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I join the royal family on the palace steps, behind a phalanx of the Imperial Guard, taking a place beside Camilla. The princess is eagerly tapping her fingertips together, craning her neck around the guards’ feathered helms for a better glimpse. “Oh my,” she murmurs. “Thatattacked you? How are you still in one piece?”
Only then do I noticed the barred cage being wheeled in from the stables, escorted by four guards with the thickest steel gauntlets I’ve ever seen. A green-eyed beast paces within, horns scraping against the steel bars. This one isn’t as large as the two that were at my tower. It’s starved and only about a hand taller than the tallest person in the yard, but it’s just as monstrous: wolf-headed, human-gaited, a hulking body covered in fur and bark.
“What the hell?” I mutter, heart leaping into a run.
“Raya needs it for her demonstration. She claims she can cure it.”
A hefty claim. The cage should hold; it’s the type used for trapping dragons, which are of similar size and teeth-and-claw sharpness. The difference with dragons is, they’re only after our glittering items—they don’t look at us like we’refood.
The beast hurls itself at the cage door and the audience gasps and shrieks. I physically recoil, even though it’s more than twenty paces away.
The barest pressure squeezes my gloved fingers, then vanishes—a fleeting comfort.
I know that touch. I only notice now that at some point Camilla surreptitiously moved from my left side to my right, putting her brother and I next to each other.
I twine my hands behind my back and don’t look at him.
A spectator at the front peers across the ropes. “What does the beast eat?” she asks.
“This one ignores the game meat we give it. It doesn’t eat vegetation, either,” says the handler, some captain from the Thirteenth’s Dragonsguard. “We have even tried prepared foods—”
“I have heard they hunt people.”
Fretful murmurs. The handler goes quiet.
“Yes,” he says. “Yes, we have, ah, in fact seen disturbing scenes in the countryside that show that…may be true.”
More questions erupt.
All falls quiet when King Emilius taps his cane against the marble steps, though the horror remains. “Lady Raya is prepared. Let us not waste any time.”
The woman of the hour steps past the wall of guards, alone before a hungry audience and hungry beast. Her puffy yellow gown adds nothing to her beauty. I wonder if she should change into something more practical or at least roll back her sleeves. As Camilla says: “In dates or death,go out in style.”
Beneath the gauzy fabric of her veil, she lifts her chin with a certainty I haven’t seen in her before, which both unnerves me and makes me like her a little more.
I glance sideways. Cyrus’s mouth has thinned to a line, and his knuckles are white where he grips the pommel of his sword.
As Raya approaches the cage, she raises a shaking arm dangerously close to the beast’s drooling maw. I am certain, like everyone else staring with bated breath, that in a matter of seconds, we’re about to witness the Head of Lunesse lose a quarter of her limbs, and I flinch away from looking.
But the beast is frozen as a glow envelops her arm. Shoulder to fingers, brighter and brighter until it’s a blinding flash.
I jerk backward—I can’t see.
Shouts.
The beast roars, then chokes out a garbled, guttural groan.
A din rises:
“Stars above.”
“She’s the one!”
“It changed—”
When the spots disappear from my eyes, I don’t know what’s more horrific: the creature it was before, or the pitiful thing I’m gaping at now, a naked, half-transformed man lying on the floor of the cage.
Though his skin is patched in fur, he is more human than beast. I can barely hear him beneath the clamor: “Thank you. The witch…” He collapses, moaning incoherent babble.
