Palatine First (The Aurelian Archives) Read Free Page A

double-checking. Military-issued boots, laced and tied off tightly. The black uniform of The Owl, steamed and pressed and by some miracle, actually clean. The white patch of Atlas on his left sleeve, balanced by the pair of flight wings pinned to his right—what real pilots called a captain’s first feathers. Tonight, he’d take off those tiny gold wings and replace them with a bigger silver pair. If he didn’t completely botch up his test, that is.
    The student dormitories were as quiet as they always were on a testing day. For Eighteens, this day determined their level of success in their field. For the rest of the students, it just determined what marks they would be taking home to show their parents over the midyear holiday, but that was still reason enough to be studying rabidly.
    Swinging around, Reece put his fists on his hips and blew out a long breath. His and Hayden’s shared suite had been in chaos last night, its hardwood floors covered in books and flight graphs, its sofa turned into a bed for Gideon, who had stayed late claiming to help his friends study when really, he’d been reveling in the fact that testing day held no power over him. He already had his future figured. At this point, bad marks were more of a joke to him than anything.
    Hayden must have been up cleaning before dawn. The suite was back to looking like a handsome lounge. Both beds had been retracted into the walls, leaving a wide open space around Hayden’s crammed bookshelf and their pair of wardrobes. It was a standard suite, identical to every other on this floor, but it was more of a home to Reece than any place else. He’d be sad to leave it in another six months, when he and the rest of the Eighteens graduated.
    The handle on the bedroom door suddenly jiggled, and the door swung inward, revealing a frazzled-looking Hayden struggling with an armload of books. In eight years, he hadn’t changed much. He still wore secondhand spectacles and clothes that smelled like musty books and hung loosely over a very lean frame. He’d let his dirty gold hair grow out so that it brushed the back of his neck.
    “What are you doing?” Hayden exclaimed when he saw Reece. He dropped his books onto the sofa and dusted off the front of his wrinkled uniform. “You’re going to be late!”
    “I’ll be fine.” Reece carefully avoided the cloud of dust swirling around the sofa. “Where have you been?”
    Hayden hesitated, then fixed Reece with a level stare. “I took my test.”
    Reece scowled, scratching his jaw. It was important to be clean shaven on testing day. The judges were persnickety about these sorts of things. “Gid and I were supposed to be there to watch.”
    “I thought it’d be better to get it out of the way so I didn’t have to rush off after your test. Father and Sophie will want to congratulate you and visit, not hurry away to hear me recite theorems.”
    Chances were that was at least halfway true. Hayden’s twelve year old sister, Sophie, had had a liking for Reece since before she could walk.
    “Well, yeah, but—”
    “Reece.” Hayden pulled a book out from his jacket and added it to the pile on the couch, his voice stern. “Today is important. We all know it. There’s not a chance of you getting liscenced to captain in the Streams as an Eighteen unless you fly loops around the judges, Palatine Second or not. Besides,” he suddenly looked embarrassed, and lowered his eyes to the floor, “I… that is, I finished my test kind of...quickly. I think I might have studied too hard.”
    “Of course you did.” Hayden probably could have taken his vocational test when he was a Fifteen and passed it with flying colors. Come to think of it, he probably could have taken someone else’s test and passed it with flying colors, and no matter that the test wasn’t even in his field. “I know what this is really about. You’re nervous because you know you’ll be out of a job if I don’t pass today. After all, I can’t