Beast Trials: The Last True Tamer novel · Chapter 2 of 24

Chapter 2: The Pens

Anwen bonds Moth, meets Bran, and finds her Roll line stamped hunt-eligible.

The barracks bed was the first real bed I had ever slept in, and I didn't sleep in it at all.

At dawn the thirty entrants were marched down to the Bonding Pens.

Every Trial entrant had to bond a beast before the first trial.

The nobles had mostly done theirs years ago and were only there to be seen.

I stood at the back of the line in a borrowed Watch jacket two sizes too big.

Cassian stood at the front, and his gryphon sat beside him with a steel collar around its neck.

The gryphon's eyes were on the ground.

It didn't look like a beast that had chosen anyone.

"Bare girl," Cassian called over his shoulder. "Pick quickly. The good ones go first."

He grinned at the others.

"Though I suppose none of them will have you."

A few laughed.

A tall, sandy-haired boy at my elbow leaned over and whispered, "Don't mind him. He laughs like a goose being stepped on."

I looked at him.

He had freckles across his nose and a wool jacket with three different colors of mending.

"Bran Tully," he said. "Farm outside Calder. I'm here because the purse would pay off my father's land, and because I lost a bet."

"What was the bet?"

"That I wouldn't do it."

I laughed before I could stop myself.

It was the first time I had laughed since the morning before.

The Pens were a long stone hall with a cage on either side, and each cage held a beast waiting to be chosen.

The trick of the bonding is that you don't choose.

You walk the aisle with your cord in your hand, and the beast comes to you.

If none comes, you don't bond.

If none bonds, you don't compete.

The Thornwicks had arranged it so they could say I failed.

The fifth cage on the left held a night-stag, a huge black creature with antlers.

Its eyes were rolling white.

It was starving.

Anyone could see it was starving.

"Go on, bare girl," Cassian said. "Try that one. It's the only one left that still needs feeding."

The stag was the one he'd rigged for me.

I knew it the moment I saw the rope marks on its flanks.

If I put my hand through those bars, it would take my arm off.

I stopped walking.

"It's afraid of you," I said to Cassian.

"What?"

"It's not hungry. It's afraid of whoever tied it up."

I turned my back on the stag and kept walking down the aisle.

I heard Cassian swear behind me.

At the end of the hall, in the last cage, in a pile of straw, something small was snoring.

I stopped.

It was an ash-grey fox the size of a cat, curled nose to tail, with the tip of its tail smoking a little.

A cinder-fox.

The Pens kept them for lighting kitchen fires.

No one bonded a cinder-fox for the Trials, because they were too small to fight.

I crouched down by the bars.

"You're loud," I said.

The fox opened one eye, ember-orange, and looked at me with great disgust.

Then it stood up, stretched, walked to the bars, and climbed straight into my jacket.

The latch clicked by itself.

Someone in the line whistled.

"She got the fire rat," Cassian said, and then louder, "She got the fire rat!"

The whole line was laughing now.

I didn't care.

The fox had curled up against my ribs and gone back to snoring.

It was the warmest thing that had touched me in a year.

"What's his name?" Bran asked, coming up beside me.

"Her," I said. I scratched under the fox's jaw. "I don't know. She's a moth. She keeps flying toward the fire."

"Moth." Bran nodded solemnly. "Strong name. Terrifying."

That afternoon the Watch quartermaster handed me a blanket, a pair of boots, and a bowl of stew.

I ate all of it standing up, with Moth begging at my sleeve.

A clerk came by with the Roll to record the bonds.

I watched him write my name and Moth's beside it.

Then I saw the small red stamp he put at the end of my line, and I read it upside down.

HUNT-ELIGIBLE.

I stopped chewing.

"What does that mean?"

The clerk wouldn't look at me.

"It means you can be taken in the trials by any entrant, miss, and no one will be punished for it."

"Nobody else has it."

"No, miss."

"Who ordered it?"

He lowered his voice.

"Lord Aldric signed it himself, last night, an hour after you did."

The stew turned to stone in my stomach.

Across the yard, on the Watch tower, a man in a black coat was standing alone, looking down at me.

When I looked up, Kieran Falkirk didn't look away.

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