Page 74 of Feralheart

They handed me new boots, ones more for looking good than lasting through years of work, but at least I wouldn’t face the Scorching barefoot. I laced them up and stood, testing my weight on my burned foot. It hurt, but I’d live.

Lyndie wore a dress in a similar style, hers in pale green. It made her look younger than she was, like someone’s daughter playing dress-up.

Fabric rustled on the other side of the room, the men dressing too.

“Are we supposed to be grateful for this?” Reece’s voice carried over the screen, edged with bitterness.

“It’s an honor to be invited, isn’t it?” Lyndie said softly while the servants arranged her hair in a simple style.

“We weren’t invited,” I said. “We’re being brought out like cattle at market.”

She looked down at her dress, and her shoulders fell. “Oh.”

They sat me in a chair and worked on my hair.

“Did you hear about Meckard?” the first servant said to the other who was working the comb like I was a hedge to be trimmed.

“Shh.”

“He’s been with the prince since he was a boy. They marched him out the front gates a short time ago.”

“I said shh.”

“Nobody’s been told why.”

The comb ripped through a knot. “Nobody’s had to.”

They moved on to the state of my fingernails.

The prince’s aide. The one who’d made a strangled sound when I sassed his master over the buckets, who’d swayed like a dying man when I threatened the royal boots. Dismissed after the prince leaned close to his mother and bought my life with a few whispered words.

A coincidence?

They’d dismissed the protocol violation but someone else may have paid the fee.

The realization settled in my belly like spoiled meat. Every kindness the prince spent on me may come out of somebody else’s pocket. Never his. Never mine.

After our hair had been deemed suitable, the screen was pulled aside, revealing the men for the first time since the arena.

Reece looked older in clean clothes, the white in his beard standing out against the dark blue of his tunic. His hands kept flexing at his sides, opening and closing like he was testing to make sure they still worked. When our eyes met, his held the same look Father’s had the night Mother died, steady on the surface, drowning underneath.

Kerrel wore brown. He stared at the floor, water still dripping from his red hair, onto his shoulders. His hands hung at his sides, his fingers loose, as if someone had cut the strings holding him upright and he hadn’t fallen yet.

Reece would last longer than Kerrel. Whether that was mercy or cruelty, I couldn’t say.

Lyndie was still an unknown. She was either genuinely naive or playing at it.

As for me, I didn’t know what I was anymore.

The same tall, thin man who’d led us from the arena stepped into the room from the hall and looked us over with a twist of his mouth.

“You’ll do, I suppose,” he said with a sniff. “I’ll escort you to the ball.”

He turned and walked into the hallway.

I grabbed the still-warm scale and tucked it into my pocket, securing the sheath with the talon-blade around my waist despite the raised eyebrows of the servants.

“That’s…” Lyndie’s grin rose, a gesture unlike the fake smile she’d been giving almost everyone else. “Alright, it’s badass.” She tapped her hip where her gown lay smooth. “I wish I had a blade. I have a feeling I’ll need one.”