The Sojourn of Intimacy

Evelyn Weiss. Evelyn Weiss has spent her life being exactly what every institution rewards. The wealthy daughter of two academy alumni, she enters Bruchwald’s officer boot camp beautiful, brilliant, kind, and destined for Central Command—without ever having failed badly enough to learn humility. Chosen as unit leader, she mistakes admiration for friendship and strategy for the right to engineer other people’s lives. When Elias becomes the first person capable of matching her ambition, Evelyn tries to control the future he may not survive, even turning intimacy with Merek into a bargain he never offered. Losing Elias, her officer career, and the immaculate person she believed herself to be forces Evelyn to discover that intimacy cannot be earned through perfection or secured through control; her victory is an entire unit that knows her at her worst and chooses her anyway.

Elias Valen. Elias is a magical theorist working nearly a decade beyond his age, but Bruchwald reserves advanced study for those who survive its officer track. Terrified of losing access to the work that gives his life meaning, he conceals a dangerous heart condition, suppresses his objections, and accepts a front-line assignment his body may not survive. Evelyn initially appears to be his perfect match: brilliant, ambitious, and capable of engineering the future he is too afraid to demand for himself. But her protection becomes another form of authority over his life. Elias must find the courage to stop earning permission to become who he already is—and recognize that what he needs beside him is not another perfect soldier, but Astrid, the rebel willing to defy the institution he fears.

Merek Gammel. Merek Gammel returned from his final field operation without the person he loved. After years hunting human traffickers in enemy territory, command assigns him to train cadets as a reprieve; instead, he makes their preparation as merciless as the world he expects them to survive. His punishments appear arbitrary but follow one rule: he can tolerate almost any intentional choice, including Evelyn’s attempt to influence him, but not an action whose consequences have gone unconsidered. His discipline falters only around Astrid, the eighteen-year-old cadet assigned as his life partner—a young woman he sees more as a little sister than a lover. Because assigned partners historically survive more often when they become romantically attached, Merek tries to manufacture desire as though it were an operational advantage, and fear for Astrid’s life makes him cling to their pairing when she chooses Elias instead.

Liesl Fischer. Liesl Fischer makes a joke of everything, especially the things she takes most seriously. Irreverent, desirable, and seemingly engineered to violate Evelyn’s every standard of proper behavior, she becomes the first person to like Evelyn without orbiting her—and therefore her first real friend. Beneath Liesl’s theatrical confidence is a history of being groomed by older men, which taught her to mistake the attention of powerful men for proof that she matters. Her genuine attraction to Merek turns into jealousy, and her big mouth exposes Evelyn’s affair with him. Repairing that betrayal will require Liesl and Evelyn to build something neither has experienced before: a friendship strong enough to survive seeing each other at their worst.

Astrid Hale. Astrid Hale never learned how to behave properly, and she has no interest in starting now. A fiery, foul-mouthed orphan from a frontier mining town, she was kidnapped into Bruchwald’s officer program for an ancient magic she does not understand—though she would have gone willingly for any chance to escape home. Unknown to Astrid, she has been assigned as Merek Gammel’s life partner; knowing this makes the ruthless instructor conspicuously lenient with her, because he considers preferential treatment the most efficient form of courtship. Astrid has eyes only for Elias and openly names Evelyn as her competition. Where Evelyn tries to keep Elias safe by controlling his future, Astrid defies every authority that would control either of them—and Elias ultimately realizes that he needs a rebel beside him, not another soldier.

Markus Weber. Markus Weber is the most competent cadet in Evelyn’s unit—and the one least troubled by what boot camp demands. Calm, observant, and endlessly useful, he is a brilliant actor who performs loyalty, humility, and friendship well enough to become indispensable. Inside, Markus has recast the unit as a private epic: Elias is his mortal enemy, Liesl the temptress corrupting Evelyn, and Evelyn the prized princess whose eventual choice will prove that Markus is the hero destiny promised. He does not love her; he is not capable of love. Every kindness, sacrifice, and victory points toward making himself important, and the occasional crack in his performance offers only a glimpse of the antagonist he has not yet decided to become.

Richter Valen. Richter Valen has made himself into everything Bruchwald asks a soldier to be: disciplined, obedient, fiercely patriotic, and willing to die without complaint. Elias’s less-gifted cousin, he lacks the independent judgment Merek believes an officer requires, making him the highest-grade cannon fodder the military could ask for. When both his parents die midway through the year, Richter clings even more fiercely to the nation—but grief destroys the hardness he mistook for strength. Beneath the model soldier is the kindest member of the unit, a boy who could never hurt a butterfly and whose magic transforms through loss into extraordinary healing. With his defenses gone, he finally allows Liesl—and eventually the entire unit—to love the person his patriotism had taught him to hide.