– catching myself barely as I tumbled to the wagon floor. The cart shook again, rattling on cobbles, rattling my bones awake. Rubbing my eyes. Tall buildings rose to either side. A city grew around us. Baronbridge. Sod it for a bag of rats.

  I jumped and grabbed my kit bag and swore at myself but none of the others seemed to care, not even Sunder. Trapped in their personal purgatory. Well, I was going to escape mine before I got locked into it forever and I’d missed my chances, I’d missed them.

  So my very last option was Baronbridge itself. A city that thought itself the finest fox of the forest – surely there were places to be, places to hide, places where people wouldn’t get conscripted like rounding up goats for the abattoir. Buildings towered like a masoned forest canopy, stonework monoliths the likes of which would never come to Dreadfall. Too grandiose. Too unstained. Too many bellowing posters cascading their sides.

  I stumbled across the wagon and leaned out to them, eyes wide, fingers clutching. Half of them bayed tremendously over the war. More than half. Hefty, blocky, stencilled letters imploring you to support our heroes and cheer their names. A swathe had Oldfield’s face emblazoned over them and a dozen of his eyes stared out at me from too many places. But there, dead centre, a large pink sheet offering a few spots left in this year’s intake at a place called the Institute. Handwritten lettering. Head to the Old Castle Gatehouse, next right turning and up the Hill Road.

  I fell out the back of the wagon with all the decorum of a sack of potatoes. Such a tragic shame it was that no one shouted for the convoy to halt. A young hopeful gone to waste. Truly terrible. Would Oldfield ever recover? Perhaps, given ten seconds and a dram of cheap rum.

  Righting myself, I watched Sunder and the others trundle away – a couple of vague expressions like they were thinking of doing the same. I waited, but none followed. Maybe the sheer sacrilege of daring to stray from our fate was taking too long, too deep to register. Maybe they hadn’t yet learned, with one small tumble, one small touch, your life could deviate to a whole new path. As the train of wagons disappeared away deeper into the bustling city, I did the little salute they’d always made us do in the training camps. And I stared down the couple of handcart pushers who’d had the gall to stop and gawk at someone else’s business, then hefted my kit bag higher on my shoulder and set away to find the Hill Road.

  *

  “You look like you’ve come straight from recruitment, dearie.” The clerk at the desk peered at me over her semicircle glasses like she’d found something unknown to lore or science floating in her stew serving. Her skin was the same soft shade all over her face – and on her hands too. Round-headed; hornless. She grimaced a mouth of flat teeth, but the expression might have been from how tight her silver hair was pulled back in her bun. A popular Clearlander style. Looked awful painful.

  I’d already waited plenty long enough outside the door of the castle gatehouse composing myself for this, catching my breath, urging the stitch out of my side. If the ten minute slog up the steep Hill Road did me in so easily, then the war front had been callously robbed of a very trivial first casualty. And making it worse while I recovered, a tall and entirely unruffled figure had disembarked some carriage which had emerged from under the road, heading up the hillside, and he’d given me a thoroughly distasteful look, pointed nose held high. Typical Clearlander. I’d made a heartfelt gesture behind his back as he strode off through the gate like he owned castles bigger than this, then I entered. And I’d maintained my well-practiced nonchalant expression the whole time, and when I glanced down at myself in my thick, tough, outdoor clothes, I let my heavy kit bag ease a little. “This is just how I dress,” I lied to the clerk.

  She smiled like a fox. “Mmm. Only a matter of time until they come recruiting straight from our dormitories. Marching their hobnails in. They’ve no respect for decency nor propriety. No respect for anything.”

  “...So I can join you, right?”

  The smile came again and the clerk put an elbow onto the expansive desk that swept around the foyer of the gatehouse, as big as a tavern bar but with a fraction of the stains. I’d never walked on marble before, and between the black floor and the few white statues, there was more here than I’d ever seen. None of it in too hale a state. And though we were alone in the great echoing space, I still felt way too self-conscious, way out of place. “Do you know what this place is, dearie?”

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  I bit my lip. “It’s an Institution. Said so on the posters…”

  “And what do we do?”

  “You… institute things.”

  Her second elbow joined the first and I already knew I’d picked wrong. She laid her sharp chin on her hands, her nails all smooth and round. “Heed closely: scholars come here to dedicate themselves to the arcane. To study, to invest in harnessing the darkmagic which flows from the earth, to protect our society from the aberrant and unstable lightmagic of the skies. To shield the life of the earth from the searing light overhead. It’s arduous. Even the most astute can spend years here before getting anywhere meaningful, gradually climbing the ladder of magehood, and you can spend decades as a travelling scholar navigating the various Institutions across the realms and still not make any independent discoveries worthwhile enough to contribute to the field.”

  “So it’s a kind of college?”

  “Of sorts.” She smiled again. It still unnerved me.

  “So I can join it?”

  “Well...” She sat back a little and actually used her glasses to look at me now. Examined me. “You’re not at all the standard cohort,” she said carefully, the way you’d tell a tavern-keep the cider they're serving was stale. “You understand that board and education has to be paid for, yes? It’s a lot of dedication. A lot of commitment. A significant expense for someone like you. As much as we might like to have you here…”

  I checked down again at my rough clothes. “I can work. I can do stuff. Please. I’m very good at reading – I have a lot of books in my room at home. I –” I realised too late that if my boast of owning a few books might make me the exception in Dreadfall, here they’d probably just pity me. I set my claws on the edge of the desk and did my best to sound reasonable. “I don’t wanna be part of the war. I’ve lost people. War's just destruction, and I… If you study here, that’s constructive, right? You discover things. It makes a better future. I want to be part of that. I don’t wanna destroy and I don’t wanna be destroyed.”

  “Dearie, aspiration is nice, but it’s nothing without foundation. You do still need to afford what’s offered and it can, uh, be an investment.” Her smile wavered. I didn’t. “Where would we send billing to? Do your people have addresses?”

  I shrugged. “They won’t pay. It’s just me on my own really. So it’s either here for me, or I get recruited.” I didn’t tell her they’d already caught me once – they just didn’t tie the net tight enough. And I figured she’d guessed it anyway. Her whole demeanour was of someone playing backgammon on a street corner against a pigeon who’d shown an interest in pecking at the dice. “I wanna be here. More than anything. The war people have no respect for anything like you said, and I haven’t ever fitted in with them. I grew up around those obsessed with the destruction of others, and I… I don’t see how it won’t also lead inevitably to their own destruction too. I want to construct, not destroy. I can’t be them. Not ever. I just need a chance to show it.” I pulled close to the desk, gripping the edge. “Please.”

  The clerk leaned in again and spoke softly, softer than I thought she could given how tight her hair was pulled. “You’re surely not the first Forester to try it, dearie, but there’s blessed not many of you. Half give up within a year. Half of the rest don’t make the pass grades to stay any longer. I’ll get you the forms you need to fill and it’ll take you a hundredtime. I’ll be talking to the advisory office and we’ll see what we think about you.”

  *

  A hundred came and went and I was still filling out papers on a chair in the corner of the chamber. I could tell exactly how much time was passing, and not just by how numb my squashed tail had been going or how rain had grown to a chatter on the window, dipping the room into an untimely evening. The great clock which loomed over Dreadfall’s market square worked just the same as the one on the wall here – so I was proficient in that skill at least, but not quite so much in the creation of words and letters. I made sure to glance over at the clerk every so often as she left and returned, fiddling the quill around my fingers like I was lost in contemplation over one of the many essay questions on exactly what I wanted to achieve at the Institute, or what instigating event had inspired me to pursue this path; space for a list of noteworthy people in my name or lineage, or who my greatest role models were – arcane or otherwise, or if I had any idea of my desired specialisation field yet. In reality, half of it was creating the most robust yet maintainable lie, the other half remembering what letters went in each word and what lines I’d have to make for them.

  I could read and write better than anyone I knew. Not much call for it in Dreadfall or the wider Sunken Woods, not a thing many Foresters burdened themselves with. But I’d persisted out of a sheer need to escape, to save what was left of myself, to give myself a path, and once he was old enough, I tried my best to teach my brother too.

  Turns out it didn’t save either of us.

  None of that went on the forms, of course. On the forms, my life was way simpler, way prettier, way more ideal for what I figured they were looking for. I was Morrigan Oakley. Aspiring arcanist. Independent learner. Eclectic upbringing. Varied interests. And I was astute as well, because I remembered the clerk using that word. Hoped it meant something good. I was everything the Institute wanted – as far as they would ever know. I’d be perfect for them. Because I had no choice not to be.