Chapter 2

Lyra

The lock clicked behind me, and the pretending stopped.

I don't remember how I got to the bed. The bed was something I was just suddenly on — sitting at first, then sliding sideways until my back was against the frame and my cheek against the cool wood. The blood on my knee had dried into a hard, dark scab.

It came up out of me without warning, and my face went into the side of the mattress so the guards at the door wouldn't hear. My hands were shaking. The pulse in my teeth was the loudest thing in the room.

There was only one thing in my room I wanted to touch.

In the bottom drawer of my dresser, wrapped in a square of linen Mother had stitched the year before she died, was the one thing of hers the new wife had not been able to find and sell. A thin silver chain. A small green stone the color of river-glass. I had never worn it in front of my father.

I held it in my fist, and I cried until there was nothing left.

The necklace stayed closed against my breastbone while the ceiling went from black to gray to a thin, dirty rose. My mind did a great many things and then nothing at all. By morning, there was nothing left in me but the need to stand up.

I sat up.

The basin was cold. The water turned brown when I washed the blood off my shin, and I bound the cut with a strip of an old chemise. My hair went into a single plait.The gray wool dress I wore most days had blue stitching at the cuffs, taken from one of Mother's old gowns and sewn on by my own uneven hand after she died.

My face in the small mirror looked tired. It did not look broken.

I was not dead yet.

The door opened.

Delilah was in the hall, smiling. Behind her stood two of the household guards in their gray coats and one man in a black livery I did not recognize.

"The carriage is at the door," she said.

I did not answer her. Walking past her into the hall, I lifted my elbow out of the gray-coat's reach and kept moving. No one was going to carry me out of my own father's house. Delilah followed me down the steps.

The carriage was black, and the horses were black. The crest on the door was the dragon, in a thin gold line. The man in the black livery opened the carriage door and waited.

Delilah caught my arm.

She did it without force, the way a friend might. She leaned in close to my ear. Her breath smelled of breakfast tea.

"Lyra," she said. "Before you go. Mother."

"Don't."

"Your mother left a will."

I went still.

"Father climbed in this town because of her dowry. Did you know that? When she died, everyone assumed the rest passed to him. But she had written it differently. All of it was supposed to come to you, on the day you wed."

The yard noise dropped away.

"He has been the keeper of your money since you were six," she said. "And now you are a tribute, and there will be no wedding. He will keep all of it. Forever. So when you ask yourself why he didn't fight harder for you — that's why."

She let go of my arm. "Safe journey," she added.

The dragon-livery man grabbed my elbow and hauled me into the carriage. I struck the seat and did not feel it. The door shut. The wheels began to move.

I sat there with my hands flat on my knees and let the truth come up.

The fire when I was six. The fire that took my mother. The fire that was supposed to take me too. I had been sent to fetch a candle. I had come back to a wall of flame.

I had been six years old, and I had never once asked what had started it.

The carriage rolled past the gate, and I came back to myself all at once. The carriage window was under my hands. The glass rang where I was banging on it.

"Delilah!" She turned at the steps.

"Tell my father something for me," I shouted. The carriage was already pulling away. "Tell him I am coming back. Tell him I am coming back from the Dragon Court alive."

She was smiling.

I sat down. My hand closed around the necklace through the front of my dress. The words were out of my mouth now. That meant I would have to keep them.

Zarek

The chamberlain bowed at the threshold. He was a small man with a long, papery face.

"Your Majesty," he said. "The tributes have arrived. The first round is to begin within the hour."

I did not turn from the window.

"How many?"

"Twenty-three this season."

"Send them to the lower court."

He bowed again and did not leave. He had been my chamberlain for fifty years, and he knew when I was lying about being calm.

"Your Majesty," he said, more softly this time. "How long since the last fit?"

"Four days." He breathed out.

I felt the curse turn over inside me again. It was pressure behind my eyes, heat under my breastbone, the slow hungry voice of the beast I had been trying not to become for nine hundred years.

I opened my hand and looked at the knife on the table.

It had been used twice this week already. Once on my forearm, once across my own ribs.The pain was the only thing that still worked.

Soon the curse would have me completely. What remained would be a beast no chain could hold.

Unless I found her.

The girl who could stand in dragonfire and not burn. The true queen.

I had stopped believing she existed sometime in the last hundred years. I conducted these selections out of duty now, because the law required it, and because my chamberlain looked at me with frightened eyes when I tried to cancel them. He was the only one left who remembered what I had been before.

I picked up the knife.

I drew it across my forearm, low, where the sleeve would hide it. The pain hit, and the pressure behind my eyes eased a little, and I exhaled. Then it pushed back. Faster this time.

"Hugh," I said. He came forward.

"Bring the chains."