“A bit elegant for a Macaslan, don’t you think?” He turned around and locked eyes with her. Isobel’s hand froze over the page for the Reaper’s Embrace, but with so much clutter in the room, Reid didn’t seem to notice she’d snooped through his things.
“Tell me, princess.” He sneered. Isobel stiffened at the nickname. Unlike the children of more respected tournament families, Isobel hadn’t had the luxury of growing up with fairy tales. “If you won, do you really think that your family would wield high magick any better than the Lowes?”
The next time the Blairs or Thorburns call us leeches, her father had said in his usual throaty rasp, they’ll be sorry. It’s our turn to taste true power again.
“Anyone is better than the Lowes,” Isobel said, dodging the question.
Reid’s laugh sounded hollow. “But haven’t you come here to ask me to choose you?”
“I did, but you won’t.”
“At least you Macaslans don’t bullshit. I’ll give you that.”
Isobel had already braced herself for disappointment, yet it hurt all the same. Reid had made up his mind long before she’d set foot in his shop.
“Then if not me, who will you choose?” she asked.
Reid turned back around to the spellboard, apparently annoyed by her question. “Seven rotten families in an insignificant city, fighting over the most powerful magic left in the world. Why do any of you deserve it?”
Isobel didn’t have an answer for him, just like she hadn’t had an answer for the countless reporters who’d asked her the same question. She thought her family was rotten, too.
What have we been raising you for, if you abandon your flesh and blood the moment we need you?
“Thank you for letting me watch,” Isobel said, her voice masking the sound of her ripping the Reaper’s Embrace from the grimoire and slipping the page into her purse.
GAVIN GRIEVE
My family is proof that even depressing stories need a punchline.
A Tradition of Tragedy
Callista Grieve did not wear white to her wedding. She wore black, and she wore it with pride, because the silky, ashen skirts of her wedding gown proved that from that day forward, she would be a Grieve no longer.
Gavin watched her gliding down the aisle from his place at the front of the Ilvernath banquet hall, feeling tawdry and foolish in his hand-me-down suit and with his blond hair combed flat. Other members of tournament families in Ilvernath would only surrender their last name for the most valuable of wedding alliances. But Callista had spent her entire life longing for the day she could abandon hers.
Gavin couldn’t blame her.
Fergus, their thirteen-year-old brother, fidgeted beside him. Gavin delivered a swift kick to the back of his calf to remind him to stop slouching. The crowd behind them wouldn’t hesitate to mock their family’s smallest mishap or embarrassment, and though most of the Grieves were long past caring about Ilvernath’s low opinion of them, Gavin wasn’t. He’d do everything in his power to make sure this wedding didn’t give the town another reason to laugh at them.
The chairs were filled with Grieves and Paynes—mostly Paynes. There was a pun to be made there, but no one would have been amused. It would’ve been easy to tell the families apart even if they hadn’t been seated on opposite sides of the banquet hall. The Grieves were a tiny, bitter bloodline, and each sat slumped in their seat while the Paynes’ postures were ramrod straight.
The Grieves looked anxious. The Paynes looked disdainful. Callista looked radiant.
The groom, Roland Payne, seemed like he was a moment away from losing his lunch beneath the elaborate floral archway.
All things considered, it was one of the Grieve family’s less depressing weddings.
The bride reached the end of the aisle, where Gavin’s father effectively pushed her at Roland. At the end of the ceremony, Gavin kept an eye on the crowd as Callista wrapped her arms around the groom’s neck and went in for a kiss. He caught a few judgmental looks from the Paynes and the thin row of other townsfolk in the back of the room, but nobody voiced their displeasure.
Light streamed in through the banquet hall windows as Callista and Roland retreated down the aisle, arm in arm. Gavin watched them go, the tension in his stocky shoulders finally easing.
Because children born of parents from two tournament families could only be named champion of one, the competing families in Ilvernath considered marriage a game, a way to engineer powerful alliances with one another in their pursuit of high magick. By marrying into another family, one spouse would forfeit their name and accept the other’s. Callista was effectively abandoning ship. Because in the centuries of the tournament, no Grieve had ever won it. And Gavin’s family had long since given up trying.