Chapter 2

Gideon’s gaze traveled down her face, down the rough linen of her collar, down to the telltale sag of her stained leather apron.

A cruel, thin smile touched the corners of his mouth. "You smell of herbs, drudge. Not lye. Not sulfur. Chamomile. Honey-water. The kind of swill old women brew for sickly babes."

He reached out. His hand was large, calloused from the leather reins of war-mounts, the fingernails trimmed with surgical precision. With two fingers, he hooked the hem of her apron pocket and jerked it outward.

Pip tumbled out.

The little creature landed with an undignified *plop* upon the dry straw, rolled over twice like an overstuffed sausage, and came to rest on its back with four scrawny, pewter-scaled legs waving weakly in the air.

One of the acolytes barked an involuntary laugh. "By the Throne. What is that? A toad with mange?"

Gideon did not laugh. His eyes narrowed, a flash of genuine, aristocratic revulsion twisting his features. "A parasite."

Pip struggled right-side up with an immense amount of undignified grunting. He shook his wedge-shaped head, scattering loose chaff, and peered up at Gideon. His eyes were terrible—completely milky, the color of spoiled curd, save for the faintest, almost imperceptible ring of pale amber deep within the lens. A wet drop of clear mucus hung from his left nostril.

"It failed the spark," Gideon said, his voice dropping into that chilling, bureaucratic register that preceded executions. "It failed the bone-density trial. It possesses no secondary eyelid, no ether-duct along the jaw, and its clavicle is soft as lard. It is an abomination against the purity of the Imperial Blood-Line."

He reached behind him without turning his head.

"The brand."

The acolyte stepped forward immediately, lifting the long-handled iron from the brazier. The three-pronged crown at its tip was incandescent, radiating a shimmer of heat that warped the air.

"Wait!"

The word cracked through the vaulted stall before Oriana’s mind could stop it.

The silence that followed was absolute.

Both acolytes froze, their jaws slackening in pure disbelief. No common keeper—no hand, no peasant born of the dregs—spoke to a Lord Dragonmaster in the imperative. It was a flogging offense. In the lower yards, men had lost their tongues for less.

Gideon’s head turned slowly, his flint-gray eyes fixing on her with the clinical interest of an anatomist observing a beetle twitching on a pin.

"What did you say?" he asked softly.

Oriana’s throat felt as dry as kiln dust. Every instinct honed over eight years of surviving in the lower mews screamed at her to drop to her knees, to beg for mercy, to let the iron sizzle into the runt’s soft belly and thank the Lord Dragonmaster for cleansing the kennel. Pip was nothing. A mistake of nature. A mouth she had wasted her own meager bread rations to feed.

Then Pip sneezed. A tiny, wet sound that blew a piece of straw across Gideon’s boot.

The little creature didn’t run. It waddled forward two clumsy steps, bumped its snout against the toe of Oriana’s patched boot, and curled itself tightly around her ankle, resting its heavy, deformed chin on her leather laces.

*He kept me warm when the winter pipes froze,* she thought, a fierce, irrational heat flaring behind her breastbone. *He didn't bite when I lanced his foot. He is mine.*

Oriana took half a step forward, putting her body squarely between the glowing iron and the scrap on the floor.

"I invoked the observation period, my lord," she said. Her voice shook on the first syllable, but by the third, it was steady. Iron-hard.

Gideon’s eyebrows arched in mocking amusement. "The observation period? You are a broom-pusher, girl. You invoke nothing in this Weyr except the broom and the shovel."

"Chapter Nine," Oriana recited, the words tumbling from a memory she had kept buried since she was nine years old, curled beneath her father’s study desk while the Inquisitors burned his books. "Subsection Four of the Imperial Founding Codex. *The Sanctuary of the Thirtieth Dawn.*"

The two acolytes exchanged bewildered glances.

Gideon remained entirely still, though a faint twitch tightened the skin beside his left eye.

"Go on," he said, dangerous and low.

"Any beast hatched within the outer wards during a solar shift or unseasonal frost," Oriana said, pitching her voice clearly so it echoed off the damp limestone arches, "whose physical traits deviate from the standardized trials, may be claimed by an attendant of the Brood-Guild for thirty solar days of observation. During this time, the beast is immune to the culling-tongs, provided the claimant wagers their own bond in surety."

She lifted her chin, meeting Gideon’s gaze without blinking.

"The Seventh Clutch was laid during the Black Moon frost. His bones have not fully calcified. Under the law written by Emperor Aurelius himself, you cannot burn him until the thirtieth dawn."

For a long, agonizing moment, the only sound was the crackle of charcoal in the brazier and the distant, tormented shrieks of the drakes on the upper tiers.

One of the acolytes scoffed. "She’s making it up, my lord. The Codex is three thousand pages of High Valdic law. A scullery girl cannot read High Valdic."

"She isn't making it up," Gideon said quietly.

His eyes had changed. The casual disgust had vanished, replaced by something far colder: calculation. He stepped closer, leaning down slightly so his mouth was level with her ear.

"Your father was Master Archivist Vance’s copyist, wasn't he?" Gideon whispered, his breath hot and dry against her temple. "The one who broke his oath and tried to hide the apocrypha before we put the torch to his library. I thought we sent his entire litter to the salt-pans."

Oriana’s hands balled into white-knuckled fists at her sides, but she did not flinch. "I am Guild-registered, Lord Gideon. My name is on the kennel roll. The law stands."

Gideon pulled back, looking at her as if she were a curious specimen of rot. He glanced down at Pip, who had closed his cloudy eyes and appeared to have fallen sound asleep against Oriana’s boot, his crooked snout letting out an occasional, bubbling snore.

"The law stands," Gideon agreed, his voice suddenly smooth as oiled silk. He turned to the acolyte with the iron. "Put the brand in the sand."

The acolyte hesitated, then plunged the white-hot crown into a bucket of damp volcanic gravel. It hissed violently, sending up a plume of gray, sulfurous steam that filled the narrow stall.

Gideon looked back at Oriana. The smile on his lips was terrifying in its absolute lack of warmth.

"Thirty days, Keeper," Gideon said. "You know the rest of that clause, don't you? Since you are so fond of reciting dead men’s scrolls?"

Oriana’s stomach dropped. She knew it. Of course she knew it.

"If the observed beast fails to pass the Rite of the Crown at the end of the thirty days," Gideon recited softly, his tone mocking and rhythmic, "the claimant’s bond is forfeit. The beast is cast into the dross-furnace to cleanse the bloodline."

He paused, stepping right into her space, his tall shadow swallowing her whole.

"And the keeper who wasted the Empire’s oats and harbored the blight," Gideon whispered, "shall have their hands crushed by the smith’s hammer and be fitted with the slave-torc, to serve the war-drakes as living meat."

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