Chapter 2 The Forbidden Mark

For a long moment the prince did not let go of my wrist, and I understood that whatever he said next would decide whether I lived past morning.

The whole hall was watching him. He felt it the same instant I did. I saw him close down, the strange pale gold of his eyes going flat, and when he stood he dropped my arm like it had burned him.

"A fraud," he said, loud now, pitched for the room. "Someone painted a mark on her to raise her price. Wolf packs are not above a cheap trick."

The copper-haired girl laughed. The tension cracked, and the students relaxed back into cruelty, which was a thing they understood.

But I had been close enough to hear what he whispered. I knew he did not believe a word of what he had just told them.

"Bring her," he said to the guard. "We'll prove it. The trial stone doesn't care what a wolf paints on her skin."

They hauled me up. My knees had gone stiff against the cold floor and I stumbled, and a boy near the front made a barking sound and the others joined in. I memorized his face. I memorized all their faces. It was a habit and a comfort, the way some people pray.

The trial stone sat in a round chamber off the main hall, sunk into the floor like the stump of something that had been cut down. It was black and slick and the size of a cart wheel, veined with thin lines of dull red that pulsed faintly, the way a coal pulses when you think the fire has died and it has not.

"It reads what you are," the prince said. He stood across the stone from me with his arms folded. Students crowded the doorway behind us, pushing to see. "Strong dragons make it burn gold. Weak ones make it smoke. Wolves make nothing at all. You'll make nothing. Then everyone here can stop pretending you matter."

He wanted that. I could see he wanted it badly, and not for the reason he was giving. He wanted the stone to call me empty so the room would forget the way he had looked at me. So he could forget it too.

"And if I refuse," I said.

"You're property," he said. "You don't refuse."

The guard forced my chained hands down onto the stone.

The cold hit first. Then the cold became something else. The red veins under my palms flared, brightened, ran up toward my fingers like water finding a channel, and a sound started somewhere underneath the floor, low and growing.

The prince's arms came uncrossed.

"Take her hands off," he said sharply. "Now."

The guard reached for me. He was too slow.

The stone went white. Not gold. White, then a hard burning silver that poured up out of the floor and wrapped around my wrists and climbed, and the iron cuffs that had bitten my skin for two days glowed, softened, and fell open and clattered to the floor in two melted halves.

The fire did not hurt me. That was the part I would think about later, lying awake. Everyone in that chamber was made of dragon and fire and they all shrank back from the silver light, and I stood inside it with my bare wrists raised and felt nothing but a warmth that knew me, that fit against my skin like a hand I had been waiting my whole life to hold.

The students screamed and fell over each other to get out of the doorway. A dragon somewhere above us in the towers let out a roar that shook dust from the ceiling, and then another answered it, and another, until the whole mountain seemed to be calling out at once.

The prince did not run. He stood on the other side of the stone with the silver light on his face, and he was staring at me the way you stare at the thing you were warned about as a child, the monster under the words, suddenly standing in your own house wearing a girl's frightened face.

"That's not possible," he said.

The fire sank back into the stone. The cold rushed in to replace it. My legs went out from under me and I sat down hard on the floor next to my own broken chains, shaking, my hands silver-bright and slowly dimming.

"Moonfire," the prince said. He said it like a man naming a disease he had watched kill his family. "You're Moonfire."

"I don't know what that is." It was the truth. My father had never given the mark a name. He had only ever given it a warning.

"It's the bloodline we destroyed." He came around the stone slowly, like I might detonate. "Twenty years ago. Every last one of them. The royal line that ruled before mine. My father burned their palace to the ground and salted the ash so nothing could grow back." His voice dropped. "There are no Moonfire heirs. There can't be. I watched the records sealed myself."

"Then maybe your records are wrong," I said.

He crouched in front of me again. Closer this time. I could feel the heat coming off his skin. Up close his face was younger than his reputation, and there was something working behind his eyes that I did not trust, because it looked too much like the thing I felt in my own chest when the fire had touched me. Recognition. The sick, falling certainty of recognition.

"Don't tell anyone what you saw," he said quietly. "Not a soul. If you want to live through tonight, you don't have a name, you don't have a mark, you are nothing but a debt wolf. Do you understand me?"

"Why," I said. "Why would you help me hide it? Your family killed mine."

He opened his mouth.

He never got to answer.

Boots rang in the outer hall, a hard fast rhythm, more than one set, moving with purpose. The students scattered out of the doorway. A royal guard in palace black filled the frame, his armor still cold from the wind outside, a sealed scroll in his gauntleted fist.

He looked past me as if I were furniture. He looked only at the prince, and he dropped to one knee.

"Your Highness." His voice carried into every corner of the silent chamber. "The Dragon King has ordered the girl brought to the palace for execution."