Funny, considering I was born an outsider. It had been my role in my old life, and here again, in this new world. It just kept finding me.
Apathy had not carried Vetr here to me, however. The tendons in his throat worked as he faced me, grating out, “What was that back there?”
I swallowed thickly, imagining my own throat working in a quest for speech—andnotimagining how I looked wearing only my under tunic before him. I remembered Fell and how he, too, had looked like this—impossibly big. Larger than life.
“I don’t know what you mean.” Then, recalling myself and that he was unwelcome in my space,uninvited, I squared my shoulders and reached for my dignity, struggling to ignore my state of undress—that my legs were bare from the middle of my thighs down to my feet. “And how dare you march in here without knocking first.”
He blinked. “Knocking?” He uttered the word with suchincomprehension that I wondered if he even understood the definition of it … in this place without actual doors.
I gestured vaguely, explaining, “You know what I mean … knocking, calling out, asking permission to enter.”
He pointed to the center of his chest. “How dare …me?”
He pronouncedmewith such incredulity, as though I could not possibly mean him, a man—or dragon—only ever accustomed to total deference and stirring awe in others.
Here, he was sovereign of this community. They might not number more than thirty, but they were dragons. Powerful. Destructive. As a whole, capable of taking down an army. He was their leader and fear inspiring. Unless, of course, you were one of the skelm. Then a bone blade to the throat, talons, fire, fangs could be expected. Or at least before the truce was struck that could have been expected.
“Yes.You. I don’t care who you are. I’m not like the rest, who follow you blindly.” I motioned scornfully toward the dens around us, aware that this attitude was likely the very thing that separated me from the pride, that prevented me from fitting in, but I couldn’t help it. Try as I might, I was not one of them. “I’m not subject to you.”
Even as the bold words popped out of my mouth, I realized that just about everyone in this pride would disagree with that.
Day after day, I followed their rules. I performed the duties assigned to me without complaint. Except that wasn’t really me. That was some version of myself, an automaton acting out a part while I tucked myself—mytrueself—away, learning, transforming … knitting into whatever it was I would become to survive and find my place.
I was done with blind acceptance simply because it was the rule or the custom or the way. I’d bowed to a king once, and what had my loyalty gotten me? The end of a whip. Forced into marriage to a reputed beast.
Stig had convinced me that the duty of a whipping girl was an honor, and I had believed in that. As a girl I’d walked the palacegallery and stared at the portraits of those who came before me with reverence and admiration, but I had just been deluding myself so that I could live, so that I could breathe in that space, so I could continue existing with my dignity intact.
But I was done just existing.
Done lying to myself.
Sometimes I heard Fell in my head, his words swelling up inside me, searching for an escape.You’re someone. Something.
I was done bowing. Even here. The pride might function as its own little realm with Vetr at the helm, but I would no longer put myself beneath anyone. There had to be a way to survive, to carve out a place in this life without losing myself entirely.
I continued talking, asserting myself. “I can leave this place any time I want.”
“And go where?” he scoffed, a ruddy flush creeping over the planes of his face, and in that moment, I realized I’d pushed him. For him to have entered my space unannounced, unbidden, he toed an invisible edge. Somehow I had provoked him.
I held my arms out wide and then dropped them dramatically to my sides. “Anywhere.”
“So you have no idea where you might go. You’re just saying … words.” Now he mocked me.
“I’m not a prisoner here.”
Unaware of or indifferent to the storm brewing inside me, he motioned outside my den. “When you are in that arena you need to fight like it’s not a practice.”
I blinked, my thoughts realigning. He was talking about this day’s training. He was here because of what happened in the arena.
“But itispractice,” I said slowly. “Itistraining. That’s why we call it that,” I reminded him tartly.
“When you’re under threat, you fight.” He bit off that last word like it was something hard, a bit of dried meat he was tearing off with his teeth. “You respond in kind. Nayden came at you with fire and you held back.”
I compressed my lips and shook my head. It was confusing.Hewas confusing. Up was down. Down was up. Everything about this place left me feeling as though I was on unstable ground, on the heaving deck of a ship in the Dark Channel with monsters lurking in the turbulent waters waiting to devour me.
“We were instructed to train in human form,” I said. “Yougave that instruction.”
“And even then,” he snapped, “you failed. You have yet to master bytte.”
