The Tyrant's Pet novel · Chapter 1 of 32
Chapter 1: Tribute Day
Left to drown in the black flood by her wolf mates, Ione wakes on Tribute morning, volunteers as the Emperor's pet and cuts both bonds before the pack, and the Emperor himself says he asked for her by name.
The black water was up to my chest when Blaise cut my wrist.
He did it fast, the way he'd done it every full moon for two years.
He held the silver cup under the cut until it filled.
"One more for Father," he said. "He'll need it now."
Behind him, the dam was gone.
The whole valley was a river of rot, and it was climbing my ribs.
"Blaise, my leg is stuck. Please."
He capped the cup and tucked it inside his coat.
Then he turned and lifted Lettice out of the water.
She wrapped her arms around his neck and looked at me over his shoulder.
"Sorry, Ione," she said. "There's only room for one."
Corran was standing on the bank.
My other mate. The gentle one.
He looked at me for a long moment.
Then he looked at his brother, and he went.
The water reached my mouth.
It tasted like iron and burnt flowers.
I woke up choking on air.
I was in my cot in the kitchen loft, under my own thin blanket.
Sun came through the gap in the shutters.
Downstairs, someone was beating a drum.
I knew that drum.
It only beat once a year, on Tribute Day.
I held my left wrist up to the light.
Twenty-four thin scars.
In the black water there had been twenty-seven.
I hadn't died yet.
I had three months before the frost, and the dam, and the water.
I got dressed and went down to the square.
The whole pack was there in their autumn best.
The Alpha stood on the steps of the long hall with his twin sons beside him.
Blaise in his fur-trimmed coat. Corran a step behind him, like always.
Lettice stood between them in pale blue silk.
On the high table behind them, polished and waiting for tonight's moon, sat the silver cup.
At the bottom of the road stood a black carriage with gold serpents on the doors.
Nobody went near it.
Every autumn each pack sent the Emperor a pet.
One unmated woman, twenty or older.
None of them had ever come home.
The old women said he swallowed them whole.
The Alpha raised his hand, and the drum stopped.
"This year the Tarrow tribute is the tanner's daughter."
A girl at the front made a sound.
She was twenty. She had freckles and a laugh you could hear across the fields.
In my first life, she went in that carriage.
I never asked what happened to her.
I was too busy being grateful it wasn't me.
Her mother grabbed her arm and wouldn't let go.
Lettice leaned over to Blaise and giggled behind her hand.
I walked to the front of the crowd.
"I'll go instead."
The square went quiet.
Then somebody laughed, and then half the pack was laughing.
"Ione." Blaise didn't even raise his voice. "Get back to the kitchen."
"The tribute has to be unmated," the Alpha said. "You're mated to my sons."
"Not for long."
I walked up the steps, past all three of them, to the high table.
I picked up the little silver knife that lay beside the cup.
Blaise finally moved. "Put that down."
I opened my right hand.
The moon had drawn a silver crescent on my palm the night I turned twenty.
It was the only thing about me the pack had ever called lucky.
"I, Ione Thistle, reject you, Blaise Tarrow, as my mate."
I drew the knife across one horn of the crescent.
It burned like a coal.
Blaise grabbed his chest and staggered into the table.
The silver cup rolled onto the stones and rang.
"Ione, don't." Corran held his hands out. "Not like this. Not in front of everyone."
That was the thing he'd always cared about most.
In front of everyone.
"I, Ione Thistle, reject you, Corran Tarrow, as my mate."
I cut the other horn.
He went down on one knee in the dirt.
My palm bled into the cracks between the stones.
The crescent was gone.
"You wolfless little nothing," Blaise said through his teeth. "You think he wants you? He'll eat you in a week."
"Then you'll save on bread," I said.
Somebody in the crowd snorted, then pretended to cough.
Lettice's smile slipped.
"She's lost her mind," she said. "Alpha, you can't send a madwoman. The Emperor will burn the valley."
The carriage door opened.
Every wolf in that square stepped back.
The man who got out was dressed all in black, down to his gloves.
He was tall, with black hair to his jaw and eyes the color of old gold.
Black scales were tattooed up his throat and disappeared under his collar.
The Alpha went gray.
"Emperor Ossian," he said. "We didn't know you'd come yourself."
The Emperor didn't look at him.
He walked up the steps and stopped in front of me.
He looked at my bleeding hand.
Then at the two men on their knees.
"So you're alive," he said.
"For now."
He almost smiled.
Then he turned to the Alpha and held up a folded paper with a broken seal.
"I asked for this woman by name," the Emperor said. "Ione Thistle. And you wrote back that she'd died of fever."
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