Page 51 of Feralheart

I bent and scratched behind his ears, then straightened and started down the lane without looking back.

The city was waking. Smoke rose from chimneys, and the lift bell clanged in the distance, calling the morning shift down into the mines.

Old Merra hung laundry across the lane. She nodded once, her mouth pressed so thin it disappeared. Beside the water barrel, Jalak the tinker touched two fingers to his forehead, the gesture miners used for good luck. Across the way, Tessine pulled her daughter inside before the girl could finish pointing at the trial mark on my hand.

Cob the baker stepped from his doorway as I passed. “Grain and stars keep you,” he said the old blessing. He handed me a roll still warm from the oven.

He’d fed us rolls like this after my mother had died and we had nothing.

I passed the roll back into his hands. “For Tolross. If I don’t come back.”

His weathered face crumpled. “Eradin.”

“Please.”

He closed his fingers around the roll, and I kept walking before he could argue.

My jaw ached from clenching it. If I opened my mouth, I’d fall apart in the middle of the lane, and they’d all see it. Better to be the woman who walked to her death quietly than the one who sobbed her way there.

By the time I’d reached the top of the path, my legs quivered and the fortress loomed ahead, banners lying limply against their poles.

My legs wanted to stop. To turn around. To run back down the mountain and crawl into my bed where I could pretend I’d never been foolish enough to think I could do this. Instead, I made them keep moving. One step, then another, the talon-blade tapping against my thigh in a countdown.

They’d gathered in the fortress courtyard, seven others like me waiting in the looming dawn. I recognized the sunburned man from the sign-up line. He caught my eye and nodded. Scared but trying not to show it.

A wiry man leaned against the stone wall, studying the rest of us like livestock he was considering buying. When his flat gaze reached me, it turned hostile. I didn’t know him and didn’t care to.

A woman four or five years older than me stood alone, her eyes wide. She looked vaguely familiar with her long blonde hair, though I couldn’t place her. Her hands twisted together as she studied the ground.

Blonde hair. A few years older than me. Something about the way she held herself…

The path to the quarry road. This was the woman with the heavy bag I’d bumped into. She’d been holding books. She wasn’t holding them now.

As if she felt me watching, her head came up. Our eyes met.

Recognition flickered across her face, followed by a bright, empty smile unlike the sweet one she’d given me on the path.

She lifted her hand in a small wave, and I returned the gesture.

Four others filled in the gaps. A man about my age with red hair, his trial mark still raw. A gray-bearded man whose hands shook so badly, he nearly dropped the cap he held in his hands. A woman with a miner’s build met my eyes once and jerked up her chin, the gesture saying, we’re in this together, even if we’re not. Chalk dust still grayed her knuckles.

“Marda,” she said, like a name was worth spending on a stranger. “Third shift, east seam.”

The last was an older woman standing apart from us all, staring toward the path to Shaleside, her lips moving. Names. She was saying names.

I’d forget their faces the moment this began. Or I’d remember forever, depending on which of us survived.

Someone has to see them, my mother would say, so I made myself look.

The priestess left the fortress entrance and strode over to the center of the courtyard, her silver robes swishing across her bare feet.

She raised her hands, palms up. “Form a circle around me.”

We shuffled into position. The sunburned man stood to my left and the scared woman to my right, her breathing too fast.

The priestess chanted words in a language I couldn’t understand and the ground beneath my feet rumbled, the vibration clawing up through my bones.

My belly tightened, and the courtyard plunged away.