“You have one task,” Tamra called to Fetran and Amira. “Fix this word in your mind:
“Run!”
Tamra then slapped the lever that unlatched the gates, and the two kehoks, with their riders still clinging to their backs, burst out of the starting shoots. They barreled forward—even at a cheap training facility like theirs, the practice track was hemmed in by high walls, so there was no place for the massive mounts to go except forward. But that didn’t mean they wouldn’t try to resist.
She jogged through the stands, parallel to the track.
The lion-lizard bashed against the wall, trying to knock his rider off. He didn’t understand that the rider was attached. Tamra felt each blow in her memory—her bones still ached because of the number of times she’d been slammed against a training wall. Then there was the time a kehok had rolled on top of her in an attempt to unseat her. Her right leg had broken in three places, but she’d won that race. Some days—like today, with twinges of sympathy—her leg still hurt.
“Run!” she shouted at the two riders. “That’s all that matters! That’s all that exists! You are nothing but the sand beneath the hooves, the wind in your face, the sun on your back. You are this moment. Feel the moment. Feel the race!”
She missed it, the way the wind felt, the way the rest of the world fell away, the way life was distilled into a simple goal. Nothing about life was simple anymore.
She wished she could peel away everything else and just focus on this: a race. Just her and a monster that she understood and could control, rather than the monsters who wore human faces and believed they were purer of soul than she.
Maybe they are purer than me. But that doesn’t make their actions right.
She couldn’t dwell on that now, though, as Amira and Fetran demanded her attention. The other students and trainers cheered as the two kehoks and riders thundered around the track. Sand was kicked into the air in a cloud that billowed up toward the sky. She began to feel a shred of the old exhilaration—the barely bridled wildness of the kehoks, matched with the barely contained terror of the riders. It was intoxicating. Tamra cheered with the others as the riders rounded the third corner.
And then it happened—
Fetran lost control.
She knew it a split second before the crowd gasped. It was in the way the boy’s kehok tossed his head, the sun glinting off his golden eyes—
Freedom.
The rhino-croc sensed that the boy’s focus had slipped, and he pivoted on his back feet. Rising up, he struck the other kehok, the lion-lizard, in the face. The lion-lizard crashed to the wall, and the girl—pinned between her mount’s back and the wall—cried out in pain. Shaking off the crash, the lion-lizard then charged at the rhino-croc. He lashed with his claws, and the croc clamped down with his massive jaws.
Tamra was already running. She leaped onto the sands of the track with no thought but to save her students. Ahead of her, the two kehoks were tearing into each other.
She threw herself forward, feetfirst, skidding between them on her back. Hands up, she roared with every fiber of her being: “STOP!”
Later, the other trainers would tell her what she did was suicidal.
You’re crazy.
You don’t throw yourself between out-of-control kehoks.
You don’t lie prone beneath their hooves and claws.
But Tamra did.
What she didn’t do was allow a shred of doubt or fear into her mind. They would stop because they must stop. Her livelihood depended on it. Her daughter depended on it. I will not lose these students.
You. Will. Stop.
And they did.
Snorting and snuffling, the two kehoks dropped back onto four feet and retreated from her. Rising to her feet, hands outstretched, one toward each, Tamra felt her whole body shaking with . . . She had no name for what she felt. But they would calm. Now.
She heard the others running toward them. Shouting for healers, the other trainers unstrapped her two riders. She heard the screams of her other students, their voices melding as if they were a single scared beast. One of the riders, Fetran, was howling in pain. The other, Amira, was frighteningly silent.
But Tamra kept her focus on the two kehoks.
She walked toward one and took his harness. Then she took the other. She led them along the racetrack, crossed the finish line, and then led them back across the training ground to their stalls. It felt ten times as far as it was.
Only when they were locked in did she allow other thoughts to enter her mind.
Her students.
Were they dead?
Was it her fault?
Yes, of course it is. She was their trainer. Part of her job was teaching them not to die.
For a moment, Tamra couldn’t make her feet move. She’d rather face a herd of kehoks than exit the stables now and see what damage had been done.
One of the kehoks snorted as if it were mocking her cowardice.
Go, she ordered herself.
And she walked out of the stable to see how badly her students were broken, and to take responsibility for letting her hopes destroy their dreams—and possibly her own.
Chapter 2
Neither was dead, which was a miracle.
Both were broken, though. Badly. Left leg, one rib for Amira. Three ribs and a concussion for Fetran. Their parents had descended on the training ground, cleared out their belongings from their rooms, canceled their lessons, and demanded that Tamra compensate them for all healers’ bills.
She’d argued they’d signed contracts, relieving her from responsibility for the cost of any injuries or funerals, except in cases of negligence.
Putting unprepared students onto the racetrack counted as negligence, they’d argued.
She had little defense against that.
The injuries proved she’d made the wrong choice.
It didn’t matter that she couldn’t afford the healers’ fees, not on top of everything she owed the augurs for her daughter’s training. And it didn’t matter that if the riders-to-be had been talented enough to become real riders, they would have risen to the challenge. Instead of dreaming of glory, she should have coddled them—that’s what their parents had wanted.
I misjudged that. I thought they’d want me to turn them into winners, if I could.
Riders got hurt. It was what happened in the Becaran Races. It was part of why the people loved them—there was true risk. And there were stiff penalties for anything the officials ruled as negligence. “Racing comes with risk,” she told the parents.
They swore to go directly to her patron. Insist Lady Evara rescind her patronage. Kick Tamra off her training grounds. And then they’d file a complaint with the racing commission. Insist the commission charge her with overt negligence and revoke her training permit. Require her to submit proof of an acceptable augur reading before ever being allowed to work with children again, a demand usually made only of proven criminals. Or bar her from the tracks across all of Becar.
She should have groveled—as elite south-bank Becarans, they were used to the lower classes groveling at their feet—but she’d never been good at that. “Do what you need to do,” she’d told them, and they’d stomped off to the ferry dock, following their injured offspring, whom Tamra was certain she was never going to see again, much less train.
By the end of the day, all the parents of her students had come to her, expressed their concern, listened to her apologies, and then politely withdrawn their children. One went as far as to say that they should have known better than to expect more from a lesser Becaran. As her last student left, she told herself, You did this. In one misguided dream of glory, you lost them all.