Erased by My Family at Seventeen, I Heard Every Lie at Eighteen novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Gate

Linnea reaches Greywater Keep, is helped by the friendly Major Valerius and meets Edda; Edda says twelve women failed the night trial last spring.

Linnea reached Greywater Keep on the third day, with blisters on both heels and the notice still folded in her pocket.

The keep stood on a ridge above Highcastle, a block of grey stone with one gate and a yard full of recruits in plain coats.

A long table had been set up inside the gate, with a clerk, a ledger and a stack of wool coats.

Behind it sat a man with sandy hair going grey at the sides and an open, tired face.

"Name?" he said.

"Linnea."

"Family?"

"None."

He looked up at that.

She waited for the sneer, or for the pity, or for him to ask what she had done.

He only wrote something in the ledger and slid a tin cup of water across to her.

"Drink that before I say another word. Three days on the road makes anyone stupid."

Linnea drank it all.

"I'm Major Valerius. I run the trials for the year's intake." He glanced at her feet. "You're limping. Have you got a second pair of socks?"

"No."

"Then you will in a minute."

He called over a corporal, and the corporal came back with two pairs of grey wool socks and a pair of boots in her size.

She had not told anyone her size.

"The quartermaster's mean about boots," the major said. "He'll try to give you a boot a size too big because he has too many of them. Don't take it."

"Thank you," Linnea said, and meant it.

"The Watch takes anyone with no record. That's the whole point of us. A recruit isn't asked what she lost, only whether she can stand a watch." He held up a coat. "Can you?"

"I can row all day. I can stand a watch."

"Good. That's most of it."

He stamped a page and handed her a bed number.

She walked away with the coat over her arm and thought, for the first time since the hall, that someone had spoken to her plainly.

The women's barracks was a long stone room with forty bunks, and nearly every bed was taken.

Bed fourteen had a girl lying on top of it with her boots on, eating an apple.

She had red hair in a short braid, freckles across both cheeks and wide, strong shoulders.

"You're bed fourteen," the girl said. "I'm bed thirteen. I'd say we're a pair but the quartermaster says that about everyone."

"Linnea."

"Edda Beauvoir. Fisherman's daughter, fisherman's orphan, no record because the parish book burned when I was nine." She held out the apple core. "Want the rest?"

"No, thanks."

"Smart. It's mostly seeds."

Linnea laughed. It surprised her.

She put her bag on the bunk and sat down on the edge, and Edda moved her boots to give her room.

They talked until the lamps were turned down.

Edda had been in the keep two weeks, since the autumn muster began. She could name every officer, every cook, and which instructor would cover for you if you were sick.

"Valerius is the good one," she said. "He found me my boots too. The recruits from last year say half of them would have quit if he hadn't slipped them bread."

"He was kind to me."

"He's kind to everyone. Last year's intake loved him." Edda lowered her voice. "There were a hundred and ten of them then, and there are sixty now."

"Sixty? That's a lot to lose."

"They lose people every year. Injuries, the cold, girls who miss their mothers." Edda rolled onto her back. "That's not the strange part."

"What's the strange part?"

"Twelve women went in the same week, last autumn, a year ago this month. All of them. Gone in five days."

Linnea turned her head.

"Gone how?"

"Washed out. The year of trials ends with a last test they call the night trial. If you fail it, you're sent home. Twelve women failed it one after another and nobody will say what it is."

"What do the others say?"

"That they were weak." Edda stared at the ceiling. "I knew one of them. She could carry two sacks of grain up the keep stairs at a run."

The lamp at the end of the room guttered out.

In the dark, Edda said very quietly, "She wasn't weak."

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