THE GILDED HEART: Claimed by the Werewolf King

Eleven days into the wrong century, Eva Cross had learned three things about being sold.

The first was that it was boring. Nobody told you that. She had imagined — in the four hours between falling out of her own life and the moment the chain closed around her wrists — that being taken by slavers would be a fast, loud, cinematic horror. It wasn't. It was eleven days of walking, and sleeping in a wagon that smelled of wet wool and other people's fear, and being fed a grey mash twice a day by a boy who wouldn't look at her. Terror, it turned out, had a shelf life. After about seventy hours it curdled into something flatter and more useful.

The second thing was that the cold here was a different animal than the cold at home. It didn't bite. It settled. It moved into the marrow of her and made itself comfortable, and by the eleventh morning she had stopped shivering, which she was fairly certain was bad.

The third thing was the one that mattered.

Keep your eyes up.

She had learned that a long time before this. She had learned it at eleven years old, in a kitchen with yellow cabinets, with her back against the corner where the counter met the wall, and her father's face gone loose and red above her. She had learned that if you dropped your eyes, it took longer. If you dropped your eyes, he had to keep going until he found the bottom of you. If you looked at him — if you just looked, flat and bored and without one drop of the thing he was fishing for — it ended faster, because it stopped being fun.

So on the block at Sarnhold, with a split lip and a face she hadn't seen in eleven days and a shift that had been white when she arrived, Evangeline Cross kept her chin level and looked out over the square like a woman waiting for a train.

The market ran along the bottom of a gorge, in the shadow of a mountain so big it made her ribs feel wrong. Gold country. She could tell, because everyone here wore some of it, badly — men in filthy leather with gold wire twisted through their beards, a woman selling sausages with a nugget the size of a thumb hanging between her breasts on a bootlace. Gold was common here in the way that plastic was common at home, and the effect was somehow more obscene than poverty would have been.

Sleet was coming down in a thin sideways drift. Six of them stood in a row on the long butcher's table they used as a block, and Eva was fourth, and the auction had been going for an hour and it was, God help her, boring, and she made herself hold on to that. Boredom was a fortress. She had built a lot of fortresses. She was extremely good at this.

The man selling them was called Drossel. Round, damp, small-eyed, rings on every finger including his thumbs, and a lovely warm carrying voice — the voice of a man who would sell you apples at a farmers' market and ask after your mother.

"And here, my lords. Here. Look at the hands."

He took her wrist and held it up, and Eva let him, because there was no version of this where she didn't.

"Look at them. No calluses on the palm, calluses on the fingertips. That is not a field girl. That's a craftswoman's hand, and a fine one. Silk-work, maybe. Gilding. I'll tell you honestly, I've had her eleven days and I still can't place the accent, and I have placed every accent between here and the salt coast."

Somebody in the crowd shouted something Eva didn't catch, and the crowd laughed, and Drossel laughed with them, warm and delighted, and squeezed her wrist in a way that was probably meant to be companionable.

The bidding started. She watched it come in, in a language that had been meaningless noise for the first hour of her first day here and had, somewhere around the second afternoon, simply resolved, the way a word does when you say it too many times, except backwards. She had stopped thinking about that. It was on the list of things she had put in a box.

A man near the front raised his hand. Velvet, wolf-grey and rain-dark, and a chain across his chest heavy enough to moor a boat. He had the kind of face that had been handsome for about a decade, twenty years ago.

"Bring her down," he said. "I want to see the mouth."

"My lord Hesk," said Drossel, pleased, and the crowd made a low noise of interest, and hands were on her arms, and then she was on the ground in the mud with everyone's eyes at her level, which was worse, and she understood immediately that it was designed to be worse.

Hesk took her jaw. His fingers were cold and smelled of onions.

"Open."

She opened. He put his thumb in her mouth and dragged her lower lip down and looked at her teeth like a man checking a horse, and said something about them being good, and something else after that about what else the mouth might be good for, and the men around him laughed the way men laugh when they're not really listening, just joining in.

And Eva did the thing she had promised herself, eleven years ago in a different country, she would never do again.

She let it be seen.

Not fear. She didn't have much of that left today. What got out of her was worse and much older — a hot, unmanageable flare of contempt, straight up out of the floor of her, and it crossed her face for about half a second before she could put it away.

Hesk saw it. He went very still, and then he smiled, and Eva's stomach dropped, because she knew that smile, she had grown up under that smile, that was the smile of a man who had just found the bottom of something and intended to take his time getting there.

"Oh, he said softly. Oh, I'll have her."

Drossel struck her.

He did it backhanded and almost absently, the way you'd swat a fly off a tray of pastries, and he was already talking again before her head finished turning.

"Forgive her, my lord. Forgive her, she's fresh, she's got no manners on her yet, that's half the fun, isn't it —"

Her ear rang. There was blood in her mouth again, the old cut reopened. She got her chin back up. It took longer than it should have.

And somewhere out past the torches, a voice said:

"Enough."

It wasn't loud. That was the strange part. It was a low, unhurried, almost bored voice, pitched for a dinner table, and it went through the whole square like a stone dropped into a full glass.

The crowd opened.

Eva's first thought, stupidly, was that somebody had put a statue in the market.

He was enormous. Not big — she'd known big men, her father had been big, Marcus had been big in the way that gym membership makes you big. This man was out of scale. Seven feet of him at least, in black, with gold at the collar and gold at the cuffs and a wolf pelt across one shoulder, and he came through that crowd without breaking stride because the crowd removed itself from his path like water off a hull.

He was, and she hated herself for noticing it while kneeling in mud with a bleeding mouth, obscenely beautiful. Dark hair pushed back wet from the sleet. A jaw you could open letters with. And underneath all of it, in the eyes, something not quite finished being an animal.

He stopped about four feet from Lord Hesk. He didn't look at Eva at all.

"My lord St. Claire," said Drossel, and his voice had gone up half a step. "This is — an honour, we had no word you were —"

"Was that your hand?"

Drossel's mouth stayed open.

"On her face. Was that your hand."

"My lord, she's my stock, I've the right to —"

"I didn't ask what you had. I asked whose hand it was."

The market had gone extremely quiet. Sleet hissed on the torches.

Hesk, who was either brave or nine-tenths drunk, laughed.

"Come now, St. Claire. You've not bid once all season. Don't tell me you've come down out of your gold mountain for a slattern with a smart —"

The big man moved.

Eva never properly saw it, not then and not in any of the ten thousand times she replayed it afterwards. There was Hesk, talking. Then there was a hand around Hesk's throat, and Hesk's boots were off the ground, and the velvet was hanging strangely, and there was a sound like someone stepping on a bundle of dry twigs.

Then Hesk was in the mud, and he was not a man anymore, just a shape wearing a lot of money.

Nobody screamed. Eva noted that. Nobody in this entire square found it worth screaming about.

The man in black turned to Drossel, and Drossel, to his eternal credit, did not run — he simply started to shake, all over, like a wet dog.

"Three," said St. Claire.

"My — my lord, I don't —"

"You struck her once. I'm going to break your arm in three places. One for the blow. One for the mouth you did it with. And one because you will tell this story for the rest of your life and I want the count to be memorable."

And he took Drossel's arm in both hands, unhurried, the way a man breaks bread at a table, and did precisely what he had said he would do.

Crack. A pause. Crack. A pause, longer, while Drossel's screaming filled the gorge and the crowd watched with the mild, absorbed attention of people at a puppet show.

Crack.

Then he let go. Drossel folded into the mud beside the late Lord Hesk and made a high thin sound into his own sleeve.

The man in black bent down. He cut Hesk's purse off his belt with a knife that appeared and vanished, weighed it on his palm, and dropped it in the mud in front of Drossel.

"Her price," he said. "Paid by your best customer. Mark the sale."

He came for her then.

Eva got her feet under her before he arrived, because she was not going to be picked up off the ground, not today, not by anyone. She stood in the churned muck in a ruined shift with her wrists chained and her lip bleeding and her hair stuck to her jaw, and she made herself look up — a long way up — into a face that was not, she realised with a lurch, looking at her the way any of the rest of them had.

He was looking at her the way you look at a name on a headstone that you already knew was going to be there.

"Can you walk?" he said.

His voice was different, aimed at her. Not softer. Just — lower. Private.

"Yes."

Something moved in his face when she spoke. It was gone before she could read it.

"Good."

He pulled the wolf pelt off his shoulder and put it around her, and the weight of it nearly took her down, and the heat that came off it was so sudden and so total that her eyes filled and she had to bite the inside of her cheek, hard, to stop that from becoming anything.

Eleven days. Eleven days and nobody had put anything warm on her.

"Thank you," Eva said.

She hadn't planned to. It came out of her rough and humiliating and small, and she despised it the second it was in the air.

He stopped. He looked down at her for a long moment, and the sleet came down between them, and the whole square watched a man who had just killed one person and ruined another stand perfectly still in the mud for a woman with no shoes.

"Don't thank me," he said. "I didn't save you. I claimed you."

And he turned and walked, and because the chain was in his hand now, Eva Cross walked after him.