Page 113 of Feralheart

Now I stood in the courtyard with the other commons survivors, my overloaded pack strapped to my back. My leather tunic I’d worn yesterday felt damp in places, clinging to my ribs where I’d laced it tight. The spare sat folded in my pack. I’d need it later, assuming there was a later. At least the boots were new, courtesy of a prince—or not. A servant had delivered them as I was waking, new, perfectly fitting and dry.

My foot felt so much better, I wanted to weep.

A priestess waited by the eastern gate, her silver robes catching the weak light. Just the four of us. No elite riders. No officials other than her.

Lyndie bounced on her toes, her smile beaming too brightly for someone who might soon meet her own death. “Where are the others? Shouldn’t we all leave together?”

The priestess’s expression didn’t change. “Only the commons require transportation to the arena.”

The elite didn’t need magical transport like livestock. They’d arrive on their own terms, in their own time, and with servants and ceremony.

We were the ones who needed handling.

The priestess raised her hands and chanted. The ground beneath my feet hummed, the vibration climbing up through my bones.

Then the world tore apart.

Weightlessness slammed into me. My stomach tried to climb out through my throat while my body was yanked in six directions at once. Colors bled together, stone and sky and something darker underneath that tasted like old blood.

The ground jolted back under my boots.

I staggered. Reece dropped to one knee. Lyndie staggered, and I caught her with a hand on her shoulder. She straightened, her face green.

“Thank you,” she breathed. “I thought I was going to—” She swallowed hard. Stiffening her spine, she snapped the bright smile back into place. “That was unpleasant.”

I knew what it cost to hold yourself together when everything inside you was falling apart.

Nausea shot through me in waves. I ground my teeth together, trying to remember how mouths functioned, how bodies were supposed to fit. The teleportation clung to my bones, a taint I couldn’t shake. This was how the elite moved through the world, tearing reality apart because they could afford the magic to put it back together.

We’d landed in an arena with high stone walls, one side lined with viewing stands already filling with people, and sand underfoot.

A magical screen shimmered above the center of the stands, its back to us. Two doors had been mounted in the walls. One normal-sized for officials. Another massive, wooden, arched, and firmly closed.

I couldn’t see over the walls to know what waited beyond.

Riders milled near the far side, dressed in gilded leathers, their packs three times the size of ours. They stayed separate from us, a clear line drawn in the sand.

Reece pulled a strip of fabric from his pocket, faded blue and fraying on the edges. He tied it around his wrist, his weathered hands shaking as he knotted it.

“My wife has its match,” he said.

“That’s sweet,” Lyndie said. “I wish I’d thought to bring something of my mom’s.”

I spotted Reece’s wife in the stands, sitting in the lower section, dabbing her eyes with a matching blue scarf.

Emotion swelled in my throat.

Tolross didn’t have a scarf. He had a poem in my pocket and a father who’d watch the empty doorway waiting for a daughter who might not return. The parallel hit hard, both of us racing to buy time for people we loved, knowing neither of us stood much chance of winning the wish.

I turned away before the burning in my eyes became something the crowd would see.

Kerrel hadn’t moved since we’d landed. His eyes held that vacant look that said his body was here but the rest of him had already left.

“Kerrel,” I hissed, then a touch louder. “Kerrel.”

“What?” he growled, not glancing my way.

“Stiffen your resolve.” If he didn’t, he wouldn’t make it through the first test.