A long, ringing signal tore Owen out of sleep.
He lay still beneath the unfamiliar blankets and listened to it echo back and forth between the stone buildings. By the time it faded, the corridor outside had come alive. Footsteps went past his door. Doors opened and banged shut, and someone farther down called out to someone else to hurry up.
Owen sat up and stretched.
A dull ache ran along his left side as he did. The healers had done their work, and his arm moved as it should, but the muscle where the claws had torn him was still stiff, and his body felt heavy, as though it hadn’t quite finished recovering from the day before.
Through the window, the sky was beginning to pale. Grey light lay across the courtyard below, and a few of the new cadets were already crossing it.
His trunk had been left outside his door at some point during the night, so he had clean clothes at least. He washed quickly and dressed in his own things. Shaw had told them uniforms would come later today.
While he dressed, he thought about Gareth on the path last night. How pleased he had looked. And his warning, that the examination had been the easy part.
Owen wanted to find out what the hard part was.
He had stood in early formations before, in another life. He knew what it was like to be woken before dawn and told where to stand and how. But that had been an Earth army. Here, every soldier carried a bonded armament, and he had no idea how much of what he remembered would still apply. It would be foolish to assume he already knew how things worked.
Someone knocked.
Elias was outside, dressed, though his hair was sticking up on one side and he was still trying to fasten his collar.
"It’s barely even light," he said. "After yesterday. Do they want us dead?"
"You chose to come to a military academy."
"I chose to come and learn to fight. Nobody said anything about not sleeping. I want both of those things."
Owen laced his boots.
"You can have one of them," he said.
Down the corridor, several cadets went past almost at a run.
Elias’s eyes widened. "The courtyard. Shaw said courtyard, before breakfast."
They went.
* * *
The residential courtyard was filling up fast.
Some of the new cadets looked as though they had been awake for an hour, every button done and their hair combed. Others had clearly thrown themselves together on the way down. A few were still murmuring to each other about their rooms, or wondering out loud when they would get their uniforms.
The air was cool and smelled of damp stone and cut grass. Sunlight had just begun to touch the upper windows of the buildings around them, and the last of the night’s lamps were dimming.
Sergeant Shaw stood at the front of the courtyard with her roster.
She was already working through it.
When Owen and Elias came up, she looked at them once, pointed toward the others, and said, "In line. There."
They went.
Once all fifty of them had gathered, she began calling names.
"Abbot."
"Here."
"Adair."
"Here."
"Ansel."
Nobody answered. A tall boy near the back was looking over at the residential doors.
"Ansel."
The boy jerked. "Oh—here, Sergeant."
"When someone calls your name, you look at them and you answer clearly," Shaw said. "Again."
He faced her properly. "Here, Sergeant."
"Better."
She went on. Owen watched her move down the list, ticking each response against the paper, never stopping for long. Now and then, without looking up, she told someone to take half a step to the left, or to close the gap beside them.
"Calder."
"Here."
"Ferrers."
"Here," Owen said.
"Harcourt."
"Here."
"Loxley."
"Here."
A long run of names later, she reached the end of the alphabet.
"Ward."
"Here, Sergeant!"
It rang right across the courtyard. A few heads turned. Marianne, three places down from Owen, glanced over at Elias with a perfectly blank expression.
Shaw ticked the name off and said nothing.
When she had finished, she lowered the roster.
"This morning," she said, "you will have breakfast. Then you will be registered, and issued your uniforms and equipment. After that, you’ll receive your first military instruction, and your training schedules." Her eyes went along the rows. "Nobody expects you to know how this Academy works yet. What I expect is that you listen, you follow instructions, and when you are corrected, you fix it."
Owen saw several of the cadets around him loosen slightly. It wasn’t another examination, then.
Shaw had seen it too.
"Learning to do it properly," she said, "is still your responsibility. Don’t relax too much."
They stiffened again.
"Now. When I say ’column, left face,’ you will turn left. When I say ’forward,’ you will move off together, at the same time, keeping the space between you that you have now. Column, left face. Forward."
It went badly.
Half of them turned before she had finished saying "left". A few turned right. Several of them stepped off before the word "forward" at all, and walked straight into the backs of the people in front of them.
"Stop."
They stopped.
Shaw beckoned to one of the Academy soldiers standing nearby. "Corporal."
The soldier stepped in front of the rows and stood still.
"Watch him," Shaw said. "Column, left face."
The corporal turned crisply to his left, and stopped.
"You don’t move until you’ve heard the whole order," Shaw said. "The first part tells you what’s coming. The last word tells you when. Forward."
The corporal stepped off.
"Again. All of you. Column, left face."
This time, they turned together. Or close enough.
"Forward."
The column moved off more or less at once, and nobody walked into anybody.
"Better," Shaw said. "Halt. Breakfast. When you’re finished, report to the equipment section. It’s the long building beside the east residence. You will not be late."
Eveline and Marianne were in the queue at the dining hall when Owen and Elias came in. Both of them looked a good deal more rested than they had the night before.
"That was very enthusiastic," Marianne said, as Elias came up beside her. "Your answer, at roll call. I think they heard you in the forest."
"I was trying to make a good first impression."
"Well," Eveline said, "you certainly made an impression."
"That’s all that matters."
"I’m not sure it was the kind you wanted," Eveline said mildly.
Owen took a bowl and didn’t help him.
They found a table and sat down. The food was simple and hot, porridge and eggs and thick slices of bread, and all four of them were too hungry to say much for the first few minutes.
All around them, the other new cadets were talking about the formation, and the uniforms, and what they might be made to do afterward.
"What do you think they’ll look like?" Elias asked. "The uniforms."
"I hope they give us something we can actually fight in," Marianne said. "Not just something to stand around in."
"They’ll probably tell us what to wear for what," Eveline said. "There must be rules about it."
Owen ate his eggs and listened, putting in a word every so often.