She didn’t want a kehok who could be caught so easily. Or one that would burn its rider. Reluctantly, she returned to the first kehok, the black-scaled lion. “And this one?”
“Augur hasn’t been by to read it yet. Most of them have been reassigned to help the guards keep things calm, you know? Can’t afford to have the market shut down. But I don’t need any augur to tell me about this monster. First time catching it. It’s got so I can tell—this is this one’s first spin as a kehok. Might be why it’s so full of rage. It took me three days to track it down, and the clever thing turned the tables on me—I would’ve been food for its stomach if I hadn’t carried Ebzer.” He patted the sword at his hilt.
Cute. He names his blades.
“How much?” she asked.
His eyes widened. “You don’t want to buy him.”
“I might.” She crossed her arms. “Depends on the price.”
“Told you he killed a man when we were moving him in here. Gored him trying to escape. He’ll gore you too, given half the chance.”
She said nothing, but continued to study the kehok. He was one of the strongest kehoks she’d ever seen, with leg muscles that looked as if they could kick down a tree in one blow. He’d be fast. Very fast. And it made a difference that he’d killed in an escape attempt, not purely out of a desire for violence—there was a chance he hadn’t yet acquired a love of death.
He was watching her with golden eyes that held a hint of intelligence.
Intelligent kehoks could win races.
“Killed a man, you said?”
The seller nodded vigorously. “He has the heart of a killer. Must have been a murderer in his last life.” Most of the lion-shaped kehoks had a predatory history, so Tamra wasn’t surprised to hear that.
“He won’t kill or gore me,” Tamra said, pinning the kehok with her gaze. “I won’t give him the chance.” You might be strong, she said with her eyes, but I’m stronger. “One hundred gold pieces.”
“Nuh-uh, a kehok this size? Least one thousand.”
Tamra snorted. Seriously? He was trying to bargain with her, after first trying to talk her out of it? Looking at the seller, she could tell his heart wasn’t in it. He was saying it because he thought he should be saying it. A hunter, not a businessman. He needed to partner with someone if he wanted to make any money. But it wasn’t her job to tell him how to do his. “A killer kehok that no one has proven can be controlled? A kehok you plan to kill at sunset anyway? Anything I give you is more than he’s worth. One hundred fifty, plus you throw in the cage.” She’d need the cage to bring him home. She doubted she’d be able to control him on a crowded riverboat, not with zero time to train him.
“Can’t figure out if you’re stupid or crazy to want him at all.”
Neither, she thought. I’m desperate. “I know what I want. And I get it.”
That was a lie, but it was one she told herself daily. It made her feel as if her fate were more in her hands, rather than subject to the whims of those more powerful than she was and their rigid laws and traditions, and taxes, fines, and fees.
“Meet me at two hundred, and he’s yours.”
“One hundred seventy-five and the cage.” She needed some left over to tempt a rider, though there was no rider with any level of experience who would be enticed by that low a starter fee. She could be stuck with a rider who was no more skilled than her paying students. And look how well that had turned out.
The seller spat on his hand and held it out.
She shook it and handed over Lady Evara’s tokens.
She turned to the kehok. “You’re mine,” she told him.
He bared his lion teeth, each one as deadly as a knife. She understood him as clearly as if he’d spoken: Then I am your death.
“Your need to kill me is not greater than my need to use you,” Tamra informed the kehok.
She thought she saw him flinch, but she must have imagined it. Kehoks were smart, but she didn’t think he could have understood that.
Bargaining again with the seller, she arranged for him to transport the kehok to the riverboat docks. That required a bit more of Lady Evara’s gold. Securing passage for her patron’s newest purchase would require more. And she still needed a rider—one who had the strength of will to tame a creature as wild as this one. But Tamra felt more hopeful than she had in days.
Maybe I’ve found my miracle.
Or my death.
Either way, things were going to change.
Chapter 4
Hidden behind a stack of crates, Raia watched the trainer bargain for the killer kehok. She didn’t need to hide to stay unnoticed—she wasn’t the type of person whom anyone noticed, especially in a market. She was seventeen years old, old enough to be in Gea Market without parents but not old enough to be taken seriously as a buyer. Ordinary height, with a pretty but unmemorable face, nice enough skin, her black hair styled in multiple braids that were only just beginning to unravel. She’d picked clothes that were clean and simple—clothes that said both “I’m not worth kidnapping” and “Of course I didn’t run away from my family and my future.” But she hid out of habit anyway.
It was something she’d gotten far too good at lately.
Like stealing fruit.
A grapefruit weighed down one of her pockets, tugging at her tunic as well as her conscience. Raia knew what her former teachers would say about theft, but, she reminded herself yet again, they weren’t here, and her stomach was. She’d have time to balance out the harm she’d done to her soul after she did what she came here to do, which was to find a new future for herself.
And also find someplace not completely terrifying to sleep tonight, she thought.
Last night she’d bedded down in a toolshed behind an overcrowded house outside Gea Market. She’d woken every few minutes, convinced every creak and crack in the night was someone coming out to the shed in search of a trowel for a bit of late-night, can’t-wait-until-morning gardening. She hadn’t been caught. But she certainly hadn’t slept well.
At dawn, when the market opened, she’d screwed up her courage and started approaching trainers. All morning, she’d tried. All morning, she’d failed. One look at her—her unmuscled arms and her uncalloused palms—and they’d turned away. She couldn’t blame them. With all the uncertainty in Becar these days, no one wanted to take any kind of risk. The continued lack of an emperor was putting everyone on edge. But this trainer felt different.
Tamra Verlas.
Raia knew who she was, of course. Everyone did. She recognized the tattoo and the scar, even the way she walked.
The cursed trainer.
Last flood season, Trainer Verlas had made a mistake in one of the final races—given bad advice or . . . the rumors hadn’t been clear on what exactly she’d done. Only that it was her fault that her rider and his kehok had died, as well as several other riders and even a few bystanders. It had been such a dramatic disaster that it was said she’d never sponsor a winner again. She’d been reduced to training the children of the wealthy, for their amusement, in one of the many low-end training facilities.
Yet here she was, at the market, clearly buying a racer.