It was neither.
Four magnificent horses stood in the bright sunlight below. The biggest was a bay, with a midnight mane and tail and four dark-colored legs. A silver bridle, fitted with a mask shaped like a skull, covered the horse’s head.
Silver.
My legs shivered. I gripped the sill of the window, my fingers scraping against the stone.
Only one Sworn used silver colors.
Footsteps clapped against the courtyard floor. I stepped back, pressing myself to the wall of the cell as I peered down once more.
A soldier came to take away the horse. In his wake came four figures, three of them wearing cloaks. One I recognized, dimly—the warden. His face shone pale in the unrelenting sunlight, and he walked stiffly, as if he were trying to disguise his fear.
But he was not what drew my eyes.
There were three Sworn standing in the courtyard, all of them dressed in lavish cloaks that spoke of luxury and wealth, all of them wearing fine armor molded to fit their muscled bodies.
But it was the tallest one that I stared at as my heart pounded in fear.
I recognized him. I had heard of this Sworn in stories. Seen him in nightmares.
The most feared Sworn in the kingdom—the Silver Wolf.
He was tall, with a cloak the color of ink that swept from his shoulders to his ankles. Beneath it, he wore the sculpted armor that all the werewolf soldiers donned, but his armor was different from the others. Where the others’ armor was a soulless, burnt-ash black, this Sworn’s chest plate and arm guards shimmered, their surfaces threaded with silver like the branching fork of a thousand lightning bolts striking amid a starless night sky. His wolf mask was laced with silver too, the mouth of the animal bared in a furious snarl that made my heart stutter with fear. Powerful, thick arms ended in silver-streaked gloves.
Silver. The most painful, poisonous substance known to werewolves. This Sworn, who I’d heard called the Silver Wolf, wore it all over his body without care. He flaunted his power by wearing the dreadful silver against his skin. His reputation was one of legend. Even the other Sworn feared him.
I remembered his name—Vixor Rae—and the fact that he came from one of the most powerful families of the werewolf oligarchy. His father was one of the werewolves that had fought by the Alpha’s side when they’d overthrown the previous government and established a dictatorial rule of our land.
This creature’s father was one of our enslavers. He wasn’t merely a Sworn. He was the son of one of the leaders of the loathsome scourge. He was Sworn royalty.
I hated him, and the feeling was so hot and visceral that I almost gagged on it.
As if he sensed my scrutiny, the silver-masked face of Vixor Rae turned to look upward in my direction. The teeth on the mask flashed in the sunlight. I had the urge to freeze, like a rabbit caught in the sights of a dog. I folded myself tighter against the wall, tasting fear on my tongue.
Had he seen me?
The thought of him laying eyes on me turned my stomach.
As the right hand of the Alpha, the Silver Wolf usually traveled in a throng of the Sworn, cutting a dark swath through the kingdom and sending ripples of terror across the countryside. We were far from the heart of the kingdom, where the Alpha made his court in the city Crowfall, called such because the bodies of the dead had looked like crows when the battle for it was over. We were far from anything of political significance, far from the fires of resistance that burned at the southern border. We were nothing here.
And yet here he was, like a single arrow that had found its way through the stillness of a midsummer day to embed in the ground at my feet.
Words drifted up from the courtyard. A curt exchange—the warden lowered his head, deferential and sniveling, and Vixor Rae turned on his heel and stalked into the interior of the prison with the two other Sworn flanking him, and I exhaled.
In the distance, clouds drifted, covering the unrelenting sun and bathing the courtyard in sudden shadow. Still, no sign of my grandmother. No sign of Neil.
Nothing at all.
Thunder crackled at the edges of the horizon. A stale, hot wind swept through the cell.
I let my knees bend, and I sank to the floor to wait.
~
Rain had begun to drum against the walls of the prison when the door to my cell opened. A guard stepped inside—he was human, dressed in plain leather armor and without a wolf mask to hide his blunt features—and motioned for me to stand with a grunt of command on his tongue.
I rose, and he grabbed my wrist and dragged me into the hall.
“Has someone come for me?” I asked, a ragged scrap of hope fluttering inside me.
My question went unanswered.
The guard propelled me through the corridors of the prison, past stained walls of concrete and stone, down a flight of stairs, and into a narrow, cramped room with a vaulted ceiling and a row of windows overlooking the courtyard. I’d heard once that this place had been a university once, before it had been converted into one of the many prisons that now filled the kingdom, and I could imagine this had been the headmaster’s office in that faraway past. Now, the arching windows were gritty, though the coveted glass remained intact, and the rugs on the stone floor were worn and threadbare. The walls were covered in chipped plaster, and bare bulbs dangled from the ceiling on wires. Only a ghost of the former elegance remained.
In the center of the room stood a massive desk, and behind the desk sat the warden, Gil Resset. He was a small man, owlish, with thick spectacles and thinning hair that he kept meticulously combed. He blinked at me but did not speak immediately. He instead let the fear settle over my skin while he looked at me with what was almost amusement glinting behind the lenses of his glasses. I’d heard of Resset, and how he was a petty man with a penchant for exerting what little power he had over those who found themselves with the misfortune of being at his mercy.
When the warden spoke, his voice was nasal and irritating, like a stick scraped across a blackboard. “Meredith Rider?” he said, spreading a sheet of paper on the desk before him and scribbling something at the bottom right corner.
I nodded.
The warden paused, lifting an eyebrow, his hand that held the pen raised as he waited. “Speak,” he commanded, and he smiled thinly. “For the record.”
“Yes, that’s my name.”
Thankfully, my voice didn’t waver with fear.
The warden looked down at the paper before him. “I hereby sentence you, Meredith Rider, in the presence of these witnesses, to the punishment of forty lashes for the crime of treason and debasement of a government official’s name in a public sphere.”
The bottom fell out of my stomach, and for a moment, I couldn’t breathe. My vision blurred. My hands shook.
This was madness. He couldn’t be serious.
“Forty lashes?” I repeated, when I could speak.
“Forty,” he agreed with a jerk of his weak chin. A hint of a sadistic smile lingered on the edges of his mouth.
Perhaps I should have been frightened, but instead, I trembled with anger. This was a vile injustice on every conceivable level. Forty lashes had killed many a soldier, and it would take far less than that to finish someone as small as me. It was a death sentence, and we both knew it. And all for a mocking rhyme written on the side of a store—and I hadn’t even written it.
“You would dare kill a Chosen?”
It was my only card to play, my status as Chosen. I hated doing it—more than anything in the world, I wanted to do anything else—but it was my lone defense.