Chapter 14: First Shift

Six Selection Guards closed on me at once.

The first one caught my left arm above the brand and wrenched it behind my back.

"Let go of her!" Maud screamed from the edge of the sand.

"Take her to the cells," Aldous said. "Chain her by the wrist where the license is."

A second guard grabbed my hair, and the third kicked the back of my knees.

I went down on the sand beside the stone.

The laughter had stopped, and the arena was making a different sound now, low and uneasy.

Lysander was fighting his way through the blue line.

He threw one guard aside, and two more took his place, and he roared an order that nobody obeyed.

They were Aldous's men, and Aldous had told them the king was the one breaking the law.

"The Queen will not be touched!" Lysander shouted.

"The Queen is a slave!" Aldous shouted back.

A chain dropped around my wrist, cold over the old scar, and it closed.

I knew that sound.

I had heard it seven times in fifteen years, and every time it closed, something in me had gone quiet and stayed quiet.

It did not go quiet now.

Something under my ribs lifted its head.

It was a slow, enormous stir.

My wolf.

The traders' wolfsbane had shut her away at fourteen.

Maud had scrubbed the last of it out of my blood at sixteen, and she had waited seven years since.

She had waited through the shed, and the lash, and every night I told myself I was nobody's.

Now she stood up inside me and shook herself.

"Don't," I whispered, to nobody. "Not here."

She did not listen.

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