The cold hit harder the next morning.
Naren found Iris by accident. He'd been cutting through the main building looking for somewhere warm to exist when he heard the oversized boots before he saw her — the specific clumsy shuffle of someone trying very hard not to trip and tripping anyway.
She went down face first in the hallway. He walked past her. She scrambled back on instinct, eyes shut, bracing for something terrible.
Nothing happened.
She opened one eye. The hallway was empty. Somewhere ahead of her a door was opening and closing as the boy in the crimson scarf worked his way methodically through every room on the left side, muttering something about coats.
She exhaled.
"Uhm, they're over there."
He turned. Those golden eyes landed on her and she took a step back before she could stop herself.
She pointed at the far end of the hall. "That's the equipment barracks. Weapons and clothes and — uh — if that's what you're looking for."
He looked at her for a second. "Oh gotcha."
And then he was gone.
She stood in the empty hallway listening to the distant crash of coats falling off a rack, followed by laughter, followed by footsteps disappearing back toward the living quarters.
She stayed there a moment longer than she needed to.
It was nothing new, that particular feeling. The relief of being ignored and the disappointment that came right behind it, close enough to be the same thing. She'd been feeling it her whole life, long before her spite gave her a reason to.
She buttoned her coat — wrong again, she noticed too late — and went to find somewhere to be invisible.
——————————————————————
The two days passed the way waiting always does — slowly, then all at once.
Naren was still asleep when Vera started shaking him. He was still half asleep when she shouted something about an exam. He was three quarters asleep when he found himself being dragged outside.
——————————————————
Up front, Elara stood between the group and the main building. Soren beside her wearing a smug smile Naren didn't like even from this distance.
"I'll keep it short because I know you all are rearing to get started."
The whispering died. Every face pointed forward.
"We will play a game that I'm sure at least some of you have played. King's Game."
Elara's gaze moved across the crowd and settled briefly, pointedly, on one face. Dirty blonde hair, one eye. The man didn't react. Just looked back at her with the easy patience of someone who'd been looked at like that before and found it uninteresting.
"However, it will obviously be a bit different. For starters — you won't be given the crown randomly. You'll have to take it."
The main building behind her began pulling itself apart.
Stone grinding on stone. Towers erupting. Walls folding outward. The privates stumbled back, grabbed weapons, gasped. It reorganized and reordered itself, now looking like a medieval castle. Small bouts of whispers washed over the privates like a wave.
"The crown will be located in this castle. Any command the king gives, the castle will attend to. As your in there, you'll gain points as follows:
First to become king: 10 points
While crown is held: 5 points/minute
Issuing an order that gets a player eliminated: 10 points
Taking crown from previous king: 25 points
Eliminating a player: 5 points
Defying an order: 5 points"
Naren had finally arrived half asleep, being pushed by Vera. By now he was only four-fifths asleep finding himself standing in the back row of one hundred privates, Vera beside him, name tag already peeling off his coat.
He pressed it back. It peeled again. He left it.
"The king can only issue a command every five minutes and cannot fight back physically. He is also unable to issue orders that will directly get a player eliminated such as 'eliminate yourself' or 'fight him'. And don't worry about injuring each other, the nurse here has a healing fable."
Around Naren, the whispering had reached fever pitch. A thousand points for taking down Soren. Ariadne's Thread for highest score overall. He caught fragments from every direction, the excitement of people who'd been cooped up on a ship for days and were finally being pointed at something they could hit.
'So early to be so loud.'
His eyes were half closed looking around.
One hundred faces more or less, all of them vibrating with something he didn't feel. Pride maybe. Competitive hunger. The need to prove something to someone.
Naren tried to remember the last time he felt something like that and came up mostly empty.
There was the sister thing. That still pulled at something. But it didn't feel like what these people were feeling. It felt older and quieter and considerably more tired.
His eyes moved across the group without intention, landing briefly on faces and moving on. The tall pale woman in the back row standing completely still while everyone around her fidgeted. The sun-weathered man next to her humming something under his breath, barely audible, like he couldn't stop himself. A short girl with curly hair who looked like she was calculating something unpleasant. A nervous girl with auburn hair whose coat was buttoned wrong, her eyes darting everywhere except at the people directly around her.
Then one more. Dirty blonde hair, one eye, standing with the easy confidence of someone who'd never once doubted that rooms were built for him specifically. People had already arranged themselves slightly around him without seeming to notice they'd done it.
Naren looked at him a second longer than the others. A tinge of jealousy seeping into his eyes.
Vera tugged his sleeve. "Are you listening?"
"Yeah."
"What did she say?"
"Something about points."
Vera's turned away in dissatisfaction as Naren let his attention drift again, this time upward at the castle that had finished assembling itself against all architectural logic. It was tall. Taller than it should have been given what it had started as. The gates at the front were already grinding open, darkness pooling in the gap between them like something being poured.
He thought about Ariadne's Thread. An echo. Something that Bjorn told him about, he said it was similar to himself. A fragment of a fable that anyone can use once.
Naren had been half asleep when Elara explained it, but the words had landed anyway, bypassing whatever indifference usually cushioned things. "Leads you to anyone." He'd felt them the way you feel cold water — sudden and total.
Anyone.
The gates finished opening. Elara said something about groups of three. The privates around him began moving. One bumped into Naren, before locking eyes breifly.
"Sorry... uh."
Evidently forgetting Naren's name, the private simply averted their gaze, walking away to hopefully find a strong group. As his steps grew further, a slight smile crept up on the privates face. He was going get himself a good group and show the captain what he was about. He was going to make it up the ranks and make lots of money. He had to, in order to would get his family out of poverty.
——————————————————————
Two hours into the test, of the one hundred privates, only six remained.
A clumsy girl with a messy auburn bun, a confident man with dirty blonde hair, and a tall muscular pale woman, all around a little girl wearing a crown.
In another room in the castle, a boy wearing a crimson scarf was unable to move. Completely petrified by fear for the first time in almost ten years. He was bleeding from his head. Standing before him was a shaman, a lieutenant who was not holding back an ounce, murderous intent in his eyes.
The castle shifted around them as the two stared each other down. Naren breathed heavily, a shackled arm caressing his cheek.