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"Yes, Councillor," I said. "We have."

I pulled my hand from his, turned my back on the Chair of the Council of Iron in front of three hundred people, and ran.

The Hall erupted behind me, but I didn't look back. At the doors, I kicked off Tamsin's borrowed shoes and ran barefoot across the frozen flagstones of the courtyard, clutching the green silk in both fists to keep from tripping over it. The cold bit into my feet, and the thread around my wrist burned as I took the covered steps toward the Pit.

Before I reached the bottom, I could hear the noise rising from the ring: snarls, screams, shouts from the tiers, and beneath all of it a roar I knew.

The stands were crowded with gray uniforms and dark coats. Council men, Wardens, aides from the visiting delegations, and a handful of senior students pressed against the rails in the torchlight. Varga stood among them with his sling gone, grinning down into the ring. Oda was at the very front, small and rigid, both hands locked around the iron rail.

On the black sand below them was the scene that had been waiting for me in my sleep every night since Monday.

There were five ferals. Ronan had been right.

Three wolves, a lynx, and a short, heavy brown animal that might once have been a badger circled the ring with red eyes and bloody, matted fur. Two of the wolves were already down and weren't moving. The other three had Silas trapped against the far wall.

He was half-shifted and stuck there, just as he had been on the day of his Break. His body had become a huge, hunched shape caught between a man and a bear, coarse dark fur pushing through the remains of his torn shirt. Blood ran from his side and shoulder, and a long gash opened one arm from elbow to wrist. His head swung from side to side as he tracked the animals around him.

When the torchlight caught his eyes, they were almost completely red. Only a narrow ring of brown remained around the edges.

"He's going," someone said from the tier above me, with unmistakable satisfaction. "There. Look at him. He's going."

I didn't bother with the ladder. I climbed over the rail, the same way Silas had once come over it for me, and dropped the twelve feet to the sand.

I landed badly. Pain shot through the ankle I had already injured, but I was moving again before I had fully regained my balance. Somewhere above me, Oda called my name. Varga shouted something about interference, and someone else laughed.

The three remaining ferals turned toward me at once.

The wolf, the lynx, and the brown animal abandoned Silas and fixed on me instead. I stood on the black sand in Tamsin's green silk, barefoot, bleeding, with my hair half fallen from its pins. Their red eyes followed every movement as they lowered themselves closer to the ground.

I pulled off my gloves and let them fall.

The bandages underneath were dirty and loose, and the burns had split open again when I landed. Blood and clear fluid had already begun to soak through the gauze.

Oda's warning came back to me: Be careful who you show your hands to.

I raised them anyway, palms open for the entire Pit to see, and began to hum.

The sound came out low and rough, with no melody I could have named. It was the same sound I had made for a frightened dog on a steel table, for a grizzly in a ravine, for Silas in this Pit, and later for a man on a stone floor with his throat burning from the inside.

She sings it down, the Council memo had said forty-two years ago.

At the time, I hadn't understood what those words meant. Now I did.

The lynx reacted first.

It had been creeping toward me with its belly close to the sand, but it stopped with one paw raised. Its ears lifted, and its head turned slightly as it listened.

A moment later, the brown animal stopped as well. It blinked several times and swung its heavy head in my direction.

The last wolf held out longer.

It was the largest of them, with a torn ear, foam streaked across its jaws, and someone else's blood covering its chest. A few seconds earlier, it had been close enough to tear out Silas's throat. Now it stood completely still and watched me.

I kept humming as I moved forward.

I didn't approach them head-on. I came in slowly from the side, keeping my shoulders loose and my hands low, the same way I had crossed this sand before. My ankle throbbed with every step, but the Pit had become so quiet that I could hear the torches crackling along the walls and the distant sound of the sea below the cliffs.

The lynx lowered itself first.