The crone kept tugging her forward, and Laira wanted to use her curse—the secret disease of her family, the power that would let her escape this tribe, let her free her mother, let her kill them all. Yet she dared not. Mother had used the dark magic; now the woman would burn.

Past campfires, the totem pole, and a mammoth carcass buzzing with flies it rose—the pyre.

Upon the pile of wood and kindling she stood tied to the stake—Laira's mother.

For five days in her tent, Laira had shed many tears, yet none would now flow. The crone who dragged her forward paused, and Laira stood in the dead grass, staring, feeling dead herself, feeling empty.

Mother wept.

Her face was so beaten Laira barely recognized her. It looked less like a face and more like a slab of bloodied meat. Tears poured from bruised, bloodshot eyes to flow down lacerated cheeks. When Mother spoke, her voice was slurred, thick with blood and shattered teeth.

"Don't make her watch. Turn her aside. Please . . . Laira, my sweetness, please, close your eyes."

Laira bit her lip so hard she tasted blood. She wanted to run away, but how could she? She wanted to close her eyes, but Shedah had promised to rip off her eyelids. The crone gripped both her arms now, fingers digging, hard as bronze, and Laira wondered if those fingers could shatter her bones, rip off her limbs, kill her right here with the pain. Mother wept upon the pyre and Laira wanted to do something—to use her curse, to scream, even to weep, some act of defiance or emotion . . . but she only watched.

"Behold the reptile!"

The voice, high-pitched and raspy, tore through the camp like a blade through flesh. Goose bumps rose on Laira's skin. Wincing, she turned to see him—the man who ruled the Goldtusk tribe, the man who would sentence Mother to death, the man who filled Laira's nightmares.

"Zerra," she whispered.

The chieftain limped toward them, tall and swaying like a wicker effigy in the wind. He wore patches of fur, leather boots, and necklaces of bone beads. His prized possession, a bronze apa sword, hung upon his belt. The blade was leaf-shaped, double-edged, and as long as a man's forearm, sprouting from a semicircular crossguard. In some of the villages across the river, men now forged metal, plowed fields, and raised huts, but Zerra had always scorned them. His were the old ways, the ways of hunting and gathering, of tents and campfires, of blades taken from corpses rather than forged in smithies.

More than his towering height, his sword, or his mane of grizzled hair, it was Zerra's face that frightened Laira. Half that face was gone, burned into something wet, raw, and dripping. Mother had given him that wound—or at least, the creature Mother had become, a monster of scales, fangs, and fire.

The disease, Laira thought and shivered. The curse that had us banished from Eteer, our old home across the sea. The curse that lets my family turn into reptiles. Into monsters. Into . . . dragons.