Duskhold came out of the mountain like a fist of black stone.
The cart stopped at the gate, and a guard had me on the ground before the wheels finished turning.
Princess Yrsa walked ahead of me through the throne hall, and every dragon in it turned to look.
Yrsa: Keep your eyes on the floor, wool girl. They can smell a bastard from the door.
Calista: Then they'll smell you too. You're standing right next to me.
Her hand moved fast. The back of it caught my mouth where my uncle's wall had already split it.
Blood ran warm over my chin again. I licked it off and smiled at her with red teeth.
Yrsa: Say one more clever thing and I'll have you stripped and thrown in the lower kennels with the dogs.
Yrsa: This is what my brother gets. A merchant's byblow with a cut lip and no dowry.
Yrsa: Her mother sold herself on the docks, and the daughter came here to do the same. She'll warm his bed or she'll burn.
The court laughed. Not loud. Just enough to let me know I was the joke.
I fixed my eyes on the far wall and kept my brother's face in my head.
Severin: Enough, Yrsa. The contract is signed and paid. Let the fire decide what she is.
The king looked at me the way a man looks at a rat in his grain. Tired, and already certain.
Two guards dragged me to a trench cut into the floor of the hall, wide as a road and full of fire.
One of them shoved me to the edge, and my knees hit stone hard enough to open the skin.
Yrsa: Walk it or refuse. Refuse, and I take your hand off for breaking the contract.
Yrsa: Walk it, and the fire cooks you from the inside. I've watched it happen. They scream for a long time.
I believed her. That was the worst part. I could feel the truth of it waiting on my skin.
Calista: And if I walk out the other side?
Yrsa: Then you're still a bastard with a dead mother, and I'll find another way to be rid of you.
Yrsa: Go on. Your brother's medicine runs out in three days. I asked around.
She'd gone looking for the one thing that could move me, and she'd found it.
So I stopped being careful.
The first step was the worst. Heat closed over my boots like water.
I kept walking. I did not run, and I did not pray.
The fire touched my arms and my face and my hair, and it did not want me.
It curled away from my skin like something shy, and left me cold in the middle of all that burning.
I came out the far side with my hem smoking and not one blister on me.
The hall had gone completely quiet. Even the king had stood up.
Calista: You promised me screaming. I'm still waiting.
Calista: Try harder, Yrsa. Send a bigger fire.
Her face went white to the lips, and something behind her eyes turned from hate into fear.
That fear was the first good thing I'd felt since the counting house.
I stood in the middle of that hall, unburned, and thought of my brother coughing in the dark.
Three days. I had three days to make these monsters useful.