Silence fell. As if the world itself stopped when Titus’s body crashed to the ground, black blood spilling everywhere.
Manon stood absolutely still. Slowly, the bait beast lifted its head from the carcass, Titus’s blood dripping from his maw. Their eyes met.
People were shouting at her to run, and the gate groaned open, but Manon stared into those black eyes, one of them horribly scarred but intact. He took a step, then another toward her.
Manon held her ground. It was impossible. Impossible. Titus was twice his size, twice his weight, and had years of training.
The bait beast had trounced him—not because he was bigger or stronger, but because he wanted it more. Titus had been a brute and a killer, yet this wyvern before her . . . he was a warrior.
Men were rushing in with spears and swords and whips, and the bait beast growled.
Manon held up a hand. And again, the world stopped.
Manon, eyes still upon the beast, said, “He’s mine.”
He had saved her life. Not by coincidence, but by choice. He’d felt the current running between them, too. “What?” her grandmother barked from above.
Manon found herself walking toward the wyvern, and stopped with not five feet between them. “He’s mine,” Manon said, taking in the scars, the limp, the burning life in those eyes.
The witch and the wyvern looked at each other for a moment that lasted for a heartbeat, that lasted for eternity. “You’re mine,” Manon said to him.
The wyvern blinked at her, Titus’s blood still dripping from his cracked and broken teeth, and Manon had the feeling that he had come to the same decision. Perhaps he had known long before tonight, and his fight with Titus hadn’t been so much about survival as it had been a challenge to claim her.
As his rider. As his mistress. As his.
•
Manon named her wyvern Abraxos, after the ancient serpent who held the world between his coils at the behest of the Three-Faced Goddess. And that was about the only pleasant thing that happened that night.
When she’d returned to the others, Abraxos taken away for cleaning and mending and Titus’s carcass hauled off by thirty men, Manon had stared down each and every witch who dared meet her eyes.
The Yellowlegs heir was being held by Asterin in front of the Matrons. Manon gazed at Iskra for a long moment before she simply said, “Looks like I lost my footing.”
Iskra steamed at the ears, but Manon shrugged, wiping the dirt and blood from her face before limping back to the Omega. She wouldn’t give Iskra the satisfaction of claiming she’d almost killed her. And Manon was in no shape to settle this in a proper fight.
Attack or clumsiness, Asterin was punished by Mother Blackbeak that night for letting the heir fall into the pit. Manon had asked to be the one to dispense the whipping, but her grandmother ignored her. Instead, she had the Yellowlegs heir do it. As Asterin’s failure had occurred in plain sight of the other Matrons and their heirs, so would her punishment.
Standing in the mess hall, Manon watched each brutal lash, all ten of them at full strength, as Iskra sported a bruise on her jaw courtesy of Asterin.
To her everlasting credit, Asterin didn’t scream. Not once. It still took all of Manon’s self-restraint to keep from grabbing the whip and using it to strangle Iskra.
Then came the conversation with her grandmother. It wasn’t so much a conversation as it was a slap in the face, then a verbal beating that—a day later—still made Manon’s ears ring.