Chapter One

The clasp was being difficult, which was fair, because I was being difficult right back.

"You're not going to win," I told it, easing the tiny pin free with the tip of my smallest pick. "I've beaten harder clasps than you. I beat one last week that was practically welded shut."

"Lara." My uncle Galen didn't look up from the necklace he was restringing three feet away.

"I'm working."

"You're talking."

"I can do both. Watch." I held up the clasp, now open, and set it gently on the velvet pad. "See? Fixed. Talking the whole time. It's practically a skill."

Galen made a sound that wasn't quite a laugh, which from him counted as high praise. The shop was full that morning, fuller than it had been in months, because Selection was four days away and half of Evermere had suddenly decided they needed new earrings for the occasion. Aunt Maris was at the front counter, wrapping a pair of silver drops for a woman I didn't recognize, and the little bell over the door hadn't stopped ringing since we'd opened.

I liked the shop like this. Loud, busy, smelling like polish and warm metal. It was the only place in town where nobody looked at me twice, because here I wasn't Jarek and Elena Silvers' daughter. I was just Lara, who was good with a pick and a torch and could fix your grandmother's brooch while telling you three unrelated stories about the last time someone brought in a piece exactly like it.

The bell rang again, and Isla came in sideways, arms full of the little velvet boxes we used for deliveries, talking before the door had even shut behind her.

"Four days," she said. "Four days, Lara."

"I'm aware."

"I can't sleep. I tried counting sheep and I just kept turning them into dragons."

"That doesn't sound restful."

"It wasn't." She dumped the boxes on the counter and dropped onto the stool beside me, and even sitting still she seemed to be moving, bouncing one knee, drumming her fingers on her leg. Isla had always had more energy than her body knew what to do with. "You could still change your mind. It's not too late to sign the roster."

"Still no."

"You didn't even think about it."

"I've been thinking about it since you started asking six months ago, Isla. That's plenty of thinking."

She huffed and reached over to steal one of the polishing cloths, twisting it around her fingers instead of actually doing anything useful with it. "I just don't understand why you wouldn't even try. What if a dragon looked at you and it was perfect and you spent the rest of your life wondering what would've happened?"

"I'd survive the wondering."

"You say that like it's easy."

"It's not easy. It's just what I've decided." I picked up the next piece on my list, a ring with a stone that had come loose, and turned it in the light so I could see how the prongs had bent. Talking about Selection with Isla was an old, well-worn argument, the kind you could have without really fighting, because we both already knew how it ended. She wanted to be chosen more than she'd ever wanted anything. I didn't want it at all. We'd said as much to each other a hundred times and neither of us had ever managed to change the other's mind, and at this point I think we mostly kept having the conversation because it made us both feel like we were doing something about the four days left before it happened for real.

"I just think you'd be good at it," Isla said, quieter now.

"I'm good at this." I nodded at the ring. "This I can actually control."

She didn't argue with that, which was how I knew she understood it, even if she didn't like it.

From behind the counter, Maris glanced over, and I caught the look that passed between her and Galen — quick, practiced, the kind of look adults gave each other when they'd already had a conversation about something and didn't need words for it anymore. I knew what it meant. They worried about Isla wanting this. They never said so outright, not to her, because they'd decided a long time ago that it wasn't their choice to make for her. But I'd grown up in this house too, and I knew worry when I saw it settle into the corners of Galen's mouth.

"She's still going to sign up," I said to him quietly, once Isla had gone to help a customer near the window. "You know that."

"I know it." Galen set down his pliers. "Doesn't mean I have to like watching her get closer to it."

"She's not them, Galen."

"I know that too." He said it firmly enough that I let the subject drop, because that was as far as either of us wanted to go with it in the middle of a full shop.

The woman who came in around midday was pleasant enough, in a fine green coat, buying a birthday gift for her son who was apparently hoping very badly to be chosen this year. She chatted while I helped her, the easy kind of chatting I was good at, and then she looked at me properly for the first time and her whole face changed.

"You're Lara, aren't you?" she said, studying me more closely. "Jarek and Elena's daughter?"

"Yes." The word came out smaller than I meant it to. "I am."

"I thought so. You look like your mother." She smiled, and it was a kind smile, which somehow made it worse. "I remember them. Everyone remembers them. Your mother flew that green — Mira, wasn't it? I saw them once, over the eastern fields, before —" She stopped herself, but not soon enough. "I'm sorry. I only meant it as a kindness."

"It's fine." I was already reaching for the next box, already looking at the shelf instead of her face. "Was there anything else you needed?"

Galen appeared at my elbow like he'd been summoned, smooth and unhurried, asking the woman something about the clasp she wanted and steering the whole conversation somewhere else entirely. He didn't look at me while he did it. He just did it, the way he always did, and by the time the woman left with her parcel I was breathing normally again and nobody had made me talk about it.

I was glad, an hour later, when Maris asked if someone could run the Hallick order out to the smithy on the edge of town. Ordinarily Isla would've gone, but she was buried under a line of customers wanting last-minute Selection pieces, so I grabbed the wrapped clasps and the wax seals, ready to go.

"Take a heel of bread with you," Maris said, already pressing it into my hand before I could argue. "You skipped lunch, don't think I didn't notice. And don't dawdle at the smithy talking Old Renn's ear off, he has actual work to do."

"I never dawdle."

"You dawdled for forty minutes last month telling him about a hinge."

"That was an interesting hinge."

She just shook her head and swatted the door open for me, and I went before anyone could suggest otherwise. The walk would get me away from the shop, and more importantly, away from the words Selection and dragon and chosen, which I felt like I'd heard roughly four thousand times since breakfast.

The road out past the smithy ran along the edge of the fields, and I was maybe halfway there when the shadow crossed over me.

I looked up before I'd even decided to. Two riders, high enough that their dragons looked almost small, banking together over the tree line — a russet-colored one in front, long and lean, and behind it something enormous and grey-blue that moved with a slow, deliberate power that made my chest go tight just watching it. I stopped walking. I always stopped walking. I couldn't help it, not for dragons, not ever, no matter how many times I told myself I didn't want that life.

They wheeled once over the fields and then angled off toward the mountains, and I watched until they were gone, until it was just sky again, and then I made myself keep walking because I had a delivery to make and Galen would ask questions if I took all afternoon.

It was on the way back that I heard the sound, cutting through the trees along the shortcut I sometimes used when I didn't feel like walking the long way around by the road.

It wasn't loud. A scrape, low and metallic, then something that might have been a groan if a groan could come from something much bigger than a person. I stopped, and it came again, somewhere off to my left — well past where the shortcut curved back toward town, out in the part of the woods I never had reason to go.

I knew, in the sensible part of my brain, that leaving the path to go find out what had made that noise was not a good idea. I knew it the way you know you shouldn't eat the last slice of cake that isn't yours. And then, same as with the cake, I did it anyway.

The ground grew rougher the farther I went, the trees closer together, until I was somewhere I was fairly sure I'd never actually stood before despite having lived near these woods my whole life. It wasn't hard to see why nobody had stumbled onto it. I hadn't gone far past the treeline before I found the first signs that someone had been here who shouldn't have — a wide track through the brush, too broad for deer, with deep ruts like something heavy had been dragged. Broken branches, snapped clean rather than weathered. And then, half-hidden under leaves, a length of chain.

My stomach dropped somewhere around my knees.

I followed the tracks anyway, quieter now, until the trees opened into a small clearing, and I saw her.

She was black — not the flat black of soot, but something with depth to it, a sheen that caught what little light came through the canopy and turned faintly blue-green along the edges of her scales. Young. Smaller than the dragons I'd just watched over the fields, though still large enough that if she'd stood, her head would have cleared mine by a good margin. She was chained at the neck and one hind leg to a heavy iron stake driven into the ground, and every line of her body said she hated it — wings half-flared and trembling with the effort of holding still, eyes tracking me the second I stepped into the clearing, a low sound rolling out of her chest that I felt in my teeth before I properly heard it.

I froze.

"Okay," I said, because apparently even terror couldn't stop my mouth from moving. "Okay. You're a dragon. Obviously. I knew that part."

She snapped her head toward me, jaws parting, and I took an involuntary step back.

"And you're angry. Also obvious. Very reasonable, given the — the chains. I'd be angry too." My heart was going so hard I could hear it. "I'm doing very well so far, in case you were wondering."

She didn't answer. I had no idea how much of what I was saying she understood, if any of it — I'd never been this close to a dragon before, let alone one that wasn't bonded and furious about it. But talking helped. Talking always helped, even when I wasn't sure anyone was really listening, and right now it was the only thing keeping my legs from carrying me straight back the way I'd come.

I made myself look past her fury, at the restraints instead, because looking at machinery was easier than looking at teeth. The chain at her neck ran to a heavy iron collar, and the collar closed with a fitting I recognized — not exactly, but in the way you recognize a cousin of something familiar. A pin-and-hinge lock, similar in principle to the kind Galen used on our best display cases, just scaled up and crude. I'd spent years learning how pins like that failed, where the weak points sat, which ones could be worked loose with the right tool and which ones needed to be forced. I didn't know how to open this one. Not yet. But I understood, in a way most people wouldn't have, that it wasn't as unbreakable as it looked.

That was when I heard the voices.

Men, two of them at least, coming up from the far side of the clearing, still far enough off that I had time — barely — to duck back behind the treeline. My whole body went cold and very, very sensible all at once. Leave. Get back to the path, get to Galen, get to someone who could do something about armed men and a stolen dragon that wasn't me. That was the plan. That was obviously the plan.

I was already backing away when one of the voices carried clearly enough for me to catch it.

"— tonight, before anyone comes looking. Buyer wants her moved by morning."

Tonight.

I stopped moving.

If I left now — if I did the smart thing, the only thing that made any sense — by the time I found Galen and someone official and got back here, she'd be gone. Sold off to whoever was paying, hauled away in the dark, and nobody would ever know she'd been here at all except me.

I looked back through the trees at her. She was still straining against the stake, still watching the direction the voices were coming from with an intensity that looked almost like understanding, and for one strange second her eyes cut sideways and found mine again.

I knew exactly what the sensible choice was.

I didn't make it.