Page 31 of Feralheart

I was grateful he didn’t finish. The thought of losing him tore something deep inside me. The reality would be even more painful.

The weight of it settled against my hip. I’d never needed it before. I had a feeling I might now.

My hand on the hilt, I slipped out the door and into the alley, making my way to the spiraling path that swept up to the top of the mountain behind our city, where the heart of the drums and horns lived.

The scale in my pocket banged against my thigh. I pressed my palm against it through the fabric, but it had gone quiet. Whatever had sparked it yesterday wasn’t speaking now.

Or maybe I didn’t yet know how to listen.

The fortress courtyard had been transformed. Banners whipped at the top of poles that hadn’t been there yesterday. A platform stood in the center, draped in white and gold. Heralds flanked it in formal black clothing, their voices overlapping as they repeated the same proclamation in rounds.

The elite mixed with the lower classes, though they had smiles on their faces rather than the somber expressions on those of us from Shaleside. Their children darted through the crowd with fake wings strapped to their backs, shrieking and laughing, while children from my part of the world clung to their parents. A woman sold ribbons from a cart, red and blue and gold, each one stamped with a dragon silhouette. The ribbons cost more than a day’s worth of coal. An elite child’s fist closed around two.

I pushed through the crowd until I reached the front and could understand what the crier was saying

He stood on the platform, a gilded scroll in his hands. “By decree of Her Majesty and the sanction of the Oracle, the Scorching will commence in six days’ time. A trial of bond and flight, witnessed by the realm and blessed by the very fates themselves. Sign-up will close in three days.”

The elites in the crowd cheered. A priestess in silver robes raised her hands and intoned a blessing that got lost in the noise.

The crier continued. “To the victor, a boon. One wish, granted by the Oracle herself, weighed and judged worthy.”

One wish.

The words punched through my chest and kept going.

Seven breaths between Tolross’s coughs. A week ago it had been twelve. The month before, fifteen.

The math was simple, and it was killing him.

The scale flared molten-hot against my thigh. I gasped and shifted it away from my skin. It burned deeper than touching a stove, the heat blasting from the inside out.

An odd feeling shot through me, of a wild creature recognizing a predator it had never encountered but knew in its bones.

The scale cooled as quickly as it had flared.

I made myself breathe and think past the roaring in my ears that sounded like wings and a shriek of fear and the pitch of my brother’s cough when he couldn’t stop.

Whatever the Oracle was, the wild dragon already knew. And she was afraid of it. And if a wild dragon was afraid, what did that make me for wanting to stand in front of it?

Desperate. That’s what it made me.

But there was only one wish.

Cured, Tolross would live.

Everything I’d been breaking myself to find stood right in front of me. One race. One impossible, deadly, commons-killing race.

The crier rolled up the scroll and descended from the platform. The crowd pressed forward, voices rising in excitement.

Far overhead, a black shape circled. I recognized the silver in Aristus’s scales and how he moved through the air like he was made of mist instead of muscle. Which meant Prince Fenian was up there too, watching the crowd react to the Scorching announcement. Watching us scramble for a chance at what he already had.

Weapons don’t slosh, Sire. Two almost-smiles, and somehow the man had taken up residence in my head without paying for the room.

I evicted him and hurried down the mountain, back to Shaleside.

Father had closed the window. He sat at the table, his mending abandoned, staring at the wall where my mother’s wildflower paintings hung.

“They’re calling the race,” I said.