An awful sound grated to Gavin’s left. He jerked his head toward it. The Champions Pillar was glowing brighter than it had just a moment ago, a crimson line now etched through Elionor’s name.
Gavin shuddered and looked back at the others. Isobel was silent, pale as a sheet.
Elionor’s arm was flung out to the side, her fingers just centimeters away from Gavin’s bloodied boots. Her eyes were sightless and glassy, mouth open in something between horror and surprise. He could see a slight shimmer of white gathering around her mouth, her nose, her ears. Her life magick, dissipating into the air.
He felt a tug toward it. A physical pull. And instead of hovering aimlessly in the air, the magick drifted toward him. Like it wanted him to take it.
Gavin reached forward, gasping as a tendril wound around his hand—and sank into his skin. The ever-present pain in his arm lessened slightly, but he could not process what this meant. Not while staring down at the horror of what Alistair had done. The whole courtyard smelled of copper and bile.
He raised his eyes from Elionor Payne’s corpse to Alistair Lowe’s cruel face, now accentuated with a thin misting of blood. “You didn’t have to kill her like that,” Gavin rasped.
Alistair examined the body with a horrified stare, as though this act surprised even him—no matter if it had been in defense of his brother.
Gavin had told himself that Alistair Lowe was callous. Brutal. Wicked. He’d been wrong about all of those things. But his biggest mistake had been not in what he’d learned, but what he’d forgotten: Alistair Lowe, first and foremost, was dangerous.
Above them, the sky let out a great, wide groan—and then, like a miracle, daylight streamed through for a moment, like an eye opening. Everyone gasped, squinting into the light.
As quickly as it came it was gone, red stitching the sky back together. But the high magick around them felt … different. A crack sounded from the Champions Pillar, and Gavin whipped his head around, wondering who else had died. But instead of crossing out a name, a gash appeared on its other side, across the carving of the moon and the line of seven stars. Crimson light spilled through the cracks, identical to the light that hovered around Hendry.
“What just happened?” asked Gavin. The sky hadn’t done that when Carbry died, but now it had happened twice in one morning.
But everyone else looked just as confused as he did.
“I don’t like this,” Isobel said, stepping away from the body. “I’ve never heard of the Pillar cracking when champions die.”
“This is the fourth crack,” Gavin pointed out. “But only two champions are dead.”
“Or the tournament really is breaking,” Alistair said.
Gavin instinctively opened his mouth to disagree, but he couldn’t find the words. They were outside tournament grounds, after all. He circled the Pillar and examined its cracks, three on its front side and one on its back. He didn’t know what it meant. He didn’t know what Hendry’s inexplicable resurrection meant. After his years studying the stories of the tournament, nothing in his files or in A Tradition of Tragedy had prepared him for when the story veered off course.
Before either he or Isobel could respond, footsteps thudded from behind them.
Gavin turned.
Briony’s dark hair swirled behind her as she walked toward them with Finley Blair.
Gavin had seen Briony Thorburn kill a champion less than twelve hours ago. The look on her face then was nowhere near as frightening as the one he saw now, because she didn’t look defeated. She looked triumphant.
“What are you doing here?” he asked warily. He barely knew who his allies were anymore, but he doubted Briony and Finley were among them.
Briony bared her teeth in a victorious smile. “We figured it out. We know how to break the curse.”
BRIONY THORBURN
The only part about the tournament that makes it a fairy tale is that it’s definitely gone on ever after.
A Tradition of Tragedy
Briony swayed as she saw Elionor’s mangled corpse, a heap of tattered strips of black fabric and flesh.
She and Finley had come to save her—to save everyone. But they were too late. The courtyard was in ruins. One of them was dead. And Gavin was drenched in blood.
Somehow, impossibly, the tracking spell Finley had cast on Elionor had led them into town, behind the inner part of the Blood Veil. And even more impossibly, a boy stood beside Alistair at the top of the stairs to the banquet hall. A boy who did not belong.
“Who are you?” Briony’s voice cracked with confusion and horror. They shouldn’t be here. And they shouldn’t be able to interact with anyone but the champions.