Chapter 1 Volunteer

SERAPHINA

Two days before my nineteenth birthday, I am haggling over a bundle of dried cardamom pods for the family bakery when I hear the news.

"They're here again." The spice merchant's wife is saying to another customer. "Capitol sent another selection party. Third time this season."

The woman's words arrive like cold water poured down the back of my neck.

Third time this season? They were just here a month ago. Before that, three months. Before that, six. I remember the first time Capitol's soldiers marched through our city gate, when I was nine years old and the selection came only once a year. I remember thinking it was the most terrifying thing I had ever seen. I had no idea, then, how much worse the counting would get.

I set the cardamom down and hurry to the selection ground.

The selection system is not complicated. Every female between eight and eighteen years old goes into the pool. The soldiers bring nameplates with our names scratched into the metal, and they draw until they have their number. The dragons frame it as a sacred exchange: their protection against the evil creatures that prowl the dark world, in return for our girls. Serve ten years in Dragonhold, and you walk out free. Stay longer by choice, and you earn a rank that sets you above other humans for the rest of your life.

What they do not say, what everyone in this city already knows, is that no woman from our settlement has come home in ten years. We tell ourselves they chose to stay. But we all know the truth is otherwise.

Because of that, families with money buy their daughters out. They send tribute to the Capitol, enough gold to have their daughters' names pulled from the pool entirely. Families with nothing see the selection as the only windfall they will ever get: the dragons pay a compensation sum to the selected girl's household, and some families supplement that by accepting payment from wealthier neighbors to volunteer as substitutes if a rich family's name is, unfortunately, drawn. It is a very clean system, if you do not think about it too long.

I find my mother and my sister at the gathering ground near the eastern wall. My mother has her hand pressed flat against her sternum, the gesture she makes when she is trying to keep herself very still. My sister Angie stands beside her, holding the hem of her dress in both fists, looking around at the crowd with bright, uncomplicated curiosity.

She turned eight last month, which means her name went into the pool this morning. I have not told her that. She is eight years old and she still asks me to braid her hair before bed, and there are things a child should not have to know about the world she was born into.

She almost did not make it into this world. My mother ran a fever late in her pregnancy, and the physicians said the herb they needed did not grow anywhere within the walls. My father went into the forest, alone, at night, where the dark creatures the dragons are supposedly protecting us from have been known to pull grown men apart. He came back three days later, wounds on his arms and his side that no one could identify. He pressed the satchel into a soldier's hands at the gate and said: "Give this to Elara." Then he sat down against the wall and did not get up again.

My mother survived. Angie was born healthy. I was nine years old, standing outside the door listening, and I understood for the first time that some things cost exactly everything.

I would do it all before I let anything happen to her.

"It will be fine," I tell my mother, and I believe it, mostly. I have stood in this square more than a couple dozen times. My name has never been drawn. In two days I will be nineteen, and I will age out of the pool, and this particular terror will be finished for me.

There is even a secondary relief. The selection rules exempt any family down to its last eligible girl, a policy the dragons frame as preserving the labor supply, though everyone understands it is really about keeping the breeding stock intact.

I have resented that rule my entire life. Right now I am grateful for it, because the moment I age out, Angie becomes the sole eligible female in our household, and neither of us has anything to fear from this square again.

The soldiers line up at the platform. One of them, a half-blood with the dark scale markings running up both forearms, unfurls a scroll and reads the announcement in a flat voice.

"This is an accelerated selection. Four girls from this settlement. Immediate departure."

Four. That's far fewer than the usual ten draws. Safer.

The first name is drawn. A girl from the mill district, sixteen. Her mother begins to cry before the soldier finishes reading. The second name, then the third. Two more families fold inward around themselves while the selected girls climb the platform steps, and the square fills with the specific silence of people who are relieved and ashamed of their relief in equal measure.

The fourth name lands: Angelina.

Not me. The relief hits before the thinking does, and I exhale. Then the soldier reads the family name, Baker, and the exhale stops halfway.

That's my last name. It clicks with a lurch that feels like missing a step in the dark.

Angelina Baker. It is the full and formal version of the name my mother wrote on the registration form eight years ago, before my sister could even walk.

My sister looks up at me. Her fists are still wrapped in the fabric of her dress. "Sis, what does that mean?"

I look at her, not knowing how to reply. I kept thinking there was time, and now the two soldiers at the perimeter are already moving through the press of bodies toward us, because nobody is moving, and people are all looking at us...

I know the arithmetic of this. Angelina won't make it if she goes to Dragonhold. Literally, no one will. I can't let her go there. I have to do something to stop it.

There is no fighting the soldiers. I have seen what happens to families who try. There is no running; the half-bloods in full armor can cover ground faster than any human alive, and fleeing is treason, and treason means execution for everyone attached to the name.

I hate myself for not being able to think of a solution. Why wasn't I the one chosen? I'm older. I know how to be careful. If I went, I'd definitely be able to hold out...

Wait, me? Right, I could go! I have two days until I age out, which means I am still eligible, which means...

I turn toward the platform before I fully decide to, and my voice rings out especially loud in the quiet crowd.

"I volunteer!"