The Beast Will Not Eat Tonight

Larrian took one step forward and the broken clay of the wine cup ground under his boot. He did not look down. He could not look anywhere except at the red cord on the girl’s wrist, the small wooden wolf bouncing once against the bone of her arm as her hand trembled.

The beast was breathing into her collarbone. Wet, shuddering breaths. His one good eye was closed.

“Stop the proceeding,” Larrian said.

His voice did not carry. The Magistrate did not hear him.

“Stop the proceeding,” he said again, louder, and this time three soldiers turned their heads.

Magistrate Orlov rose slowly from his bench in the high tier, turning the gold ring on his smallest finger the way he always did when something had gone wrong. “Beastmaster. The girl is condemned. The animal will not eat. Drive him to it.”

“I will not.”

“You will, or you will join her.”

Larrian walked out onto the sand.

In the lower tier, Anya the flower-seller had risen to her feet without realizing it. The bundle of lavender had fallen between her sandals. She was looking at the old man’s hands, the burn scar climbing out of his left sleeve, and she was beginning to remember a winter night thirty winters past, a southern village, a man with that same scar carrying something wrapped in a shepherd’s cloak.

Vesna lifted her face. There was sand on her cheek where the soot had been.

“You know him,” she whispered. She meant the beast.

Larrian knelt in the sand the way she had knelt. The beast turned the good eye toward him and a low sound came up from somewhere in his chest, not a growl. A recognition.

“I tied that cord around his neck the night I found him,” Larrian said. “There was a baby in the croft. The grandmother took the baby south. I was told the baby died on the road.”

He reached out, slowly, and his trembling fingers touched the frayed red cord at Vesna’s wrist.

“Who gave you this.”

“My grandmother. She said my mother tied it on me the day I was born. She said there was a brother.”

The beast made the sound again.

Larrian closed his eyes.

Above them, Magistrate Orlov’s voice cracked across the arena. “Beastmaster. Drive the animal or be driven with her.”

Larrian did not stand. He did not turn. He spoke to the sand, and his voice was the steadiest it had been in eighteen winters.

“Magistrate. This animal will not eat tonight. Not tonight. Not ever again by my hand. If you want her dead you will come down into this pit and you will do it yourself, and you will do it in front of him.”

The beast turned his head toward the high tier.

Anya the flower-seller bent down and picked up her fallen lavender, very slowly, and she did not take her eyes off the old man on the sand. In the lowest tier the green-shawl woman lowered her hand from her mouth and reached, without looking, for the hand of the boy beside her.

The Magistrate did not come down.

He turned, and his cloak turned with him, and he walked out of the high tier with the gold ring still spinning on his smallest finger, and the soldiers at the gate did not know whether to follow him or to lower their pikes.

Larrian untied the frayed red cord from the beast’s collar — the cord he had tied there eighteen winters ago, grown into the fur, browned with time — and he laid it across Vesna’s open palm beside the cord already on her wrist.

Two cords. The same red. The same fray.

She closed her hand around them both.

What is a family, when the world has spent eighteen winters teaching you that you do not have one?