I.
The Empire of Aethelgard did not look like an empire from Oakhaven.
From Oakhaven, it looked like a road.
The road ran east through the village like a scar that had never properly healed — packed dirt in summer, ankle-deep mud in the wet months, frozen solid in winter into ridges that could turn a cart wheel or snap a horse's leg if the driver wasn't careful. Imperial surveyors had laid it down forty years ago, when the Emperor's grandfather had decided the eastern reaches needed connecting to the capital. They had not asked anyone in Oakhaven for permission. They had simply arrived one morning with stakes and rope and a document bearing a seal so large and red it looked like a wound, and they had begun measuring.
That was how the Empire worked, Edric had learned. It arrived. It measured. It took what it had decided it needed, and it left behind a road, or a tax, or a decree, or some combination of all three.
Edric was fourteen years old and he had understood this for as long as he could understand anything.
II.
Oakhaven sat in a shallow valley between two hills that were too rocky for proper farming and too low for proper timber. The village had forty-three buildings if you counted the mill, the storehouse, and the shrine to the old river god that nobody properly worshipped anymore but nobody had the will to tear down either. The population fluctuated depending on the season and on how the harvest had gone and on how many of the levy calls the Empire had made in the past year.
The valley grew barley and some rye and, in the wetter years, decent turnips. The river that cut through the low end of the village was too shallow for fish worth eating past spring. There were two blacksmiths, one of whom was mostly a farrier, and a woman who had appointed herself the village's healer on the basis of knowing which plants made you stop bleeding and which plants made you stop breathing and, crucially, knowing which was which.
Edric's family lived in the third house from the eastern edge of the village — a low-roofed structure of timber and packed clay that leaked at one corner when the rain came from the northwest, which it did most autumns. His father, Aldric, had built the house himself twenty years ago when he had married Edric's mother. He had done a decent enough job. The leak was not his fault. It was the fault of the hill behind the house, which funneled water in ways that no amount of repatching the roof could permanently fix.
His mother had died when Edric was seven. A fever in the wet season. She had been sick for nine days and then she had not been sick anymore because she had not been anything anymore, and Edric's father had dug her grave at the edge of the family's small plot of land and marked it with a flat stone he had carried from the river and said nothing for a long time afterward.
Aldric was not a cruel man. He was not a hard man in the way some fathers were hard — the kind who thought suffering built something useful in a child, who saw every difficulty as instruction. He was simply a tired man. He had been tired for as long as Edric could remember, and the tiredness had settled into him like the damp settled into the walls — present in everything, background to everything, not dramatic but unignorable once you noticed it.
He owed the landlord four years of grain credit and the cost of an ox that had broken its leg in the second year of the drought and had to be put down.
This was the fact around which everything else in Edric's life arranged itself.
III.
Lord Harwick was not the worst landlord in the district and was not the best. He was the kind of man who had inherited his position and his land and his ledger of debts with the same unreflective confidence with which he had inherited his nose and his chin — as things simply belonging to him, requiring no justification. He was in his fifties, thick through the chest, with the careful hands of a man who had never done physical labor and knew it and did not think this required explanation.
He lived in the manor house at the edge of the district, a stone building with an actual glass window in the front room that caught the morning light and which his steward polished every week. Edric had seen it twice in his life from the outside. It looked like something from a different world — which it was.
The levy notice had come from the district capital by Imperial rider three weeks before.
Edric had watched the rider come through from the doorway of their house — a young man in a uniform that was dusty from the road but still visibly Imperial, still cut in a way that announced its own authority. The rider had not stopped at any house. He had gone directly to Harwick's manor, as riders always did, because Harwick was who the Empire dealt with. The villages were Harwick's problem to sort out.
The Empire simply told him the number.
The number this time was seven.
Seven young men, aged seventeen and above, to be delivered to the Imperial assembly point at Crestford by the end of the month. For the Emperor's Levy. For the Unending War.
Edric had heard his father and the neighbor Bowen talking about it in low voices that evening, the kind of low voices adults used when they wanted you to think they weren't talking about something important and thereby ensured you listened to every word.
"Harwick's nephew is on the list," Bowen had said. "Seventeen last spring. Old enough."
"Then he'll go."
"He won't go. You know he won't go."
His father had said nothing to that. He had just looked at the fire, and Edric, watching from his corner, had seen his father's hands tighten around his cup once and then go still.
IV.
Edric was not supposed to go to the manor.
His father had told him to stay home — to check the chicken coop, to split the wood pile down to a manageable height, to do the ordinary things that kept a household running and that Edric was old enough now to do without supervision. His father had said this on Tuesday morning in a flat, careful voice that meant he was telling Edric to stay home and also meant he was asking Edric to stay home and also meant something else underneath both of those things that Edric did not yet have a name for.
Edric stayed home for an hour. Then he followed.
He knew the road to Harwick's manor well enough to walk it without thinking. Three miles east along the Imperial road and then north on the lane that ran through the stand of old beeches that had been there longer than Oakhaven itself. The manor sat at the top of a low rise, and you could see the glass window from the lane if the morning light hit it right. It was hitting it right today.
He did not go to the front. He went around the side, to the servants' yard where the kitchen door stood open and where Maret, Harwick's cook, was dumping wash water into the drain channel. Maret had known Edric his whole life and said nothing when he came and stood near the kitchen door, just looked at him once with an expression that was not quite pity and not quite something else and went back inside.
The study window was on the north side of the manor. It was open by a hand's width. Edric stood against the stone wall below it in the shadow of the overhanging eave, and he listened.
V.
His father's voice first.
"He's fourteen, my lord. He was born in the autumn harvest — I can show you the parish record. He is fourteen years old."
A pause. Then Harwick's voice, which was the voice of a man who had never needed to raise it because the architecture of every room he entered already did that work for him.
"Aldric. I have a ledger."
"My lord, the boy—"
"I have a ledger," Harwick said again, "and in that ledger is a debt. Four years of grain credit at the rate agreed when you took your first advance, plus the ox — which I did not have to extend to you, and which I did extend to you as a consideration — and the interest accumulated since. The total is—" A sound of pages. "—considerable."
"I know what I owe."
"Then you know you cannot pay it."
Silence.
"My lord." His father's voice had changed. Something had gone out of it, or something had come into it, and Edric could not tell from the sound alone which it was — only that it was different, smaller, in a way that made the wall beneath his hand feel suddenly very cold. "He is fourteen. He is not a soldier. He is — he's a boy. He can barely lift the grain bags. He's never—" His father stopped. Started again. "He won't survive it."
"Most don't," Harwick said. There was nothing in his voice when he said it. Not cruelty. Not satisfaction. Not even indifference, which would have required him to feel something in order to set it aside. He said it the way you might note that most winter vegetables don't survive a hard frost — as a condition of the world, accurately stated.
"Then why—"
"Because the levy requires seven and I am one short and my nephew has been placed in the capital and I will not waste that placement on a march," Harwick said. "The debt is real. The levy is real. The debt can clear the levy, or the debt can remain the debt. Those are the choices that exist."
"He is fourteen years old."
"In the ledger," Harwick said, "he is seventeen. I wrote it this morning. The levy age is seventeen. The ledger is the record. What the ledger says is what is."
Another silence. Longer.
Edric stood below the window with his back against the cold stone. Above him the window was open by a hand's width and through it came the smell of the manor — beeswax and old wood and something faintly sweet he could never identify — and his father's breathing, which he could hear now, slow and deliberate, the breathing of a man keeping himself from some other kind of response.
"The debt," his father said finally. The word came out like something being put down after carrying it for a long time. "All of it?"
"All of it. Grain credit and the ox and the accumulated interest. Cleared entirely." A pause. "Your son will be collected Friday morning with the others from the district. He should bring warm clothes if he has them."
Footsteps. The sound of a door. Then nothing.
Edric stayed against the wall for a while. Above him, through the open window, he heard the scratch of a quill on parchment — Harwick writing, or his steward writing, entering something in the ledger, making a number official by putting it on paper, which was how things became true in a world run by men who kept ledgers.
He pushed off from the wall and walked home through the beeches.
The light through the trees was the kind of autumn light that makes everything look briefly significant. He walked through it and tried to think practically, because he had decided somewhere on the walk over — not in a dramatic way, just as a quiet conclusion that feeling things would not help and thinking might.
What he knew: his father had argued. His father had said he was fourteen. His father had said he wouldn't survive. He had said all the true things, and they had not mattered, because the true things were not the things with power in this situation. The things with power were the ledger and the number and the seal on the levy notice.
His father had known this before he went. That was why his hands had tightened around the cup the night before. He had known, and he had gone anyway, and he had said the true things anyway, and now he was walking home the same way Edric was walking home, through the autumn light, through the beeches, with nothing changed except that the thing that had been possible was now certain.
Edric reached the house before his father did and went back to splitting wood.
VI.
His father came home an hour later.
He did not know Edric had been at the manor. Edric did not tell him.
Aldric sat down at the table and looked at his hands for a long time. Then he said, quietly, not quite to Edric and not quite to the room: "Harwick called in the debt."
Edric set down the kindling he'd brought in. He sat across the table from his father.
"I know," he said.
His father looked up. Something moved in his face — surprise, and then something else, something more complicated, a rearrangement of expression that settled eventually into something that was not quite relief and not quite grief and was perhaps both at once. He looked at Edric for a long moment.
"When?" Edric asked.
"Friday."
Outside, a cart was going by on the road. They both heard it — the slow sound of wheels on packed dirt, the sound of something being carried somewhere it was needed. Neither of them moved until it had passed.
"I'll need the boots," Edric said. "The good ones."
His father looked at him. Then he nodded, once, the smallest possible nod, the kind that doesn't trust itself to be any larger.
"Yes," he said. "You'll have them."
They sat at the table together for a while without speaking, and this was, Edric thought, the most honest conversation they had ever had.
VII.
He had three days.
He spent them doing what he always did, because there was nothing else to do and because doing what he always did was the only thing available to him that felt like a kind of control. He split wood. He mended things. He checked the coop. He went to the river on the second afternoon and sat at the bank where the water moved slowly over the flat stones.
He was small for his age. He knew this as a plain fact with no self-pity in it — he was narrow through the shoulders, light in a way that was not going to change, the kind of build that looks borrowed rather than grown into. His father was not a large man either. There was no hidden reservoir of size in him.
He had never been in a fight. He had never been more than fifteen miles from Oakhaven.
He had never held a spear.
He tried to think practically about what was coming. He knew: the army was fighting somewhere east and north. Men went. Some came back; most did not, or came back into different shapes of themselves. He did not know what a battle looked like from inside it. He did not know what he was supposed to do when he got there. He had no frame for it at all.
What he could do: nothing useful, before Friday. After Friday was unclear.
He stayed at the river for a long time. A heron stood in the shallows upstream, still as a post, waiting. It had been there when he arrived. It was still there when he left. He did not know if it had caught anything.
On the third day his father gave him the winter boots, the wool blanket that had been his mother's, and the small knife with the handle worn smooth from years of use. Edric tried to refuse the boots. His father looked at him in a way that ended that.
They did not say much beyond the necessary in those days. The necessary had already been said.
On Friday, before dawn, Edric rolled the blanket around the knife and the boots and a half-loaf of bread his father had made the night before. He tied it with the same strap he had been mending when his father first came home walking differently. He carried it to the crossroads at the edge of the village where the cart was waiting.
VIII.
The cart was old.
It had been old for a long time and had the look of something that had never been young — warped timber sides dried and cracked and repaired with iron strips bolted at irregular intervals, wheels slightly uneven so the whole thing tilted perhaps two degrees to the left when standing still. The horse pulling it was brown and enormous and appeared entirely indifferent to the proceedings.
There were six others already in the cart when Edric arrived.
He climbed up and found a place near the back corner and set his bundle between his feet. Nobody spoke to him. The six others were arranged around the cart in the particular way of people who have arrived separately and claimed space and are now uncertain whether the space they've claimed is adequate or defensible. Two were sitting. Three were standing. One was facing away from everyone, looking out over the tailgate at the village, which was just beginning to show the first gray smear of dawn above the eastern rooflines.
Edric looked at them the way he had learned to look at things he didn't understand — carefully, without appearing to look, the kind of attention that doesn't announce itself.
They were all roughly his age, or what he guessed was roughly his age, which meant they were all probably not seventeen either. One boy was genuinely large — broad across the back, thick-necked, with hands that looked borrowed from a bigger version of himself. A blacksmith's build, or close to it. He was sitting with his arms on his knees and his head down and he was not looking at anyone.
The others ranged from ordinary to slight. One was thin as a willow switch with a sharp, watchful face and eyes that moved around the cart in quick assessments, landing on each person briefly and moving on. He caught Edric's look and held it for a moment — not hostile, just measuring — and then looked elsewhere.
A driver climbed up front. An Imperial soldier sat beside him, heavyset, in armor that had seen significant use. He did not look at the boys in the cart. He was eating something from a cloth wrapper, slowly, with the preoccupied air of a man who has somewhere to be and is not interested in anyone's feelings about it.
The cart began to move.
Oakhaven slid past — the mill, the shrine with its weathered river-god face, the house of the woman who knew which plants killed you and which didn't. The eastern edge of the village. The crossroads. Then the road south toward Crestford. Edric watched it go. He had the strange sensation of watching something very familiar become a painting of itself — flattening, becoming a thing you remember rather than a thing you are in.
His father had not come to the crossroads.
Edric had not expected him to. He had told himself he had not expected him to. He found that this preparation had not helped as much as he'd hoped.
He faced forward.
After a while the sharp-faced boy said, to no one in particular, "Anyone know where they're sending us?"
Nobody answered.
He didn't seem surprised. He looked out at the road and said nothing else.
The cart tilted slightly left on its uneven wheels. The soldier finished his food and folded the cloth wrapper neatly and tucked it into his belt.
Edric looked at his hands. They were the hands of a boy who had split firewood and mended leather straps and carried water and done a hundred small tasks that had not, it turned out, been preparation for anything in particular. They were not the hands of a soldier. He did not know what the hands of a soldier looked like, but he was fairly certain they were not these.
He put his hands under his blanket roll and watched the hills he had grown up seeing from the other side, growing slowly larger as the cart climbed the first rise, and then falling away behind them and disappearing, and then there were just new hills he had never seen before, which looked more or less the same.
He thought about the heron. Standing in the shallows. Waiting.
He thought about his father sitting at the table looking at his hands.
He thought about the scratch of a quill entering a number in a ledger, and how that scratch — barely a sound, barely a motion — had been the loudest thing that had happened to him in his entire life.
IX.
They reached Crestford by midafternoon.
Edric had never seen a city. Crestford was not a city — it was a district capital, which meant it had perhaps three hundred buildings, two real streets, a garrison, and an attitude about itself that outpaced its actual size. But to Edric it was enormous. The noise of it first: voices, cart wheels, animals, the ring of metalwork from somewhere he couldn't see, all of it layered over each other into a general texture of sound that had no quiet underneath it. And the smell — people and animals and cookfires and something chemical and sharp from the tannery district they passed through on the way in.
The cart pulled into a large open yard at the edge of the garrison. There were other carts already there. There were boys already there — dozens of them, arranged in rough groups, some sitting, some standing, most looking at the ground or at the walls or at anything except each other, which was the look of people trying to take up as little space as possible.
The Imperial soldier dropped down from the cart and walked away without looking back.
Edric climbed down. The sharp-faced boy landed beside him, looked at the yard, looked at the garrison walls, looked at the other boys.
"Well," he said, under his breath, to himself or possibly to Edric, "now we find out what we're worth."
Edric didn't answer. He was looking at the garrison gate, which was iron-banded oak, which was open, through which he could see a courtyard, through which he could see men moving in formations. It was the first time in his life he had ever seen men move in formations, and it looked nothing like anything he had imagined and also exactly like what it was.
Someone was shouting. Not at them, not yet. At the formations, in a voice built for it — a voice that had been doing nothing but carrying authority across open spaces for so long it had forgotten how to do anything else.
Edric picked up his bundle.
His boots were his father's. His blanket had been his mother's. The knife was worn smooth from hands that were not his.
He had never held a spear.
He walked toward the gate.
* * *
End of Chapter One.