First Chosen by the Dragon (Evelyn) novel Chapter 80

[Evelyn’s POV]

The training yard goes cold the moment I step through the archway.

The air is warm, salted with sea breeze and the tang of oiled steel. But what goes cold is everything else: conversations die mid-sentence, blades pause mid-swing…

Thirty warriors turn to look at me, and the silence that follows is thick enough to choke on.

I keep walking with shoulders back and chin up. My training leathers are laced tight, hair braided over one shoulder. The way I taught myself in Mintia’s corridors when the whispers followed me like smoke.

The warriors who sparred with me last week won’t meet my eyes. They find sudden interest in their boots, their blades, the texture of the courtyard stone. The ones who do look carry something between suspicion and open hostility.

Nobody offers to partner.

I take my position in the open circle and draw my training blade. I begin working through forms — high guard, low sweep, pivot, strike. Every pair of eyes on my back burns like a brand.

I move through them again, faster this time. My muscles warm, my breathing steadies, and the rhythm of steel cutting air becomes the only sound in a yard that should be ringing with thirty blades.

The silence is worse than insults. This careful, deliberate nothing is a wall made of air. There’s nothing to swing at, nothing to push against, just absence where acceptance used to be.

Then footsteps cross the packed earth behind me.

I turn. A young warrior stands at the edge of the circle — Brennan, one of the newer marks. He is barely twenty, narrow face, ears that stick out beneath cropped brown hair.

I remember him from the qualifiers: he’d slipped in mud during the obstacle course, gone down hard, and I’d hauled him up by the collar before the proctor could disqualify him.

He doesn’t speak, just raises his training blade into guard position.

I raise my blade to match. “Thank you,” I say quietly.

“Don’t thank me.” His voice comes out thin, strained. “Just spar.”

We do. It’s stiff, formal, nothing like our easy exchanges before — when he’d laugh at his own mistakes and I’d show him the hip rotation that fixes a weak slash.

Now every strike is measured. Every parry is careful. He’s sparring with me the way you handle something that might bite.

But he’s here. He stepped into the circle when nobody else would.

We finish three rounds. Two more warriors drift in — a tall woman named Seren and a stocky man whose name I’ve never learned. They don’t announce themselves.

Just raise their blades when Brennan steps back, their eyes flicking toward the senior fighters for disapproval.

I spar with each. The exchanges are cautious and distant, but it’s contact. Steel meeting steel — the basic language of this place, spoken haltingly.

By the session’s end, I’ve sparred with four people out of thirty.

The rest watched from the edges, arms crossed, stone-faced. Twenty-six people who looked at me and decided that whatever I’d earned in the arena, whatever the Protocol declared: I am still the daughter of the house that killed their people.

That stain doesn’t wash out with training drills.

I sheathe my blade and walk out without looking back. My legs hold until I round the corner, and then the trembling starts: deep in my thighs, climbing through my core, spreading until my hands shake and my jaw aches from clenching.

“I felt it. Every cold shoulder and every turned back. Their fear tastes like copper through our bond.”

“Well, it is the beginning. That’s where we live, you and I.”

VERIFYCAPTCHA_LABELVerify