Chapter 5 The Prince's Property

Dawn came grey through the red glass, and with it the problem neither of us had solved: I was a prisoner who had not been delivered, in the private rooms of a prince who could not explain why.

Kael had not slept. I knew because I had not either. We had spent the last black hours of the night on opposite sides of his cold room, him in the chair by the dead hearth, me sitting against the far wall with my knees drawn up, and every time the silence stretched too long I had felt the bond turn over in my chest like a second pulse, reaching for the warmth on the other side of the room. I had hated it for that. I think he had too.

When the light came he stood and looked down at me.

"My father expects you in a cell or in the ground," he said. "By now half the academy is wondering why you're in neither. I can't hide you. The moment you vanish, you become the thing they hunt for." He dragged a hand down his face. "So you don't vanish. You stay in plain sight, somewhere I can keep you, where no one questions why the prince watches a wolf girl."

"And where is that."

"At my heel." He said it without pleasure. "As my servant. My property, logged, accounted for, beneath anyone's notice. A prince keeping a debt wolf to fetch and carry is arrogant. A prince hiding the Moonfire heir is dead. We need them to see the first so they never look for the second."

I understood the sense of it. I hated the shape of it.

"You want to parade me through that hall on a leash," I said. "After last night."

"I want you alive." His jaw worked. "You can hate me for the leash. Hate me from inside it, where I can reach you when they come for you. Because they will come, Lyra. The only question is whether I'm standing between you and them when they do."

I had survived eighteen years by knowing the difference between a cage that kills you and a cage that keeps you. My father's den had been the first kind. This, as much as it turned my stomach, might be the second.

"Fine," I said, and stood, and made myself meet his eyes. "But understand something. I'll wear your collar in that hall. I'll fetch and carry and keep my head down. And every minute I do it, I'll be learning this place. The doors. The guards. Who reports to your mother. Who fears your father. You think you're hiding me. I'm using the cover."

For just a moment, the corner of his mouth moved. Not a smile. The ghost of considering one.

"Good," he said. "A useless servant gets sold on. Make yourself worth keeping."

The hall in daylight was worse than in chains. Now they had a whole night of rumor to chew on. The silver fire. The melted cuffs. The prince who took the debt wolf to his rooms and did not bring her back. Conversation died as we crossed the floor, Kael ahead, me one step behind with a basket of his soiled training cloths pressed against my chest like armor.

"There it is," the copper-haired girl said. Loud, this time. She wanted the room. "His Highness's new pet. Tell me, wolf, does he scratch behind your ears or just let the others do it for him?"

Laughter rippled out. Kael did not slow. Beneath notice, he had said. Be beneath notice. I kept my head down and walked.

The copper girl stepped into my path.

"I asked you a question." She was smiling. She had the easy cruelty of someone who had never once been the thing on the floor. "Look at me when a real dragon speaks to you."

I looked up. That was my mistake. I let her see my face, and whatever she saw there, some flicker of the thing that had survived a two-day march and a melted chain and a Queen's smile, it offended her. She knocked the basket out of my arms. The cloths scattered. And when I bent to gather them she put her boot flat against my shoulder and shoved me down onto the cold stone, hard, in front of everyone.

"Stay down," she said. "It's what you're for."

The fire came up before I could stop it.

I felt it leave the seal, the same cold bright pull as the stone, the same as Kael's touch, racing down my arm toward the hand braced against the floor. The mark on my wrist flared silver beneath my sleeve. A line of frost-bright light cracked across the flagstone under my palm, and the air went sharp with the smell of it, and the copper girl's boot, where it pressed my shoulder, suddenly smoked. She shrieked and stumbled back, clutching her leg, and the whole hall surged in a single breath toward the silver light spilling out from under a wolf girl who was supposed to have no power at all.

This was it. This was the second execution order, written in front of forty witnesses.

Then Kael was there. He stepped between me and the room and seized my wrist, pressing his thumb hard over the mark, and the contact slammed the fire back down so fast my vision swam. His face was a mask of cold royal contempt, pitched for the crowd.

"Whitefire oil," he said, with magnificent disgust, holding up his own hand as if he too had been burned. "On my training cloths. Someone in this hall thought it would be amusing to leave a reactive compound where my servant would carry it." His pale gold eyes swept the room and every dragon in it found something else to look at. "It ignites on a dragon's heat. She carried it. It caught. If any of you find that funny, you can explain the prank to the headmaster yourself."

A lie. A fast, clean, total lie, built in the half second between my fire and their fury. The hall bought it because the alternative was unthinkable, because there were no Moonfire heirs, because the King had said so.

The copper girl opened her mouth to argue.

"You'll want the infirmary for that burn," Kael told her, soft. "Before it scars."

She fled.

He hauled me up by the arm he was still gripping, and under the cover of the noise, his mouth barely moving, he said the only thing that was true in the whole performance.

"You can't control it." It was not an accusation. It was fear. "It answers your anger and your fear and my touch, and you cannot control any of it, and the next time there won't be an oil to blame." His grip tightened. "Tonight. You start learning. Or this lie gets us both killed before the week is out."