Chapter 4: Wells, You May Choose

"Wells. You may choose."

I knew those words. I knew them because I had typed them myself, at two o'clock in the morning, in a different life though… I never expected to hear them out loud.

The Temple of the Hundred Cradles was exactly as I had described it. Gold light poured through high windows. Pillars rose in rows, carved with vines and wings. Overhead, a vaulted ceiling was painted with tamers and beasts standing side by side, and a hundred young people in white ceremonial robes shuffled and whispered below it. I could smell incense, warm stone and straw, and under it all, the wild, musky heat of a hundred animals waiting to be chosen.

I had spent three whole paragraphs on that ceiling. It had never occurred to me that it would be so high.

"Wells," said the old examiner again, with an impatient rustle of his scroll. "Do try to keep up, girl. We choose in order of rank, lowest first. You are lowest. That is why you are first. We have not got all day."

Somebody giggled. It was a soft, delighted sound, like a spoon on glass.

I did not need to look to know who it was.

Up in the family gallery, in a gown of green silk, my stepmother Helen was snapping a fan open and shut. Beside her, Nora's father, Gordon, looked tired and absent, exactly as written. And in the line, three places down, in a pale blue cloak, with a smile as sweet and poisonous as syrup, stood Daisy Price.

In the book, ninety-four percent of readers had voted Daisy the most hated character. I had been quite proud of that.

Now Daisy met my eyes across from where I stood, bright and amused, and I realized that being hated by readers and being hated in person were two very different things.

I took a deep breath.

The next few minutes were not a mystery. I had written them. In the third row of the Cradle Hall, a little black snake lay in a basket of straw with a bandaged tail. It was the weakest creature in the hall. Nobody had wanted it. In the book, Nora walked straight to it and picked it up out of pity. She felt its warmth… She loved it.

Jax.

I stepped forward. My legs felt strange. They were thinner than mine, and lighter, and they trembled a little with every step. The Cradle Hall opened before me, row on row of baskets and perches and cages. A golden tiger cub, who rose to his feet with a hopeful mew. A white-furred wolf. A blue hawk. A fire lizard the size of my thumb, spitting sparks.

And in the third row, in a basket lined with straw, a small black snake, its tail wrapped in a strip of clean cloth.

It lifted its head and It’s golden eyes met mine.

My heart gave a painful lurch because I knew that look. I had written it with so much tenderness. In chapter one, this was the moment Nora fell in love.

It was a very small snake. It was shivering. It looked, honestly, like it needed help.

But… I walked past it, which was the hardest thing I had ever done.

I kept my eyes forward, and I felt it watching me go, but I did not look back. Behind me, I heard a tiny, frustrated hiss.

"Where is she going?" someone whispered.

"The east wall. That's the discard row."

I heard Daisy laugh, softly, and the murmur of the crowd rose like a wave. I walked on, past the golden tiger, past the white wolf, past the blue hawk, who screamed at me. I walked the whole length of the long hall, steady and quiet, to the farthest wall, where the Temple put the creatures it did not expect to survive the week.

The east wall was dusty, damp and dim. A great stone pillar cut off the light and the straw was moldy. The baskets were cracked.

In the farthest corner, in a broken basket, something lay very still.

In chapter one, I had given this corner exactly one line. In the farthest corner, a peacock chick lay dying, and nobody noticed. I had typed it as scenery. I had forgotten it entirely, until I remembered what I had deleted from the story, and the strange, dark dream I had woken with.

A peacock. In the book, Daisy would pick it that afternoon, because it was pretty. She would let it starve in a cage behind the stables, and it would never grow, which she would blame it for everything.

I knelt in the dust.

The chick was so small it might have fit in my cupped hands. Its feathers were dull and patchy, the color of old dust. One wing was twisted. Its tiny chest rose and fell in short, uneven stutters.

My eyes stung.

It was the bird from the dream. It had to be. It was the one that had clawed at my sleeve in the black water, that had weighed less than a loaf of bread and tried with everything it had to carry me to the surface.

"It's you," I whispered. "It's you."

I touched it, very gently, with one finger. It was cold.

"Girl." The examiner had followed me, scandalized. "That one is not for choosing. It's a discard. A peacock. Ornamental stock, no combat value. They don't live a month."

"I'll take it," I said.

"You are a Lord's daughter. Choose something that will keep you alive."

"I did."

Behind us, the hall had gone quiet. And then the laughter began.

It started small, with one boy at the back, and then it spread. A girl near the pillar covered her mouth. A group of students bent together, whispering. Up in the gallery, I heard my stepmother's voice rise sweetly over it all.

"Oh, let her, Gordon. Her mother was always sentimental about worthless things. I'm sure the creature will cost us nothing."

I looked up.

I had written Helen's lines for a year. I knew her voice like I knew my own. And I remembered, from chapter three, a small and forgettable detail that I had planted for a payoff I had never written.

"Surely it will cost nothing at all, Stepmother." I said.

My voice was clear and pleasant, and it carried across the silent hall.

"Unlike my mother's pearls, which cost Master Pell's pawn shop eleven gold pieces when you sold them in the spring."

Her fan stopped.

Gordon Wells turned very slowly to look at his wife.

"I," said Helen. "That is... I never, I don't know what the girl is talking about."

"I'm sure it was a misunderstanding," I said, and bent my head over the chick again, as though nothing had happened.

Dead silence rolled over the Temple. Then, somewhere in the crowd, a girl began to whisper. Then another and a murmur broke across the hall, quick and eager, like the first drops of rain.

I felt a small, hot spark of something in my chest, and recognized it. It was satisfaction. It was the exact feeling I got when I wrote a perfect last line.

"Very well," the examiner muttered, flustered. "The ritual requires a drop of the tamer's blood on the beast's brow."

A temple attendant brought a silver needle on a little tray. I pressed it to my fingertip. A bead of red welled up. I touched it to the chick's tiny, bald forehead.

For a moment, nothing happened.

Then the drop of blood glowed.

It was a faint, pure, silvery white. It sank into the chick's brow like dew into dry earth. The twisted wing shuddered. The small chest drew in one long, shaking breath.

I stopped breathing.

It was the same light as the drop that had drifted through the water in my dream. The same one I had written into the book without understanding, three drops in a pill, a tradition, a ritual, a line I had never explained.

All across the hall, the great crystal that measured the strength of every bond blazed up in a searing light. It was not gold, the color of a Spirit Bond. It was not red, the color of a Sage Bond.

It was white.

The old examiner dropped his scroll.

"That's impossible," he whispered. "That is the Divine Beast Nurturing Blood. The White Blood of the legends. That color has not been seen in three hundred years."

Gasps rippled through the hall. Students craned their necks. In the family gallery, my father half rose from his seat, and my stepmother's fan fell out of her hand and clattered to the floor.

I heard none of it.

I was looking at the chick.

It had opened its eyes. They were a deep, clear, impossible blue, with a thin ring of silver around each pupil, and they were not looking at Nora Wells.

They were looking straight through me, into something very far behind my face.

A voice spoke inside my head, small and dry and very old.

"You are not Nora."