Chapter 3

Lyra

The carriage stopped.

I did not know how long we had been moving, only that the road had gone smooth enough to mean we were inside the inner walls. I held the necklace through my dress and tried to remember my promise: I was coming back alive.

The dragon-livery man opened the door.

I climbed down on my own. I would not be lifted again. The cobblestones of the courtyard were paler than the cobblestones in our town, and the air smelled of cut stone and hot iron.

There were other girls.

A great many of us, all in pale dresses or traveling cloaks, all standing in a loose half-moon along the wall of a square stone yard. One girl was crying without seeming to notice she was. Another was chewing the inside of her cheek and staring at the closed door at the far end of the yard.

A girl near the front was wearing a sapphire on a long chain.

She was tall, and her hair was the color of polished oak, and she stood with her chin lifted. The sapphire at her throat caught the light with a cold blue flash. She looked sure of herself. The other girls had left a small space around her, the kind of space people make for someone they expect to win.

"He's looking for his bride," I heard a girl beside me whisper. Her voice was thin. "They say the true queen can stand in his fire and not burn.The dragon will kneel for her."

"Hush," another one whispered.

I did not look at them. I looked at my own hands. Half an hour ago I had been a girl who promised to live. Now I was a girl who had no plan, no friends in this place, and a knee that was beginning to throb again under its dirty bandage.

A door opened at the far end of the yard.

The man who came out was small and stooped, with a long, papery face.

"Tributes," he said. "I am the chamberlain of the Dragon Court. The first round of selection begins now."

He let the silence settle.

"You will be admitted, one group at a time, into the chamber behind me. Inside the chamber is the King's pet. The rule is simple. Spend five minutes in his presence. If he favors you, you advance. If he does not — well. You will not."

A few of the girls let out small, uneasy laughs. The sapphire girl smiled.

"What kind of pet?" someone asked.

The chamberlain did not answer.

I felt my shoulders drop. A pet. I pictured a hound, a hunting cat, perhaps one of the great striped lions the King was said to keep. A pet I could survive.

The chamberlain opened the door and stepped aside.

The smell hit me before I had crossed the threshold. Hot iron, and beneath it something wilder, something that made the small hair at the back of my neck stand up. I followed the line of girls into a chamber with a high stone ceiling. Iron rings the size of cartwheels were sunk into the floor. From each ring ran a length of black chain.

The chains were attached to a dragon.

It was huge and the color of wet coal. Its scales caught the light when it breathed. Its eyes were yellow. It lifted its head when we came in, and the chains shifted with a long, slow ringing sound, and one of the girls behind me began to make a noise I had never heard a person make before.

I stepped backward until my shoulder blades touched the stone wall. I would stand here, and I would not move, and I would let the five minutes go by, and I would walk out.

The sapphire girl walked toward the dragon.

She walked the way she had stood in the yard, with her chin up. Two other girls followed her, laughing the high, breathy laugh of people who could not believe the thing in front of them was real.

"Don't," I said, quietly enough that no one heard me.

One of the girls reached out a hand.

The dragon's chest swelled. I saw it happen the way you see lightning before you hear it — the long ribs lifting, the throat coloring orange under the scales, the yellow eyes gone narrow.

It opened its mouth, and fire poured out. I went cold.

Not the cold of fear. The other cold. The cold I had not felt since I was six years old. The cold of a room with no air in it, and a wall of flame at the doorway, and knowing the woman calling your name from inside the flame was about to stop calling.

I could not move. The girls were screaming. Two of them were inside the fire. The sapphire girl had thrown herself sideways and was rolling. The girl who had reached out her hand was standing exactly where she had been standing, frozen, her sleeve already smoking, her mouth open.

She was going to die. Something in my body unstuck.

Crossing the floor was a blur. My arm hooked under hers, her breath was wet against my shoulder, the heat came through the side of my dress. I dragged her sideways into the cleared edge of the chamber and shoved her down behind a low stone trough.

Then the dragon saw me. Its head came up off the floor.

The yellow eyes locked on mine, and for one long second the chamber went still. Even the fire seemed to hold itself in place.

Then the dragon launched. The wings unfolded. A wind I felt in my hair. A long black body uncoiling like a whip across the chamber, straight at me, all teeth and breath and weight. The chains went taut behind it with a ringing crack that shook the stone under my feet. The dragon was yanked short in midair, six feet from my face. Its jaws snapped on nothing.

It hung there. It looked at me.

I could feel cold sweat running between my shoulder blades into the back of my dress.

"Five minutes," said the chamberlain's voice. "Round one is complete."

But the dragon did not look away.