GAVIN GRIEVE
The only place where Grieve champions are immortalized is in a drinking song.
A Tradition of Tragedy
Everything had gone bad and nonsensical so quickly, Gavin had no idea how to process it. He struggled to accept the sight before him: Hendry Lowe was back from the dead, but altered. A photographic negative of Alistair, as if the brothers had swapped roles—Alistair was now the sun, and Hendry the shadow.
Beside him, Elionor Payne cast a barrage of curses, but they weren’t meant for Gavin anymore. Instead they spiraled toward the brothers standing on the mossy steps, the magick white and glimmering. Alistair desperately raced to conjure shields, but he was too slow—one flew past, and Hendry cringed as the curse struck him in the chest. Rather than harming him, the curse unraveled into red wisps of smoke. Elionor’s face went stark white with fear.
Hendry trembled as he raised his hand to his neck, to his scar, as though he’d felt a phantom pain there. “I guess you can’t cast a death curse on me. Since I’m already dead.”
Even though Hendry sounded more haggard than anything, as he started down the stairs, Gavin automatically stepped back.
“That’s … not … possible,” Elionor ground out, visibly shaken.
Hendry’s expression was grim and shadowed. “It shouldn’t be, should it?”
Though Hendry might’ve trembled earlier, no one was shaking more than Alistair. His eyes were pink from the cast of the Blood Veil, making him look wild. His chest shuddered with every breath as he fixed a ruthless gaze on Elionor. It was the sort of look that made Gavin’s own heart stutter with fear.
Gavin wasn’t sure who he was supposed to be cursing anymore. Elionor believed the Lowes had cheated, but Gavin had seen Alistair bury the ring. And he’d seen Alistair’s shock at the sight of his brother. Whatever had happened, he didn’t think it was intentional. But it didn’t change the fact that the tournament still demanded blood.
Still, Gavin didn’t attack. If two of his enemies wanted to kill each other, he wouldn’t stop them.
“If you try to hurt Hendry again,” Alistair warned Elionor, his voice cracking, “I’ll kill you. I swear it.” Gavin believed him.
“This doesn’t make sense.” Isobel strode between Elionor and Alistair, the Cloak around her shoulders shielding her from any curses they might cast. “Al, I know this isn’t a trick. But your brother can’t be here.”
“I won’t leave him,” Hendry cut in.
“And I won’t let him,” Alistair added.
“You can’t honestly mean you’re fine with this,” Elionor spat at Isobel. “Why should the Lowes get two champions?”
However Hendry had come to be here, Gavin didn’t consider him a champion. Every awful rumor had always been about Alistair—Alistair’s wickedness, Alistair’s talent. He didn’t know what that made Hendry, but Elionor was treating them like equals, when one was clearly the greater threat.
“That isn’t what—”
But Elionor didn’t wait for Isobel to finish. She cast a curse, the fumes of it hissing and spiraling in every direction. It deflected off from Isobel’s Cloak, ricocheting into the banquet hall, blasting through the stone exterior. Isobel and the brothers lunged out of the path of the falling rubble, while Gavin hastily threw up a Shark’s Skin as cover. When the clouds of dust and gravel settled, Gavin saw Alistair stumbling to his feet, a limp left wrist dangling at his side. There was no mercy on his face at all.
Alistair tilted his head, his widow’s peak slicing his face in two, and drew a hand out of his pocket. Clenched in his fist was the cursestone he’d taken from Gavin the night before.
“Thanks for this, Grieve,” he breathed, and then he cast the Revenge of the Forsaken before Gavin even had the chance to understand what he meant.
Elionor’s torso broke apart in a spray of splintered bone and mangled flesh. Blood splattered everywhere as her body caved inward on itself and she collapsed onto the stone. Gavin gasped and stumbled back, his vision coated in red. When he’d scrubbed the worst of it away, he was rewarded by the sight of Elionor’s ruined rib cage. Her intestines had been shredded. Crimson leaked through the remnants of her black clothing, pooling around his feet.
She’d been dead the moment the curse touched her. Dead before she hit the ground. And because it was Gavin’s cursestone, he knew what that death entailed. He knew exactly how difficult it was to cast it so well, so effectively. It was something he’d never been able to manage.