The candle was down to a stub, and Raven still had half a page to go.
She wrote fast, hunched over the crate she used as a desk, one ear turned toward the corridor.
A strand of hair slipped loose and she pushed it back without looking — white as frost, catching more of the candlelight than it had any right to.
The sky outside her tiny window had already gone from black to gray, and footsteps were moving somewhere below.
She didn’t have long.
If anyone caught a kitchen maid with paper, ink, and a pen she wasn’t supposed to own, the questions wouldn’t stop at the pen.
Mira did not look back at the gates.
Looking back was for women who still believed they belonged to someone.
Raven read the line twice and tutted softly.
It was good.
She hated it a little, still.
Mira got the gates, the trials, the future.
Raven got a crate, a stolen candle, and a basin of yesterday’s dishes waiting three floors down.
She had built her heroine out of nothing, given her every door she herself would never touch, and some small, ugly part of her resented the woman for it.
No reader of Beyond the Chains would ever guess that.
The mysterious R.
Vale they wrote letters to spent her days scrubbing noble plates and her nights envying a woman made of ink.
She wrapped the finished pages in oilcloth, knelt, and lifted the loose floorboard by the wall.
The publisher’s last letter lay inside, folded small beside a knotted sock holding eleven coppers and one silver.
Four books’ worth of earnings.
Not enough to buy a single month of freedom, but hers — no Blackthorn had touched it, and that made it worth more than everything in the halls upstairs.
The last three sheets were still wet, so she set them beside the candle to dry instead of stacking them.
Beneath the letter sat a folded scrap of gazette.
She didn’t need to open it.
VALERIUS ACADEMY OPENS AUTUMN ADMISSIONS.
SPONSORSHIP OR HOUSE ENDORSEMENT MANDATORY FOR UNRANKED APPLICANTS.
Three years of gazettes fished out of Blackthorn waste bins, and she knew the academy’s rankings, trials, and scholarships by heart.
She also knew her own arithmetic and the reason why she was not worthy.
No sponsor.
No name.
No combat record.
No wolf.
That last one was what everyone focused on, anyway.
The wolfless maid.
Raven pressed her palm flat against her chest, the way she had a thousand times, and waited.
There.
Faint.
A flicker somewhere behind her ribs, like something asleep at the bottom of deep water.
It had never spoken.
Never given her strength, never let her shift, never done anything except exist quietly enough that she sometimes wondered if she’d invented it.
But she hadn’t invented it.
She refused to believe she had.
Weak was not the same as nothing.
Knock-knock-knock.
A fist on her door, hard enough to rattle it.
“Raven!
Kitchens, now!’ A pause, then “Are you dead in there?” Raven moved before her heart finished its first panicked beat.
Floorboard down.
Gazette and oilcloth under.
The three drying pages — no time.
She folded them once and pushed them deep into her apron pocket, smoothing the fabric flat over them.
“Coming,” she called.
“Should’ve been down already!
The whole house is up!” Footsteps stomped away.
Raven blew out the candle and stood in the dark for a moment, letting her pulse settle.
On the crate, next to the dead candle, sat a small piece of sweet bread.
She’d saved it from Thursday’s baking, wrapped in paper, because today she turned eighteen and no one alive knew or cared.
She had planned to eat it slowly, before dawn, as a private ceremony of one.
She looked at it.
Downstairs, someone shouted her name again.
“Right,” she muttered, twisting her hair into a knot and pinning her cap over it.
White hair on a wolfless girl — the older servants called it ghost hair, a bad omen, and she’d learned young that the less of it people saw, the fewer things got blamed on her.
“Even my birthday belongs to the Blackthorns.” The kitchens were chaos by the time she got there.
Every stove was lit.
Three geese were already turning on spits, and Cook was shouting about almonds that hadn’t arrived.
Raven had barely tied her apron strings before a sack of onions landed on her station.
“All of them,” said Marta, the under-cook.
“Soup for forty, and the good bread, also her ladyship wants the honey tarts the twins liked as children—” “What’s the occasion?” Raven asked, though the answer was already moving through the kitchen like steam.
“The young masters!” A scullery girl nearly dropped a stack of bowls in her excitement.
“Back from Valerius today!
Both of them!” “The Vanguard Program,” Marta said, with the reverence other people saved for prayer.
“Six weeks.
Do you know what that is?” “Yes,” Raven said.
Marta told her anyway.
“Top twenty in the personal rankings.
Only the top twenty get the invitation, out of the whole academy.
Live combat, survival exercises out in the wild territories, command simulations.
My cousin serves at House Merrow and their heir has never once qualified.
Never once!
And House Blackthorn sends two in the same year.” “Twins, both Vanguard-ranked.” The scullery girl sighed.
“They’ll come back stronger.
They say the ones who finish the program get first pick of everything when term resumes.
Postings, duels, mate offers—” “Chop,” Cook barked from the far side.
“Gossip after the banquet.” Raven chopped.
She kept her eyes on the onions and her mouth shut, and the anger climbed up her throat anyway.
Not because of the twins.
The twins could fall down a ravine in the wild territories for all she cared.
It was the ease of it that burned.
Alaric and Kieran Blackthorn woke up one day inside the right bloodline, and the world assembled itself around them like servants setting a table — the academy, the rankings, the program, the applause.
They competed, yes.
They trained, fine.
But the gate had been standing open for them since birth.
She had spent three years memorizing the shape of that gate from the outside.
And today, on her eighteenth birthday, she would spend fourteen hours cooking their welcome feast.
The knife came down harder than it needed to.
The paper in her apron pocket crackled faintly against her hip, and she went cold.
The pages.
She’d forgotten she was carrying them.
She couldn’t run upstairs — Cook would skin her.
Raven waited until Marta turned to the stoves, then slipped to the shelf by the dry stores, took a clean folded kitchen cloth from the stack, and wrapped the three pages inside it.
She tucked the bundle at the back of the shelf, behind the crocks, where no one would have reason to look before tonight.
Two minutes after the banquet starts, I come back for you.
“You look sour,” said Tilly, the youngest kitchen maid, appearing at her elbow with a tray of eggs.
She grinned.
“Jealous the masters get a party and you get onions?” “I’m not jealous of the twins,” Raven said, which was even mostly true.
And keep your voice down, she added silently, because heads were already turning, and attention in this house was never free.
Too late.
“Jealous!” Old Bren laughed from the sinks.
“What would she even do with a party?
No, girl, you should be grateful.
House Blackthorn feeds you, shelters you, keeps you in aprons — and you as useless as a wolfless pup.
Not every House would carry that weight out of charity.” Laughter rolled through the kitchen.
Not all of it cruel.
Most of them just laughing because laughing was easier than not.
Raven’s hand tightened around the knife handle until her knuckles went pale.
Do not react.
Do not give them a reason.
Survive the day.
She knew what this was.
They knew the date; servants kept better records of birthdays than the temple did.
A year ago, Bren wouldn’t have dared — the last omega who’d called her useless to her face had eaten his dinner through a split lip, and she’d taken her whipping for it with dry eyes.
They used to fear her fuse, a little.
Not anymore.
One more incident, the steward had said.
One more, and she’d be out the gates with nothing but the clothes on her back.
Out the gates sounded like freedom until you did the arithmetic — no wage, no reference, no wolf.
Winter was four months away.
So the kitchen had figured out she couldn’t bite back, and today they were poking the muzzled dog to celebrate.
Raven exhaled and reached for the next onion.
Survive the day.
The ceremonial horn sounded above them.
Alaric and Kieran Blackthorn were home.