Pet Kingdom

The sack over my head smelled of onions and old blood. I'd been breathing through it for what felt like hours, though the sun hadn't moved much since they took me, so maybe it was only one. My wrists were bound behind my back with leather cord. Tight enough that my fingers had gone cold.

I counted the turns. Left. Right. Another left. The cart wheels ground over cobblestone, then dirt, then something softer that I decided not to think about. A dog barked somewhere far off. Then another. Then a whole chorus of them, and I understood that whatever was coming, I wouldn't be alone.

The cart stopped. Hands grabbed my arms and pulled me down. I stumbled, caught myself on a stone lip, and was yanked upright before I could find my footing. Someone laughed. A woman's laugh, low and unhurried.

"Bring him in."

They pushed me through a doorway. The air changed. Cooler, cleaner, with a faint smell of lavender and something metallic underneath. My bare feet registered smooth stone, then a rug, thick and soft. I hadn't realized my boots were gone.

The sack came off.

I squinted against the light. Tall windows, the kind that cost more than my entire village, threw white afternoon sun across a room that could have held thirty men standing shoulder to shoulder. Chandeliers hung unlit. Gold leaf crawled up the walls in patterns that looked like vines or maybe veins. And at the center of it all, on a chair that was closer to a throne than anything I'd ever seen outside of a church, sat a woman.

She wasn't what I expected. I'd heard stories about the Queen of the Eastern Reach. That she was old. That she was cruel. That she kept her enemies in cages and fed them to her hounds. The woman in front of me looked maybe thirty. Dark hair pinned up with silver clips. A plain gray dress that probably cost more than my father's house. Her hands rested on the armrests, and her eyes moved over me the way a farmer looks at livestock.

"Untie him," she said.

A guard behind me cut the cord. Blood rushed back into my hands, and I bit down on the inside of my cheek to keep from making a sound. The pain was bright and hot, then fading. I flexed my fingers.

"What's your name?" the Queen asked.

I didn't answer. Not because I was brave. My mouth had gone dry, and the words were stuck somewhere between my chest and my throat.

She tilted her head. "You can speak. I haven't cut out your tongue. Yet."

"Ren," I said. It came out rough. "Ren of Ashfield."

"Ashfield." She repeated it like she was tasting something unfamiliar. "That's the village on the southern road, isn't it? The one with the mill."

"Yes."

"The one that stopped paying tribute six months ago."

I said nothing. My father had been the miller. He'd also been the one who told the village elders to stop sending grain east. He'd said the Queen's collectors were taking more than the harvest could bear, and he was right, but being right didn't matter much when soldiers burned your mill and dragged your son out of bed before dawn.

I hadn't seen my father since. I didn't know if he was alive.

"You're wondering why you're here," the Queen said. She stood. She was taller than me, which was strange because I was seventeen and already taller than most men in Ashfield. "Most people assume it's punishment. Or ransom. It's neither."

She walked toward me. Her shoes made no sound on the rug. Up close, I could see the lines around her mouth, the tiredness under her eyes that the distance had hidden. She looked like someone who hadn't slept well in years.

"I've had four companions in the past decade," she said. "Two died. One ran away. One I had to put down myself."

I didn't understand what she was saying. Companions. Put down. The words were ordinary, but the way she said them made my skin prickle.

"You're going to be the fifth," she said.

"I don't understand."

"You will." She turned and walked back to her chair. "Take him to the kennels. Start with the basics. He's young. He'll learn fast or he won't."

The guards grabbed my arms again. I tried to pull free, and one of them hit me in the stomach. Not hard enough to break anything, just hard enough to remind me that I was meat and they were hands. I doubled over, gasping, and they dragged me out through a side door and down a corridor that smelled less like lavender and more like wet fur and iron.

The kennels were underground. Torches on the walls, flickering orange, casting shadows that moved like they were alive. Dogs in cages on either side, big ones, the kind bred for hunting bears. They watched me pass. Some growled. Most just stared with eyes that had gone flat and patient.

At the end of the corridor, a man waited. Bald, thick-necked, with a scar that split his left eyebrow in two. He wore leather gloves and carried a short whip on his belt.

"New one?" he asked.

"From the south," one of the guards said. "The Queen's orders."

The bald man looked at me. He didn't smile. He didn't frown. His face was the face of someone who had stopped feeling things a long time ago.

"I'm Kessler," he said. "You'll call me Master. You'll do what I say when I say it. If you don't, you'll learn why you should. Simple enough?"

I nodded.

"Good." He pointed to a cage on the left, smaller than the others. "That's yours. Get in."

I looked at the cage. It was maybe four feet by four feet. Straw on the floor, a tin bowl for water, nothing else. The door was open.

"I'm not a dog," I said.

Kessler's hand moved faster than I could track. The whip caught me across the face, and the world went white for a second. When it came back, I was on my knees, and my cheek was wet.

"You're whatever the Queen says you are," Kessler said. "Right now, she says you're a dog. So get in the cage."

I got in the cage.

The door clanged shut behind me. Kessler locked it and walked away. The guards left. The torches burned. The other dogs settled into their cages, and the corridor went quiet except for the sound of breathing, mine and theirs, all of us waiting for something we couldn't name.

I touched my cheek. The blood was already drying. I thought about my father. I thought about the mill, the way the water wheel turned in the spring when the river ran high. I thought about my mother, who died when I was nine, and how she used to sing while she worked. I thought about the smell of bread.

Then I stopped thinking about all that, because it wasn't going to help me.

The first week, Kessler taught me to kneel. Not to bow, not to curtsy. To kneel. On command, immediately, no matter what I was doing. He'd say the word and I'd have to drop. If I was too slow, the whip. If I hesitated, the whip. If I looked at him wrong, the whip.

By the third day, my back was a map of red lines. By the fifth, I could kneel before he finished saying the word.

The second week, he taught me to eat from the bowl. No hands. Just my mouth, down in the straw, while he watched. The first time, I refused. He held my face in the bowl until I couldn't breathe, and when I finally gasped, I swallowed a mouthful of wet grain and dirt. After that, I didn't refuse.

The third week, he taught me to walk at his heel. Not beside him, not behind him. At his heel, close enough that my breath touched his leg. He'd walk through the kennel corridor and I'd follow, and if I drifted too far left or right, he'd stop and look at me until I corrected myself. He never hit me during these walks. He didn't need to. The silence was worse.

I stopped counting the days. They blurred together, one long stretch of stone and torchlight and the smell of dogs. I learned the names of the other animals in the cages. Brutus, the old hunting hound who'd lost an eye. Sable, the female who never made a sound. A pup called Ash who whimpered in his sleep. They weren't my friends. Dogs don't have friends. But they were something. Company, maybe. The kind you don't have to talk to.

At night, when the torches burned low and Kessler was gone, I'd lie in the straw and listen to the castle above me. Footsteps. Voices. The distant clatter of dishes. A world I could hear but not reach. I'd press my palm against the cold stone floor and think about the Queen's face when she looked at me. Not cruel. Not kind. Just tired. Like she'd been waiting for something for a long time and wasn't sure I was it.

I didn't know what she wanted. I didn't know what I was supposed to become. But I knew one thing, lying there in the dark with my cheek still stinging and my knees still raw.

I wasn't going to die in this cage.

Whatever she was making me into, I'd survive it. And then, when I was strong enough, when I knew enough, I'd find a way out. Not to run. Running was for the one who'd escaped. I wasn't going to run.

I was going to bite.