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I could smell that terror clearly now, but underneath it was something else, so faint I almost missed it.

Shame.

"Yield!" Varga was shouting. "Yield! Marrow yields! Hold!"

I released her.

Backing away turned out to be harder than I expected. Four legs required a kind of coordination I did not have yet, and I staggered several steps before managing to remain upright. Blood continued to run from my chest into the black fur while I stood panting in the center of the Pit.

Three hundred people stared down at me.

The silence was so complete that I could hear gulls crying somewhere beyond the walls, out over the sea.

Then I realized I had another problem.

I had no idea how to change back.

Standing there with the entire world flooding through my nose, I searched instinctively for some way out of the wolf and found nothing. There was no obvious boundary between its body and mine, no movement I could reverse, no thought I could summon that would return me to myself. There was only the wolf's body, my blood on the sand, the crushing intensity of every smell and sound around me, and somewhere underneath all of it, the small remaining part of myself that was beginning to panic.

I turned in a frantic circle, clumsy on unfamiliar legs, and heard a thin whine escape my throat.

Then a sound reached me from the benches above.

Someone was humming.

It was low, steady, and badly off-key.

I knew that sound.

Silas.

I turned toward it, and something inside my chest loosened. The heat that had seized me began to fade, and suddenly the wolf was gone.

My body folded in on itself. Bones shifted. Fur vanished beneath skin. The overwhelming flood of scent collapsed into something human and manageable again.

A second later I was on my hands and knees in the black sand, naked and shaking, with blood running from a long gash across my collarbone.

The entire school was watching.

So was the Council of Iron.

I barely had time to register either fact before something landed heavily beside me.

Silas had jumped over the wall of the Pit. He had dropped the full twelve feet without using the ladder, and by the time I looked up, he was already pulling off his long coat. He wrapped it around my shoulders, knelt beside me, and dragged the front closed with both hands until I was completely covered in heavy, warm wool that smelled of rain and pine.

"Got you," he said under his breath. His hands were shaking. "I've got you. You're all right."

That was when the Pit erupted.

The sound crashed down from every tier at once. Three hundred people were shouting, cheering, pounding their feet against the stone, and the noise seemed to move through the ground beneath my knees.

Somewhere above us, Tamsin was screaming my name over and over until her voice broke. She was standing on the bench with both arms raised, trying to make herself visible through the crowd. Jax had reached the rail and was gripping his hair with both hands while laughing so hard that I could not tell whether he was also crying. Solace was stamping hard enough to shake the bench, and the entire Saltmere section had begun howling. Even several students from Fenhall were on their feet.

At the side of the envoys' box, Oda Brannock had risen from her chair.

She stood perfectly straight, small and gray among the taller figures around her, and stared down at me with those enormous round eyes.

Then she smiled.