Chapter 11: The First Run

The gold went out of my eyes by dawn, and the wolf did not.

She stayed under my skin, restless and warm, and every sound in the palace came through the walls to me.

I heard the cook cracking eggs three floors down.

I heard a guard change at the east gate.

I heard Lucan's heartbeat, steady, from the pillow beside mine.

"Come out with me," I said.

He opened one eye.

"It's five in the morning."

"I want to try."

He understood at once.

He was up and dressed in the time it took me to find my boots.

There is a walled park behind the palace where only the royal family may go, with old oaks and a frozen pond.

The guards at the gate saw the prince and bowed, and did not look at me twice.

Lucan led me to the middle of the trees where the snow lay untouched.

"Close your eyes," he said. "Don't pull. Just let it come."

I closed them.

For a moment there was only the cold and the wind.

Then something opened in my chest like a door that had been painted shut for seven years.

The change went through me from the spine outward.

It hurt for exactly as long as it takes to take a breath.

Then I was standing on four feet in the snow, and the whole forest was suddenly wide open to me.

I could smell every fox in the park.

I could hear the pond ice creaking.

I looked down at my paws, and they were white.

Not grey, and not tan.

White, with long black claws.

I threw back my head and made a sound I had been holding in for seven years, and it went up through the oak branches and into the sky.

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