The man leading the caravan was a looming skeletal figure draped in a long black robe. His skin was an unnatural granite gray, his lips were mushroom white, and when he grimaced he flashed two rows of square, perfectly white teeth. The short sword on his back rested in a scabbard of white bark, and the sandals that moved silently on the dirt road were faded brown leather. The only source of color on his entire body were his eyes, and those were a shade of green so bright they almost seemed like they were glowing.

He was a Reeve, one of the Antorxian Empire’s sorcerer knights, and he was both our captor and our protector.

Magic practically radiated off his body, so thick and intense that even my undeveloped maja senses could pick it up. His particular magical signature felt cold and precarious to me, like fishhooks lodged under skin.

The other prisoners all had the feel of magic about them too. It was how they'd found us. But their signatures were still weak and hard for me to pick out, with no distinct sensation to them.

My magical training to date was practically nonexistent.

The Antorxians had stamped out all rival magical traditions when they'd conquered Losiris two decades ago. The legendary orders of Losirisian wizards who spoke words that moved the earth and carried staffs that called the wind were no more than legends. The Itinerants of the Abbey, with their connections to greater spirits of protection and healing, were nothing but bones littering decades-old battlefields. The Green Wanderers were buried beneath their beloved earth. The old king’s Interlocutors were just gone.

Now, the only magic left in the land was Antorxian sorcery, a magpie’s nest of looted arts and disparate traditions, unified only by the Antorxian Empire’s stranglehold on their practice.

I'd been apprentice to the scribe back in my village of Kirkswill. He’d passed on enough to me to at least sense and accumulate maja, but even that was dangerous knowledge to have, and he hadn’t known more besides. I couldn’t move earth or call wind, or even light a candle.

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From what I'd overheard listening to the other prisoners, not everyone knew even that much.

The Reeve walked slowly at the head of the wagons, flanked by soldiers in black and silver brigandines, radiating more menace than all their swords and crossbows put together.

He was a symbol of Antorxian tyranny.

The Reeve’s were no small part of Antorxian success. They were assassins, saboteurs, and armies unto themselves. And their diverse and unpredictable talents had apparently made countering them a nightmare for the Losirisian forces. This one was Master Eradicus, the scout who’d found me and all of the other potentials in the caravan. Kirkswill’s militia hadn’t even tried to fight them. Their lives had been worth more than a futile gesture.

As I watched him striding down the stony road, a wet leaf fell from the branches of a tree above. It landed on the back of his robe, where it stuck, just below his shoulder. He carried on oblivious.

The soldiers’ eyes were on the trees of the swamp as we traveled. They were wary of wild spirits and spirit beasts.

One of them held a fulminer, a hollow black iron weapon that could shoot a lance of magical energy hot enough to cook someone alive, but his presence didn’t seem to reassure the rest.

I was close to the back of the caravan, sitting in a wagon that stank of unwashed bodies and the animals that pulled it. I was still in the clothes I'd been wearing when I was taken two weeks ago, a white thigh-length shirt that itched where it didn't stick to my body, and a pair of canvas pants that stank worse than I did.

When I’d been taken from my home, I hadn’t been allowed to bring anything with me. Everything we needed would be provided — that was the lie they’d told.

So far, we'd been given two meals a day and a barrel wash once a week, and scarcely anything else.

One of the wagon’s steel-rimmed wheels went over another rock, and everything in the vehicle rattled.

I tried to ignore the pain in my joints and told myself the journey would soon be over.

We were in the final stretch now, driving on a stony dirt road that wound through a cold swamp.

Our destination was visible ahead of us, a mountain that speared up unnaturally from the forested wetlands, like the corpse of something enormous that had dragged itself here to die. Clouds hugged its frosted peak, while dark green grass and purple heather rashed its lower slopes.

A little way up, just before the slope became severe and impassible, a ringed fortress of gray stone sat alone on a landscape of blasted grass.

It was the place we were going to be spending the next three years. It was where some of us would die. Our prison, our crucible, Windshriek Academy.