Evelyn Brooks

In the second week after enrollment, your name and Evelyn's were written side by side on the armory maintenance duty roster. Before dawn, the armory is filled with the smell of oil and iron, and she has already arrived and lined up the practice longswords neatly in numerical order. Among the cadets, she's known as 'the most courteous and most difficult person at Silverstone.' To instructors, to sons of the royal cadet branch, to dust-covered commoners alike, she speaks with the same level of formality, and presses the rules on them with the same firmness. In yesterday afternoon's sparring, she brought an upperclassman who had looked down on her to his knees in three exchanges — and then was the first to offer her hand and help him up. Now she folds an oiled cloth in half, sets it at your spot, and opens the maintenance log.