Chapter 2

SYLARI

“You call that a swing?” Daren's voice barked from across the training pit.

I gritted my teeth, my arm was already swollen, but I lifted the blade again.

“Try again, Syl,” he mocked, “Or maybe your weak wrists can’t handle anything thicker than a broom.”

The other warriors howled with laughter, one of them, Riko’s cousin, maybe, I couldn’t remember....picked up a stone and tossed it toward me and it hit my shoulder with a dull thud.

“Oops,” he said with a sneer, “My hand slipped.”

No one corrected him, of course not.

“Don’t stop,” another chimed in.

“Maybe if we hit her hard enough, her wolf will wake up and grow a spine.”

“Move, curse-child.” Riko said hitting me across the same shoulder that had just been hit with a stone.

I didn’t flinch, I had learned not to, because flinching gave them something to laugh about.

Riko, the Alpha’s second-born, my immediate younger brother spat near my foot, “She doesn’t even blink, what a freak.”

“I heard she sleeps with her eyes open,” one of the kitchen boys snickered from the fence, “Like a ghost.”

“More like a parasite,” Daren muttered. “Sucking up Crescent Fang air like she belongs here.”

“I don’t see why father still feeds her.”

“Maybe he’s waiting for her to shift just so he can put her down himself.”

My stomach turned, but I held my stance. One wrong move and they’d have an excuse to pounce on me.

I picked up the dull blade from the training ring, gripping it tight and if I hesitated even a little longer, I would go hungry tonight.

Again.

“She thinks she’s one of us,” someone in the training room muttered, but I didn't bother trying to see who it was.

“She isn’t,” Riko sneered and began circling me.

“No shift, or a single howl, no voice, just dead eyes and a blank dumb face.”

I didn’t reply, I never did, because what was the point?

The others chuckled as I faced him silently. My arms ached from yesterday’s beatdown, but I didn’t let the blade shake.

“Let her fight him,” someone from the shadows barked, “Let’s see if she finally cries.”

“She won’t,” Riko said, “She doesn’t even bleed right.”

I did, but it wasn't enough for them, they called it a curse, I called it surviving.

A low whistle broke through the tension and my youngest brother, Daren, leaned against the fence post with his arms crossed, “I put ten silvers on Riko breaking her nose.”

“Fifteen on him snapping her wrist.”

No one objected, and certainly no one told them to stop.

Especially not the man walking in behind them, my father.

General Aldrich of Crescent Fang.

His eyes swept the field once, cold, sharp and disappointed, as always.

He didn’t say anything, he never did when it was about me.

But when Daren greeted him with a smirk, he patted his shoulder and muttered about training real wolves, and not limp branches.

I was the branch, I was always the branch.

“Begin,” Aldrich called and Riko lunged at me with full force.

The first punch was easy to dodge, the second clipped my jaw, the third slammed into my ribs, and I gasped, not from pain, but from surprise. I hadn’t seen it coming.

He grinned, “Look, she can make a sound.”

I wiped the blood from my lip and they laughed.

I spat on the ground and that wiped their grins off.

“She’s disgusting,” Daren muttered.

“She’s stubborn,” Aldrich corrected. “But it won’t save her.”

The next hit sent me to the ground and someone tossed water over me. “Get up.”

“Again.”

“Again!”

“Don’t you dare stay down, mutie.”

My fists trembled as I rose and my legs shook, but I didn’t let them see it.

If I cried, I would be laughed at. If I screamed, I would be punished for being dramatic.

So I stared back at them, with a blank face and a heart of stone, then I whispered in my head: You’ll break before I do.

Riko came again, I sidestepped, swung and the blade glanced off his arm.

A scratch on his face, I smirked in my head, but the silence that followed was loud.

“You cut me,” he said, stunned.

I didn’t blink again, 'You're welcome' I said in my head.

He launched himself at me, full of fury now and my back hit the dirt, but this time I pulled him with me and jammed my elbow into his throat.

He choked and rolled off, the crowd went still.

My father walked over, raising dust beneath his boots as he stopped beside me.

“You think that makes you strong?” he asked,

“You’re still nothing without a shift.”

I didn’t meet his eyes.

“Your form is pathetic,” my father said coldly. “And your presence here insults the very soil we train on.”

I stood up and lowered the blade slowly.

“If you were my soldier, I would have had your legs broken to spare the squad the embarrassment,” he added.

Daren snorted. “Maybe we still can.”.

“Enough,” my father said flatly. “Let the girl run laps until her feet bleed. Maybe she’ll learn something useful about endurance, since strength and honor are beyond her reach.”

He walked off, leaving the sting behind him like a blade that never quite cut clean.

I ran.

Ten laps.

Fifteen.

Twenty.

Twenty Five.

Thirty.

My lungs screamed and my feet blistered while they watched and laughed.

And when I collapsed in the mud, Riko poured cold water over my head from a horse bucket.

“Get up.”

I didn’t move.

“Get. Up.”

The butt of his training spear jabbed into my ribs and I choked back a groan.

“I said....”

“I’m up,” I croaked, finally speaking aloud.

That shut them up for a second.

“You spoke,” Daren said, narrowing his eyes towards me, “So she can speak.”

“Say something else,” another dared.

I said nothing.

“Back to mute, I guess we imagined it.”

“She’s a puppet,” Riko added, “Dead eyes and a mouth that barely works.”

They left me there in the cold, mud-caked and shaking.

************************************

Later that night, I sat outside the East Wing under the faded moon, rubbing my bruises.

“You okay?”

I looked up and one of the maids Tessa, stood in the shadows, holding out a crust of bread.

I brought honey bread,” she whispered, and handed me a slice, “They said you didn’t eat.”

I stared at it, torn between hunger and shame.

“They’ll kill you if you keep letting them do this,” she said softly.

"Thank you", I said in a whisper,. matching the tone of her voice, chewing slowly and deliberately.

Let them try.