree, and asking whoever sat nearest if they had seen it too. Nobody told him to be quiet. Every so often someone would laugh at something small, then glance at the crewmen working the ropes and fall silent again.
Ruel had spent most of the night at the bow, sitting beneath the figurehead. It was carved in the shape of the Blood Deity, the old god the village had prayed to since its founding, the one said to rule the rivers and watch over anyone carried by their current. It was a long, crouching beast with its jaws open toward the water, as if commanding the current to stay calm and carry the ship to its destination.
Past the figurehead, the shore had lost its original color. The grass along the cliffs was the shade of old ash, and the trees stood bare even though the season was yet to turn cold. Here and there he could make out the shells of houses set back from the water. One still had its door hanging open, and he watched it for a long time as the boat passed, half expecting someone to step out, but the doorway stayed empty.
He knew from the old man's stories that these had been villages once, abandoned generations ago when people fled the spreading corruption. The longer he looked, the stranger he felt. It began as a pressure behind his ribs, faint enough that he blamed it on the sea and the sleepless night. It did not fade right away. When the boat drifted closer to the shore it grew stronger, and when the boat pulled away it eased. Something in him was leaning toward that grey land the way a plant leans toward a window. Strange as the feeling was, it did not feel foreign. It felt like an inherent part of him that he had never known existed, something he had always carried but that had never stirred until today.
He pressed a hand flat against his chest and looked at the other recruits. A girl a few paces away had stopped talking in the middle of a sentence and was staring at the shore with her lips slightly parted. When she caught him watching, she looked away and rubbed her arms as if she were cold.
Ruel turned back to the water. By the time the abandoned shore fell behind them, the feeling had gone, and he was no longer sure he had not imagined it. Above him the Blood Deity's jaws hung open over the current, and ahead of them, in the east, a thin grey light began to spread across the sky.
They reached the camp a little before midday. As the ship drew alongside the dock, the crewmen moved without a word passing between them, throwing lines and lashing them down with the ease of men who had done it more times than they could count. The recruits stood out of the way and watched, unsure what to do with their hands.
The port was larger than Ruel had expected, but nearly empty. A long wooden pier ran out into the water with posts for a dozen boats or more, their wood worn smooth where ropes had rubbed against them for years. Only one small boat was tied there now, its sail furled.
Still, the dock was not quiet. People had come down from the camp to meet them, well over a hundred of them, standing along the shore in loose clusters. With a small jolt, Ruel realized he knew some of them. They were older now, broader in the shoulders and paler than he remembered, but they were faces from the village, people who had stood in the square on this same day in years past and then quietly stopped being part of village life.
The moment the plank touched the dock, the recruits stopped being a single group. A girl ahead of Ruel dropped her pack and ran to a young man near the front of the crowd, and he caught her and lifted her clean off the boards, laughing. Two boys found an older cousin and stood around him talking over each other. A woman with a shaved head pushed through the crowd, took one of the recruits by both shoulders, and looked him over the way a mother checks a child after a fall before she pulled him into her arms.
Ruel recognized Hollis, who used to mend nets by the harbor and had once spent a whole afternoon teaching him to tie knots. He had left the village the year before. Hollis saw him at the same moment, and his face broke into a grin. He shouldered his way through the crowd, caught Ruel by the forearm, and pulled him into a hug hard enough to knock the breath out of him.
"Ruel," he said, and then just held on a moment longer, as if he needed to be sure. When he stepped back, Ruel saw a thin scar along his jaw that had not been there a year ago, and something in his eyes that seemed older than the rest of him.
"Look at you," Hollis said. "Gods, it's good to see someone from home. Find me tonight, I want to hear everything." Then he was moving on through the crowd, clapping another recruit on the back, greeting each familiar face the same way, as though every one of them was a small gift.
Not everyone found who they were looking for. The boy who had spent the voyage pointing at the shore went up on his toes and searched the crowd from one end of the dock to the other, then searched it again more slowly. Ruel saw the same thing happening in other places: a recruit turning in a slow circle, looking from face to face, the smile fading a little each time.
The boy stopped one of the crewmen and asked about someone named Tavin, who had left the village three summers ago. The crewman glanced down the long row of empty posts along the pier and said only, "Not here right now." The boy seemed to take that and hold on to it, but he kept looking anyway.
The path from the port climbed a gentle slope toward the camp. Halfway up, it passed a field Ruel first took for an abandoned orchard. Rows of wooden stakes stood out of the soil, each about waist high and carved down one side with marks too small to read from the path. There were far more stakes than there had been people on the dock. Some were grey and split with age, while others were still pale.
The ground around them was flat. It took Ruel a moment to see that there were no mounds of earth, and no sign that anyone had ever been buried there. A strip of blue cloth hung from one stake, and from another dangled a small carved fish, worn almost white by the weather.
Between the rows, a few people knelt with their heads bowed. A woman near the path had her palm pressed against one of the newer stakes, and her lips were moving. She did not look up as the recruits passed.
Ruel thought of his parents. Somewhere in that field there might be two stakes with their names cut into them. He kept walking and did not look back, because he was afraid that if he did, he would start searching.
The camp sat at the top of the rise, rows of long wooden houses around a wide yard of packed dirt. It was far bigger than the crowd at the dock could fill. Many of the houses had their shutters latched, and the hooks by their doors were empty where packs and boots should have hung, as if their owners had only stepped out and would be back any day. Smoke rose from only a scattering of chimneys.
At the far end of the yard, set apart from the other houses, stood a squat stone building with no windows that Ruel could see. Its door was banded with iron, and two crew members sat on a bench beside it with swords across their knees. Everyone else in the yard had turned to watch the recruits arrive, but those two kept their eyes on the door.
In the middle of the yard, the captain was waiting with a long line of older crew standing behind him. There was no stage this time and no speech. He held a sheaf of papers and waited until the recruits had gathered.
"You'll be split into teams," he said. "Each team has a lead. You'll live and train together, and when the time comes, you'll go out on missions together. When I call your name, go stand with yours."
He said nothing more and began reading names. It took a long time. One by one, recruits stepped out of the crowd to stand with their leads, and small groups began to form around the yard.
When he reached Ruel, he glanced up from the page, and his eyes rested on him a moment longer than they had on the others. "Ruel, with Maren."
Maren was a tall woman of about thirty with her hair cropped short and a pale scar running the length of one forearm. She stood with her arms folded and gave Ruel a single nod. There had been others her age on the dock, but not many, and fewer still who were older. If Maren had stood in the village square at seventeen like the rest of them, she had been out here for thirteen years. Ruel tried to imagine how many boat days that was, and how many stakes had gone into the field while she watched.
Three others joined him over the next few names: Pell, the boy from the dock, still red around the eyes; Ilsa, the girl who had stared at the shore that morning; and Doran, a broad, quiet boy Ruel knew only by sight.
Maren led them to a house at the edge of the yard. Inside were eight bunks. Four had mattresses. The other four were bare boards, and someone had carved initials into the frames.
"Pick one," Maren said, and sat down at the table near the hearth.
Doran, who had come in last, swung his pack toward one of the bare bunks.
"Not those," Maren said. She did not raise her voice, but he stopped as if she had. "Those four stay as they are."
Doran moved his pack to the bunk beside it without a word. Ruel saw Maren's eyes rest for a moment on the initials cut into the frame before she looked back at the fire.
When they had stowed their packs and joined her at the table, she had them say their names and what they thought they were good at, and she listened without comment. When Pell's turn came, he gave his name and then added, a little too quickly, that his brother Tavin was crew too, as if that might count for something. Maren only nodded.
Ilsa had been quiet through most of it. When the introductions were done, she said, "The people in the field. The ones kneeling by the stakes. What were they doing?"
"Telling them," Maren said. When Ilsa frowned, she went on. "Who came off the boat today. A younger brother, or a neighbor's girl they watched grow up. They go out and tell whoever would have wanted to know." She lifted one shoulder. "Most of us do it on boat days. It's the only day there's anything new to tell."
Nobody said anything for a moment. Then Maren added, more quietly, "Not all of those stakes are for the dead."
Ilsa opened her mouth as if to ask, but Maren was already looking past her toward the bare bunks, and the question stayed where it was.
Pell glanced toward the window, in the direction of the field, then back at the table. "Why are there so few people here?" he asked. "The camp's huge, but half the houses are dark, and there's only one boat at the pier."
"Because most of us aren't here," Maren said. "At any time, most of the teams are out. Some go for a few weeks, some for a season or longer, and the boats go with them. What you saw on the dock is whoever happened to be back, and the ones too new or too hurt to go."
Pell sat up a little. "So Tavin could be out with one of them."
"I don't know," Maren said. "I only got back from a mission a few days ago, and I haven't caught up on who went out while I was gone." She held his gaze. "The captain keeps a record of every team and where it was sent. I'll ask him tonight, and I'll tell you what he says, whatever it is."
Pell nodded, and some of the stiffness went out of his shoulders.
Maren was quiet for a moment, and when she went on, her voice was gentler than before. "But you saw the field, so I won't pretend with you. People go out, and not all of them come back. And some of the ones who do come back can't stay." She did not explain what that meant, and none of them asked. "That's why you're here, and that's why I'm going to train you hard. My job is to make sure that when you go out, you come back."
She stood, pulled a rolled map down from the shelf, and spread it across the table, pinning the corners with a cup and a knife. "Now," she said, "let me tell you what we actually do out there."