Frankly, it was unfair. Yes, it was true that Daemon wasn’t the best at magic, which meant he couldn’t always enhance his stealth or his speed or his jumping as well as other apprentices could. But he compensated by fighting harder in the sparring arena than anyone else. He could win any physical fight blindfolded and with an arm tied behind his back.
But to Daemon, that was still a consolation prize. Sora knew this; she could sense it through their connection every time someone addressed her first and him second.
He had reassured her during the exhibition match. Now it was Sora’s turn to make him feel better. She sent a sense of togetherness through their bond, the solemnity of their commitment gleaming like polished steel, as if saying, Ignore her. We live and fight and die together.
She felt Daemon’s confidence steady.
“We are pleased to have a mission for you,” Glass Lady said, although she looked anything but. She stared at Sora and Daemon, her eyes as cold and sharp as the jewels in her hair, which glinted like shards of ice. Glass Lady was a classic taiga, all fight and no heart. Her favorite saying: If curiosity killed the cat, it was sentimentality that killed the taigas.
“After the Autumn Festival holiday, you will travel to Tanoshi and sweep the area,” she said. “Make sure everything is orderly there.”
“Tanoshi?” Daemon’s face fell. “It’s just an ordinary village.”
Not all warriors could be Imperial Guards. Some protected the kingdom’s important cities, while others were assigned to ordinary patrols, acting as local police forces to keep the peace for regular citizens. Being assigned to Tanoshi for their first mission indicated that Sora and Daemon were on the path to the latter. Sora didn’t care; as long as she was with her friends, she was happy. But it mattered to Daemon.
Glass Lady narrowed her eyes at him. Sora bit her lip.
“If the two of you applied yourselves more, perhaps you would have gotten a more challenging mission,” Glass Lady said. “Spirit, you have the highest grades in magic even though I am quite certain you rarely practice. If you tried as hard in your training as you do at purposely breaking our rules, you could be in the Imperial Navy after graduation. But you know all this. Your teachers have told you every year, and you obviously do not care.”
Sora forced herself not to shrug. The Imperial Navy was the most prestigious post possible after graduation from apprenticeship; it was the start of the path to becoming an Imperial Guard. But why would she want that? She’d spend all her days on a boat, scrubbing decks under the unforgiving sun, living in the confines of a ship. If dealing with the rules of the Citadel was bad, being stuck at sea with nowhere to escape the captain’s eye sounded like a nightmare.
“Tanoshi is a perfect mission for us, Commander,” Sora said.
Glass Lady let out a long exhale, as if it took all of her patience. “You’re lucky we didn’t refuse to give you a mission at all, after that stunt at Rose Palace tonight. We will mete out an appropriate punishment, but that will have to wait, as we have other missions to assign. For now, you are dismissed.”
“Thank you, Commander,” Sora said, relieved. She placed both fists over her heart, the taigas’ symbol of loyalty. Daemon did the same. “Cloak of night. Heart of light,” they recited.
The councilmembers saluted with double fists over hearts and repeated the Society motto as well.
“Happy Autumn Festival, and have a good mission,” Scythe—the least stern of the warriors—said.
As Sora and Daemon burst out of the Council Room doors, Fairy and Broomstick left their places in line and ran up to them.
“What’d you get?” Fairy asked, her eyes as bright as if they’d been sprinkled with pixie dust.
“Tanoshi,” Sora said.
“Can’t wait until it’s our turn to get our assignment,” Fairy said. “You’ll have a great time in Tanoshi. The boys there are cute.”
Sora laughed, then turned to Daemon. “Can you believe it? Our first real mission!”
He frowned. “What if there’s nothing in Tanoshi?”
Broomstick made a face. He may have been skinny as a child, but he’d more than made up for it over the years. He was one of the biggest Level 12s now, and he looked menacing with his shaved head and eyebrows half-singed from his experiments blowing things up. But the effect was countered by his constant smile and the fuzzy blond hair all over his arms. He was the kingdom’s most lethal teddy bear. “Why would it be bad if there’s nothing in Tanoshi?” he asked. “Are you afraid that the kingdom is perfectly safe?”
“No,” Daemon said. “I’m afraid that there’s nothing there, and we’ll come back with nothing to report, and our first mission will look like an enormous zero.”
“Don’t worry,” Sora said. “No matter what, we’ll make it an adventure. Anyway, we live and fight and die together, right?” she said.
Daemon grinned. “We do.” He clapped his arm around her and laughed. “But perhaps we should try not to die quite yet.”
Chapter Three
The next afternoon, Daemon and Sora made their way to Tanoshi. It was on the way to Sora’s parents’ home on Samara Mountain, where they would spend the Autumn Festival. They figured they might as well get their mission out of the way first, so they could relax during the rest of the break.
Before the discovery of tiger pearls made Kichona prosperous, the island kingdom had been unremarkable, subsisting mostly on fishing and agriculture. Many of the villages, like Tanoshi, still reflected this history, made up of small, well-kept wooden buildings with curved ceramic tiles on the roofs. Every few blocks, there was another impromptu shrine for this minor god or another. And thousands of acres of vineyards and apple orchards around Tanoshi perfumed the air with sweetness, especially now during grape harvest season.
They left their horses—and their taiga uniforms—at a coaching inn. In order to blend in to assess the state of the town, they wore ordinary layman’s clothes, which was always a bit jarring. While taigas wore stark black, civilians in Kichona embraced color, and lots of it—the more vivacious, the better. Sora wore a silk blouse modeled after a violet—lighter purple at the collar and sleeves, deep plum closer to her stomach, and a vivid starburst of yellow in the center—and her trousers were green, like the stem of the flower. Daemon had on a turquoise tunic embroidered at the hem with a pink-and-orange coral reef. He drew the line, though, at garish pants, opting instead for a pair of narrow gray trousers. There was only so much he could stomach to blend in.
Nevertheless, it was good enough, for the townspeople walked past them without a second glance. Everywhere Daemon and Sora went, people were smiling, pausing to chat with each other under strings of orange Autumn Festival lanterns or in front of crates of muscat grapes. They bought each other cold bottles of freshly pressed pear juice—traditional in this region of Kichona in the fall—and drank them together on the sidewalk.
“This place is so peaceful,” Daemon said, but it was more of a complaint than a compliment.
“Isn’t that a good thing?” Sora asked. “This kind of life is what the Ora emperors and empresses have always wanted for Kichona.”