“The beast will decide his guilt.”
King Aldred’s voice rolled across the execution yard like a stone dropped into still water.
The crowd went rigid.
Not with anticipation.
With shame.
Because the accused was ten years old, and he was standing in the snow without his boots, and not a single person in that yard — not the guards, not the priests, not the four hundred fur-cloaked citizens pressed against the stone walls — had said a word about it.
Finn didn’t look at any of them.
He looked at the iron doors on the far side of the yard.
They were already moving.
He had heard about Solvane his whole life. Every child in the kingdom had. The sacred beast. Six hundred years old. White as the mountain ice. It had been present at the crowning of eleven kings and had bowed to none of them.
What it did to the guilty, the stories did not describe in detail.
They didn’t need to.
The doors opened.
Finn’s hands, hanging at his sides, were very still.
High Priest Cavan stood to the left of the king’s platform, his pale fingers wrapped around his ceremonial staff, watching the boy with the focused attention of a man who had organized this proceeding and needed it to end a particular way.
The theft of the winter grain stores was not, in truth, what concerned him.
What concerned him was what the boy might say if he were given a trial instead of this.
What concerned him was the name the boy carried — his mother’s name — and what that name meant to certain people in this kingdom who were not yet ready to be reminded of it.
It was much cleaner this way.
Solvane entered the yard.
The sound of it — four massive paws on frozen stone, deliberate and unhurried — made the crowd press backward involuntarily. Even people who had attended these proceedings before. Even the guards.
The beast was larger than paintings suggested. Larger than memory suggested. Its white fur had gone silver at the muzzle, and its eyes were the color of amber held up to firelight — deep, and old, and absolutely focused.
It stopped.
It looked at the boy.
Finn looked back.
Something moved across the beast’s face that the crowd could not name and Cavan did not like the look of.
Then Finn did something no one expected.
He knelt.
Not in terror. Not collapsing. He lowered himself slowly, deliberately, onto both knees in the snow, placed his open hands on his thighs, and looked up at the beast the way you look at something you are not afraid of.
The crowd made a sound.
Cavan’s knuckles went white on his staff.
“I’m not afraid of you,” Finn said.
His voice was quiet. Steady. The voice of someone stating a simple fact.
Solvane was still for a long moment.
Then it began to move toward him.
One step. Two. Each footfall landing with the particular heaviness of something that has carried its own age for a very long time. It crossed the yard until it stood directly before the boy, close enough that its breath — warm, visible in the cold air — moved Finn’s tangled hair.
It lowered its great head.
The amber eyes were level with Finn’s face now.
The crowd had stopped breathing entirely.
Cavan opened his mouth.
And at that exact moment… the beast’s front legs began to fold, slowly, as its entire body descended toward the snow….
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