that slept only a few feet away. Even if she had no idea how she was ever going to control the one that was supposed to be hers, much less ride him. I’ll learn, she promised herself.
Lying on the cot, Raia slept fitfully—every time a kehok screamed, she woke convinced her family had found her. She fell back asleep grateful it was just a monster, only waking permanently when dawn poked its way through the dusty windows.
She washed as best she could with the shallow basin of water and dressed in the student rider clothes that Trainer Verlas had left for her: a durable tunic and rough leggings that scraped at her skin. The tunic was scarlet red. To hide the bloodstains?
Don’t think like that, she told herself.
She’d chosen this life—the first time she’d chosen her own path—and she wasn’t going to panic just because the outfit was ominously colored. She could do this.
That burst of confidence got her out of the office and into the stable . . . and then it abandoned her.
Raia felt as if she were being smothered in screams—horrible, bone-cutting screams that ricocheted through her veins and filled her skull. Inside their stalls, the kehoks raged, smashing against their walls, tugging at their shackles, and squealing as if they were being skewered. For a long moment, she stood just inside the door, her ears too flooded with sound to move as the kehoks bashed against their stall walls and strained against their chains.
All of them except the black lion.
He stood in the center of his stall, the net of heavy chains draped around him, shackled to the wall. He was motionless, but his eyes followed her as she crossed toward his stall door. She stopped several feet shy of it.
“Why aren’t you screaming? Not that I want you to. You can stay as silent as you want.” She didn’t think he could hear her over the others, even if he could have understood her. Yet he was looking at her as if he followed every word.
“What did you do to be reborn like this?” Raia asked. “You’re lionlike, so you must have hunted the innocent in your past life. Were you a murderer? An assassin? Did you seek people out to be cruel to them? Did you hunt with words or knives? Your body is metal, so you must have been cold. Unfeeling. A hard man. Did people hate you? Did you hate them? Both?”
She knew she was babbling, but the words wouldn’t seem to stop. “Did you know you would come back like this? Did you ever try to change? You know that’s what augurs are for—to help you make the right choices and help you lead an honorable life. They could have prevented this from happening to you, if you’d let them, which you obviously didn’t. Why not? I mean, I know why my parents don’t ask augurs to help them.” A waste of gold, they called it. She’d never seen them enter a temple except to pay her fees and check on her progress, and she wasn’t permitted to read them herself—it was one of the rules of augur training, no unsolicited readings—even if she’d been skilled enough to see their auras clearly. “I think they’re afraid of what the augurs will tell them. I think they know deep inside that they are not any of the things they’re supposed to be, and they’re scared it will be too hard to fix themselves. Is that what you did? Avoid the augurs because you thought it would be too hard? Or did you simply not care whether you were a good person or not?”
As she talked to the black lion, the other kehoks’ screams began to blur into the background. They still made her bones itch and her skin feel raw, but she wasn’t as aware of them anymore. She was instead hyperaware of the metallic lion’s golden eyes.
Kehoks had beautiful eyes.
She’d heard that before, but she’d never been close enough to see for herself. It wasn’t just that their eyes were golden, but the gold seemed to shift as if it were molten metal. The longer she stared, the more she thought the gold was really a mix of colors: reds and yellows and oranges, constantly swirling around black pupils. “It must mean something that your eyes are so beautiful. You must have some good in you.”
She hadn’t learned much about kehoks in her training, only that they were the worst fate