Manon stalked through the ranks of the assembled Blackbeak coven leaders. They ­were the most numerous—­twenty coven leaders, over which Manon ruled with her Thirteen. Each leader touched two fingers to her brow in deference. She ignored them and took up a spot at the front of the crowd, where her grandmother gave her an acknowledging glance.

An honor, for any High Witch to acknowledge an individual. Manon bowed her head, pressing two fingers to her brow. Obedience, discipline, and brutality ­were the most beloved words in the Blackbeak Clan. All ­else was to be extinguished without second thought.

She still had her chin high, hands behind her back, when she spotted the other two heirs watching her.

The Blueblood heir, Petrah, stood closest to the High Witches, her group in the center of the crowd. Manon stiffened but held her gaze.

Her freckled skin was as pale as Manon’s, and her braided hair was as golden as Asterin’s—­a deep, brassy color that caught the gray light. She was beautiful, like so many of them, but grave. Above her blue eyes, a worn leather band rested on her brow in lieu of the iron-­star crown. There was no way of telling how old she was, but she ­couldn’t be much older than Manon if she looked this way after magic had vanished. There was no aggression, but no smile, either. Smiles ­were rare amongst witches—­unless you ­were on the hunt or on a killing field.

The Yellowlegs heir, though . . . Iskra was grinning at Manon, bristling with a challenge that Manon found herself aching to meet. Iskra hadn’t forgotten the brawl between their sentinels in the hallway yesterday. If anything, from the look in Iskra’s brown eyes, it seemed that the brawl had been an invitation. Manon found herself debating how much trouble she’d get into for shredding the throat of the Yellowlegs heir. It would put an end to any fights between their sentinels.

It would also put an end to her life, if the attack ­were unprovoked. Witch justice was swift. Dominance battles could end in loss of life, but the claim had to be made up front. Without a formal provocation from Iskra, Manon’s hands ­were tied.

“Now that ­we’re assembled,” the Blueblood Matron—­Cresseida—said, drawing Manon’s attention, “shall we show you what ­we’ve been brought ­here to do?”

Mother Blackbeak waved a hand to the bridge, black robes billowing in the icy wind. “We walk into the sky, witches.”

•

The crossing of the black bridge was more harrowing than Manon wanted to admit. First, there was the miserable stone, which throbbed beneath her feet, giving off that reek that no one ­else seemed to notice. Then there was the screeching wind, which battered them this way and that, trying to shove them over the carved railing.

They ­couldn’t even see the floor of the Gap. Mist shrouded everything below the bridge—­a mist that hadn’t vanished in the day they’d been ­here, or the days they’d hiked up the Gap. It was, she supposed, some trick of the king’s. Contemplating it led only to more questions, none of which she bothered to voice, or really care about all that much.

By the time they reached the cavernous atrium of the Northern Fang, Manon’s ears ­were frozen and her face was raw. She’d flown at high altitudes, in all kinds of weather, but not for a long while. Not without a fresh belly of meat in her, keeping her warm.

She wiped her runny nose on the shoulder of her red cloak. She’d seen the other coven leaders eyeing the crimson material—­as they always did, with yearning and scorn and envy. Iskra had gazed at it the ­longest, sneering. It would be nice—­really damn nice—­to peel off the Yellowlegs heir’s face one day.

They reached the gaping mouth into the upper reaches of the Northern Fang. ­Here the stone was scarred and gouged, splattered with the Triple Goddess knew what. From the tang of it, it was blood. Human blood.

Five men—­all looking hewn from the same scarred stone themselves—­met the three Matrons with grim nods. Manon fell into step behind her grandmother, one eye on the men, the other on their surroundings. The other two heirs did the same. At least they agreed on that.

As heirs, their foremost duty was to protect their High Witches, even if it meant sacrificing themselves. Manon glanced at the Yellowlegs Matron, who held herself just as proudly as the two Ancients as they walked into the shadows of the mountain. But Manon didn’t take her hand off her blade, Wind-­Cleaver, for a heartbeat.

The screams and wing beats and clank of metal ­were far louder ­here.

“This is where we breed and train ’em until they can make the Crossing to the Omega,” one of the men was saying, gesturing to the many cave mouths they passed as they strode through the cavernous hall. “Hatcheries are in the belly of the mountain, a level above the forges for the armory—­to keep the eggs warm, you see. Dens are a level above that. We keep ’em separated by gender and type. The bulls we hold in their own pens unless we want to breed ’em. They kill anyone in their cages. Learned that the hard way.” The men chuckled, but the witches did not. He went on about the different types—­the bulls ­were the best, but a female could be just as fierce and twice as smart. The smaller ones ­were good for stealth, and had been bred to be totally black against the night sky, or a pale blue to blend into daylight patrols. The average wyvern’s colors they didn’t care about so much, since they wanted their enemies to drop dead from terror, the man claimed.

They descended steps carved into the stone itself, and if the reek of blood and waste didn’t overwhelm every sense, then the din of the wyverns—­a roaring and screeching and booming of wings and flesh on rock—­nearly drowned out the man’s words. But Manon stayed focused on her grandmother’s position, on the positions of the others around her. And she knew that Asterin, one step behind her, was doing the same for her.

He led them onto a viewing platform in a massive cavern. The sunken floor was at least forty feet below, one end of the chamber wholly open to the cliff face, the other sealed with an iron grate—­no, a door.

“This is one of the training pits,” the man explained. “It’s easy to sort out the natural-­born killers, but we discover a lot of them show their mettle in the pits. Before you . . . ladies,” he said, trying to hide his wince at the word, “even lay eyes on them, they’ll be in ­here, fighting it out.”

“And when,” said Mother Blackbeak, pinning him with a stare, “will we select our mounts?”

The man swallowed. “We trained a brood of gentler ones to teach you the basics.”

A growl from Iskra. Manon might also have snarled at the implied insult, but the Blueblood Matron spoke. “You don’t learn to ­ride by hopping on a war­horse, do you?”

The man almost sagged with relief. “Once you’re comfortable with the flying—”

“We ­were born on the back of the wind,” said one of the coven leaders in the back. Some grunts of approval. Manon kept silent, as did her Blackbeak coven leaders. Obedience. Discipline. Brutality. They did not descend to boasting.

The man fidgeted and kept his focus on Cresseida, as if she ­were the only safe one in the room, even with her barbed crown of stars. Idiot. Manon sometimes thought the Bluebloods ­were the deadliest of them all.

“Soon as you’re ready,” he said, “we can begin the selection pro­cess. Get you on your mounts, and start the training.”

Manon risked taking her eyes off her grandmother to study the pit. There ­were giant chains anchored in one of the walls, and enormous splotches of dark blood stained the stones, as if one of these beasts had been pushed against it. A giant crack spider-webbed from the center. What­ever hit the wall had been tossed hard.

“What are the chains for?” Manon found herself asking. Her grandmother gave her a warning look, but Manon focused on the man. Predictably, his eyes widened at her beauty—­then stayed wide as he beheld the death lurking beneath it.

“Chains are for the bait beasts,” he said. “They’re the wyverns we use to show the others how to fight, to turn their aggression into a weapon. ­We’re under orders not to put any of ’em down, even the runts and broken ones, so we put the weaklings to good use.”