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Something had happened badly enough to make him lose that control.

I needed to know whether he was all right.

Then he lifted his head, and I saw his face.

He wasn’t.

Varga was circling him with a training staff, tapping the wood against his palm.

“Thorne,” he said pleasantly, making sure his voice carried through the entire Pit. “Our veteran. How are we today? Sleeping all right?”

He turned his grin toward the class.

“Mr. Thorne spent the last two years as a guest of the Council, in case some of you didn’t know. Very small room. Very thick walls. For everybody’s safety.” He tapped the staff against his palm again. “Did they let you out for good behavior, Thorne, or did they finally get tired of the smell?”

A few people laughed, though none of them sounded comfortable doing it.

Silas didn’t react. He kept his arms loose at his sides and his gaze fixed on the far wall.

Only his right hand moved.

His fingers opened one at a time.

“Nothing to say?” Varga stepped closer and prodded him in the chest with the end of the staff. The gesture wasn’t hard enough to hurt. That wasn’t the point. “They told me you used to be something. Twelve Culls in your squad’s first year, wasn’t it? Very efficient. Very tidy. I read the reports.” He jabbed him again. “All that blood on your hands, and now look at you. You can’t even get through a sparring match without stopping to count to ten.”

Silas’s hand closed.

Then opened.

Then closed again.

Varga watched him with visible satisfaction. “Or maybe it isn’t the Red making you so jumpy.” His gaze shifted deliberately across the sand and settled on the bench. On me. “Maybe there’s another reason. There is a rumour that you carried the Hollow back from the Moonrun in your mouth like a bitch carrying a pup. Is that it? Gone soft on the little stray, have we? Is that what’s—”

Silas turned his head.

He didn’t shout or move toward him. He simply looked at Varga.

I saw his eyes.

They were red.

The Red.

Not the sickness Silas had been fighting all this time. This was the thing beyond it, the break Crewe had warned me about, the point from which no one returned.

Feral.

After that, everything happened too quickly for thought.

Silas’s shoulders heaved as his body began to change. His back arched hard enough to split the seams of his shirt, and dark fur spread over his arms as his frame swelled beneath it. His jaw lengthened with a sickening series of cracks.

But the shift never completed.

He remained trapped somewhere between forms: enormous and hunched, his body still roughly human beneath the coarse fur, his head unmistakably a bear’s, while his arms ended in claws attached to hands that had not quite stopped being human.

Then he roared.

I had heard Silas roar before, in the Hollow Wood.