I Was Sold To The Dragon Academy

My father sold me to the Dragon Academy for the price of one dead wolf.

He said it standing in the snow outside our den, not looking at me, his hands open like a man showing he carried no weapon. The pack stood behind him in a loose half circle. None of them stepped forward. None of them spoke.

"The debt is paid in blood or in body," my father said. "She has no shift. She has no use. The dragons will take her."

I waited for someone to argue. My aunt looked at the ground. The hunters who had taught me to track looked at the trees. Even the old women who used to slip me extra bread when I was small kept their mouths shut and their eyes down.

So that was what I was worth. A girl who had never shifted, traded to cancel out the corpse of a wolf the dragons had killed during the border raids. One body for another. The numbers balanced. I balanced nothing.

"Hands," said the dragon guard.

He was enormous, wrapped in black leather that smelled of smoke and hot metal. When I did not move fast enough he took my wrists himself and locked the iron around them. The cuffs were heavier than I expected. They dragged my arms down and bit into the bone, and the cold of them spread up into my elbows.

I looked at my father one last time.

"You know what I am," I said quietly. "You always have."

Something moved across his face. Not guilt. Closer to fear. He turned away before I could name it, and the guard pulled the chain, and that was the last I saw of the pack that raised me.

They marched me through the pass for two days. I counted everything. The number of guards, six. The number of times they changed who held my chain, four. Which one drank too much at the fire and which one watched the dark like he expected something to come out of it. My father taught me that, before he decided I was nothing. You watch. You remember. You find the gap before you need it.

I had not found the gap yet. But I would.

The academy rose out of the mountainside like a wound in the rock. Black towers, red glass, and above it all the slow circling shapes of dragons riding the wind, their wings cracking the air with a sound like distant thunder. Heat came off the walls even in the snow. The closer we got, the more the iron on my wrists warmed, until it sat against my skin like a brand.

They brought me through a gate the size of a frozen lake and into a hall full of students.

The students were beautiful. That was the first thing I noticed, and the cruelest. Tall, clean, dressed in grey and crimson uniforms, their skin warm with the kind of power I had never had. They turned to look at the wolf girl in chains, and they smiled.

"Prey," one of them said. Not even loudly. Just a fact, dropped at my feet.

A girl with copper hair tilted her head. "It can't even shift. Look at it. They sold us a broken one."

"Maybe it's lunch," someone else said, and they laughed, and the sound bounced off the high stone ceiling and came back down on me from every direction.

I kept my chin level. I had learned a long time ago that flinching only feeds them. I let them laugh. I counted the exits instead. Three doors. One staircase. A gallery above the hall where more of them leaned on the rail to watch the new joke arrive.

The guard yanked my chain and forced me to my knees on the cold floor in the center of the hall, where everyone could see.

"Debt payment," he announced to the room. "Wolf stock. Unshifted. Property of the academy until the headmaster decides what she's good for."

Property. The word landed in my chest and stayed there.

That was when the hall went quiet.

It happened fast, a hush moving from the back of the room toward me like a wave pulling out before something larger comes in. The students at the far doors stepped aside. Even the guards straightened.

A young man walked into the hall.

He was not like the others. He did not look at me the way they did, like a thing to be priced. He moved through the crowd as if the crowd did not exist, dark-haired, broad through the shoulders, a long scar of old burn marking the back of one hand. The temperature in the room climbed. I felt it on my face. The chains on my wrists grew hotter.

He stopped three steps away from me. And then he went very still.

His nostrils flared. His eyes, which had been bored and cold, snapped to mine and held there with a sudden focus that made my breath catch. I had been stared at all my life. This was not staring. This was a predator that had just realized the floor beneath it was not solid.

"Who brought her here," he said. His voice was low and even. It was somehow worse than shouting.

The guard bowed his head. "A wolf pack. Blood debt, Your Highness."

Your Highness.

So this was him. The thing the whole academy circled around. The Dragon King's son.

He crouched in front of me. Up close his eyes were a strange pale gold, and they moved across my face like he was reading something written there that I could not see. I should have looked away. I did not. If he was going to kill me I wanted to be looking at him when he did it.

"You smell wrong," he murmured, almost to himself. "You smell like something I was told doesn't exist anymore."

"Don't touch me," I said.

He touched me.

His fingers closed around my forearm, just above the iron, and turned my wrist toward the light. I had a mark there. A faint silver tracery under the skin that I had hidden my whole life with sleeves and dirt and lies, a mark my father had told me to never, ever show anyone.

The prince saw it.

The breath went out of him. Every dragon in the hall seemed to feel something pass through the room, because they shifted and muttered all at once, and the prince's hand tightened on my arm until it hurt.

When he spoke again, his voice had dropped so low that only I could hear it.

"That mark belongs to the bloodline my family killed."