Chapter 2 The Monster's Court

The screaming stopped before I reached the palace doors.

That should have been a mercy. It wasn't. A scream, at least, is alive. The silence that followed it felt like the sound a graveyard makes.

"They say he can hear everything in this palace," the old priest muttered, hurrying me up the steps. "Every whisper. Every heartbeat. Don't speak unless he speaks to you. Don't run - he hates running. And whatever you do, child, do not let him see you flinch."

"Will it hurt?" I asked. "When he touches me?"

The priest stopped walking.

He turned and looked at me the way you'd look at a lamb asking whether the knife will hurt. "Child," he said, "nothing that happens inside these walls ever stops hurting. The king's curse killed six priestesses before you came. Each one was blessed. Each one was certain." His old eyes moved over my face, hungry and afraid at the same time. "But none of them was a moon-daughter. The goddess's own blood. If your grandmother's line is true -"

"It's true," I said flatly. "My father made sure I knew my exact market value before he sold me."

Something flickered across the old man's face. Pity, maybe. In a place like this, even pity felt dangerous.

"I am Father Marek," he said. "I was the court priest before the coronation. I have been the only priest since." He opened the great doors, and warm air spilled out, smelling of candlewax and something faintly medicinal - herbs, and under them, blood gone old. "Come. The steward will process your arrival."

The inside of the palace was beautiful the way a shipwreck is beautiful. Everything was intact - marble floors, tapestries stitched with gold thread, chandeliers still burning - and everything was empty. Not one guard. Not one servant. I counted eleven doors we passed, all shut, all silent.

"Where is everyone?" I whispered.

"Dead," Father Marek said, without slowing. "Or gone. The court fled the night of the coronation, when the curse woke. The servants who stayed..." He made a small, tired gesture. "There are perhaps forty of us left, in a palace built for three thousand. We keep to the lower floors. We leave offerings at his door every seventh day."

"Offerings," I repeated. "Food?"

"Prayers, mostly." A pause. "Once, a poet."

"Once," I said, "a poet."

"He believed his art could soothe the king's rage." Father Marek's voice didn't change at all. "We buried what we could find of him."

I decided I would not be asking any further questions about the poet.

The steward met us at the foot of the west stair - a tall woman with silver hair and a face like a locked door. Her eyes did a slow circuit of me: my borrowed ceremonial dress, my empty chest, my wolfless hands.

"So," she said. "Silverclaw finally sends the healer."

"My name is Ayra."

"Your name is irrelevant." She turned to Father Marek. "The king has not fed in four days. The fevers took him this morning. If the tribute is going to do anything, it must be tonight."

*If the tribute is going to do anything.* Like I was a poultice. A dressing to be laid on a wound.

"And if I refuse?" I asked.

The steward looked at me then - actually looked, for the first time - and something almost like respect moved behind her eyes before it died.

"Refusal is permitted," she said. "There is a gate behind the kitchens. It leads back to the mist. If the mist lets you leave, you may go home to your pack and tell your father the tribute failed." She leaned in, close enough that I could smell the candlewax on her robes. "But you should know what refusal means for us, child. The king dies. When the king dies, the curse loses its host, and the mist comes for everything it can reach. Everything. Do you understand? That mist is not weather. It is what is left of a slaughtered court, and it is *hungry*, and the only thing that has ever held it back is a dying man behind that door who burns everything he touches."

Silence.

"Four days without feeding," Father Marek said softly. "He is past asking, child. He takes. That is what the curse has made him."

The steward produced a key - black iron, older than any lock I'd ever seen - and opened the door at the top of the west stair.

"The king's chamber," she said. "We will lock it behind you. It is not cruelty. It is so that when he wakes, whatever he finds in the room, he does not chase it into the halls."

"And when he finds me?" My voice sounded far away. "What then?"

"Then," the steward said, "you will learn why six priestesses' names are carved on the wall by the kitchen fire."

The door opened.

I stepped through.

Darkness. Heavy curtains, heavy air. Moonlight came through one gap in the drapes and lay across the floor like a drawn blade. Somewhere in the dark, breathing. Slow. Wet. Wrong - like bellows full of fluid.

And heat. Heat rolled off the far side of the room in waves, the kind of heat that comes off a fevered body three times a man's size, and with it a smell of char and copper that made my hindbrain scream *fire, blood, predator, run.*

My empty chest ached where a wolf should have been. For eighteen years I'd hated that hollowness.

Standing in that darkness, I hated it more. A wolf would have told me what to do. A wolf would have known how to be brave.

I had nothing but a girl's spine and my grandmother's voice in my head: *healing hands are steady hands, Ayra. Whatever you touch, touch it like you mean it.*

I meant it.

I crossed the room.

He lay on the great bed - I saw him in pieces, the way you see anything in the dark: the pale sweep of a chest, a jaw clenched like a fist, a throat moving with each drowning breath. Veins of black crawled up from beneath the bandages on his forearm, spreading toward his shoulder like ink dropped in water. His skin gave off heat that made my eyes sting.

Up close, even dying, even ruined - he was the most beautiful man I had ever seen, in the way that a forest fire is beautiful. From far away. In principle.

His eyes opened.

Gold. Not amber. *Gold* - molten, furnace-bright, blown wide with fever. They fixed on me the instant I was inside the circle of moonlight, and the breathing stopped.

For a long moment, nothing in the room moved except the black veins crawling up his arm.

"Another one." His voice was a ruin. Deep, cracked, scraped raw by three years of screaming, maybe. "The court sends me another one." A smile crawled across his face, and there was nothing of humor in it at all. "Does Silverclaw think I've forgotten what rejection feels like? That a pretty ghost will warm what's left of me?"

"I wasn't told to warm anything." I kept my voice level. Steady hands, steady voice. *Touch it like you mean it.* "I was told the king is dying, and that my bloodline might mend him. That's all I know."

"Mend him." The gold eyes closed. The smile died. "Your grandmother's line, then. The moon-daughters. The last ones who ever touched me without burning." His head turned on the pillow, toward me, slow and deliberate, and the heat in the room climbed another degree. "Come here, moon-daughter. Let's see if the goddess finally sent mercy."

Every instinct I owned told me to run.

I thought of Father Marek's poet. I thought of six names carved by a kitchen fire. I thought of my father's face as he said, *you will finally pay your debt.*

I thought - and the thought arrived like a slap - *you are done being sold. From tonight, everything you give, you give because you choose it.*

I stepped into reach.

His hand came up fast as a whip - much, much faster than a dying man's hand should move - and closed around my throat.

Heat. Not the heat of fever. The heat of a blacksmith's forge, of a burning house, of skin going past burning into something else entirely. Every nerve in my neck lit up screaming, and I heard my own pulse crack and stutter, and the last thing I saw before the world went white was those gold eyes going wide with something that looked almost like regret.

"Close your eyes," the Lycan King told me. "It's kinder that way."