CHAPTER 1

The notice arrived before dawn.

Not delivered — there was no knock, no courier's voice requesting acknowledgment in the stairwell. It appeared under the door while she slept, or while she lay in the particular half-state that passed for sleep above a tanner's shop in the valley district, where the smell of treated leather soaked into the walls and emerged again at night when the air was still. She heard the paper's whisper against the floorboards, the dry sound of something being placed with deliberate quiet, and she was already sitting up before it had settled.

The seal was pressed into dark wax on the fold: a dragon, coiled tight around a sword, wings mantled. Imperial Standard. She had seen it before — eight years ago, on the soldiers' chests, on the documents they'd pressed into her father's hands before they pressed other things onto her family entirely. She recognised it the way you recognised the face of a wound that had scarred over but never quite finished hurting.

She read it twice. Then she put the paper on the small table beside her sleeping mat and lit the candle stub that was down to its last three hours of life, and she put water on the small brazier to boil, because her hands needed something to do.

Conscription Notice — by Imperial Order of the Warlord-Regent's Office, you are hereby summoned to present yourself at the gates of Thornspire Academy no later than the twelfth hour of this day. Failure to present constitutes criminal refusal of Imperial Service, punishable under the Rider Code, Section Seven, Article Nineteen. You are to bring no personal weapons, no bond-animals, and no more than can be carried in a single pack. This notice serves as your documentation of summons.

No explanation. No stated reason. No indication of what they wanted her for, or what they intended to do with her once she arrived, or how the empire's conscription mechanism had landed on a name like hers — a name that should have been buried in the same administrative grave where they'd buried her family's rank, their house records, their right to exist in anything but the most minimal of social categories.

She should have been invisible. She had worked very hard to be invisible.

The water heated. She made it into a thin tea from the packet of dried herbs she kept on the windowsill and drank it standing at the window, looking at the valley district in the dark hour before sunrise. The tanners' quarter was quiet at this hour — the heavy work started at dawn, and the smell that accompanied it was something you could only get used to in increments, and Ysolde had been here for two years and was about forty percent of the way there. Below her window, the narrow street held only the ordinary shadows of stacked crates and the occasional shape of a cat crossing with the furtive self-consciousness of cats everywhere. Above the rooftops, the mountain was visible — Thornspire's tiered black mass, its upper levels lit with the constant torch-glow of a place that never went fully dark.

Eight hours.

She began to move.

The first thing she did was count the coin in the jar she kept under the floorboard — not all of it, just enough for three months' rent, which she folded into an envelope and left on the table with a note that saidFor the room in the handwriting she used when she did not want it to look like her handwriting. Three months. She was not certain she would come back. She was not certain of a great many things this morning, but she had learned a long time ago that certainty was a luxury that cost more than she could afford, and preparedness was the cheaper substitute.

The second thing she did was visit her brother's photograph.

It was not her brother's photograph, technically. It was a small painted miniature of the sort that court portraitists produced for families wealthy enough to commission them, and it had belonged to her mother, and it showed Oseth at sixteen — two years before the night the empire dissolved House Craeven — in the formal posture of a young man who has been told to hold still and is managing it with enormous effort. He had never been good at holding still. Even in the miniature you could see the tension of restrained movement in his shoulders, the slight cant of his chin that suggested he was about to say something that would make the portraitist sigh.

She left it with Mevara, the woman who kept the shop on the ground floor, who was sixty years old and had never once asked Ysolde about her name or her history or the scar at her collarbone. She left it with a