“Turn to your right and march down the hall to the first door on your left. You will be sized and receive the outfit you will wear for your first year.” The very instant Mistress Madya finished, Jon turned on his right leg and, as the de facto line leader, set a pace for his sisters behind him. After all, he needed the outfit he would wear for the next year.
He barely took in the dark stone walls around him, but as he did, instead of marveling at them, or even committing them to memory, he simply accepted them as his mind rearranged itself to treat this place as the spot occupying his mental architecture as home. By the time he reached the heavy wooden door with the light spilling beneath it fifteen paces later, he could have described the route from memory if he’d been woken from a dead sleep to do so. He opened the heavy door, the weight and creak of which immediately seemed intimately familiar to him, turned on his left leg, and marched in.
An older girl dressed in a simple gray robe, with a dark red belt cinching it right, smiled at him. “Did Madya have to wake you the hard way?” she asked, clapping her hands once as her eyes twinkled. Two other girls, with green belts, rushed out with strings to measure Jon’s height, bust, and shoes.
——
Four minutes later, Jon marched out into the hallway, wearing a gray robe cinched with a white belt and gray sandals. He would wait as the older girl had told him to, until the rest of his sisters were ready to leave. Mistress Madya approached him.
“You. Kamiéra,” she said, looking Jon in the eye, and as surely as he knew what a sunrise looked like, he knew that he was also Kamiéra. “I’m making you the provisional leader of your company for the first Moon of your novitiate. Succeed, and you will go far. Fail, and you and your sisters will be punished. So excel.” She looked at Jon for a moment longer, then nodded to herself and walked away.
Jon knew he had to excel.
——
Madya walked down the hallway back to the First Anteroom. Solia, First of Her Name and Headmistress of the Academy, was looking at her with a wry smile. “Promoting the most talented one right away, Madya?”
Madya bowed to her superior and oldest friend. Then laughed dryly. “No. Promoting the most willful. You should have seen how that girl was even after I doused her with used cleaning water: bored, fidgety, her mind elsewhere. She will either step up into this role and grow into something amazing, or she will be humbled by being the last in her class — which in their minds will be forever.”
Solia laughed. “Speaking from experience?” They both laughed and set off down the hallway, not seeing that Kamiéra was making certain that her sisters lined up in perfect order and pacing, the effects of the Will and the Wind still on all the girls’ minds.
