was a race injury and realized she didn’t know why Trainer Verlas had quit racing. She’d just assumed it was age, but Raia could recognize hidden pain when she saw it.
She didn’t think her trainer would appreciate it if she asked, though. With difficulty, Raia held all her questions inside.
Trainer Verlas unlatched the cage door and swung it open. “I am going to set him free, and you are going to keep him here,” she said to Raia.
New, more pressing questions now jumped into her mind. Specifically: What?
Yes, she’d called for him to come off the ferry, but he’d wanted to savage her, and there had been a chain net to stop him. Trust your trainer, Raia reminded herself. She wants you to succeed. In fact, she needs you to succeed. Still, there was something she needed to ask.
“How?”
“He’ll have two conflicting desires: stay and kill us, or run and be free. You must give him a third option: run with you.”
“But . . .” She’d barely escaped his claws when he’d been caged! And he’d proven himself hard to control, even by multiple trainers.
“Banish all stray thoughts,” Trainer Verlas said. “All doubts. All memories of the past. All dreams of the future. Exist in the here and now.”
Raia nodded. She clenched and unclenched her hands. She felt just as tense as she had clinging to the bench of the cart.
“Control your thoughts and you can control him, without weapons, without special tricks.” Trainer Verlas unshackled one of the kehok’s legs. He began to shift, his leg muscles taut as if he were ready to run.
Focus, Raia told herself.
“Keep from losing him,” Trainer Verlas said. “You lose him, you lose your future.”
Raia swallowed and nodded. Without a racer, she couldn’t be a rider. If she failed at this, she might as well go back into hiding and to running from her family. I don’t want to run from anyone anymore. I want to run to something.
“Feel the moment.”
Closing her eyes, Raia felt the sand beneath her feet, heard the wind across the dunes, and inhaled the dusty, almost sweet smell that permeated the air.
“Let your need fill you. What is it you want most of all?”
Freedom. And this kehok was the key.
She heard the clink of iron. The low growl of the black lion. She opened her eyes in time to see him rush out of the cage. His obsidian mane flashed in the morning desert sun.
Without thinking, Raia threw her hands in the air, palms toward the lion. “Stay!”
The lion faltered.
Only for an instant.
And then he was running. Sand flew in his path as he thundered past them toward the east, as if he intended to run straight into the sun’s glow.
“Come back!” Raia called.
But he didn’t slow. He was a black star streaking across the sandy sky. Unstoppable. She felt small, as if she’d been just another rock beneath his paws.
She felt hands on her shoulders, squeezing hard. “Call him back,” Trainer Verlas said in her ear. “Now. Before he’s gone too far. Make him hear you. Make him feel you.”
“Come back!” Raia cried. Ripping the scarf away from her face, she poured every bit of oxygen in her lungs into her shout. She thought of her parents, and the way they’d looked at her when she’d come home in tears after the augur exams. They already knew the news, and they looked at her as if she were muck that had stuck on their shoes. She thought of the man they wanted her to marry, the way his eyes had raked over her. She thought of his greasy fingers when he took her hand to kiss it, the way they caressed her arm, as if testing the thickness of a cut of meat. I can’t go back! Please, lion.
“Come back now!”
He kept running.
He didn’t even slow.
Trainer Verlas’s voice boomed across the sands, “You will return.”
And the lion’s stride broke. Raia saw it—his rhythm hitched, and then he was running back toward them, as fast as he’d run before, with a cloud of sand haloing him.
He ran without stopping into the cage, and Trainer Verlas sprang forward and slammed the door shut. He shook his mane, and it clanged like bits of glass shattering.
“I failed,” Raia said.
“It was your first try,” Trainer Verlas said. “And he is strong-willed.”
“How did you do it? It took all of you before, when he broke out of the stables.”
“He caught me by surprise then.” Trainer Verlas frowned as if she were angry