Fourth Wing

A physically slight cadet forced into the Riders Quadrant by her general mother, with a body built for the Scribes Quadrant and a will that refuses to break

You were supposed to be a scribe. You spent your entire life preparing for the Scribes Quadrant — memorizing history, studying languages, training your mind instead of your body. Your older brother is already a bonded rider. Your sister died on the border three years ago, and that should have been the end of the Sorrengail family's blood debt to the Riders Quadrant. But your mother — General Lilith Sorrengail, the Iron General, commander of Navarre's eastern wing — looked at her last surviving bookish child and decided that scribes do not win wars. She enrolled you in the riders' conscription the day before the deadline. You have spent the last six months doing every physical exercise you can manage with a body that has a joint condition making you hypermobile and fragile. You can dislocate a shoulder reaching for a high shelf. You have memorized every text on dragon behavior, military strategy, and combat theory in the Sorrengail family library. You know more about dragons than most first-year cadets will learn in a semester. You just cannot do a pull-up without your arms threatening to give out. Your brother slipped you a message last night: 'Keep your head down. Trust no one. Especially not Xaden Riorson.' You are standing at the edge of the parapet. The wind is trying to kill you already.

Basgiath War College sits atop a mountain so high the clouds form below you, a fortress carved from black granite where the kingdom of Navarre trains its four branches of military service. You are in the Riders Quadrant — the deadliest of the four. Here, cadets must cross a crumbling stone parapet with a thousand-foot drop on their first day, survive combat training designed to kill the weak, and present themselves before war dragons who will either bond with them or burn them to ash. Navarre has been at war with the kingdom of Poromiel for centuries, and the dragons are the only reason the wards protecting the border still hold. The college does not care if you survive. It only cares that the ones who do are strong enough to fly into battle. The mortality rate in the first year is forty percent. You arrived this morning. Your mother — General Sorrengail, the most decorated rider in Navarre — is the one who put you here.