“I’m Hendry,” the boy said. As he shifted, the image of him lagged. There was a red glow of high magick around him, only visible as he moved, like a projection that could not keep up with his form. “I’m Alistair’s brother.”
“But … how?” she asked.
Before Hendry could respond, Finley rushed over to kneel beside Elionor’s broken form. The way he forced his expression from anguish to neutrality made Briony’s heart ache. This was not the first bloodied body of one of his allies that he had found.
“Who did this to her?” she demanded.
For a long while, no one answered. Then Alistair, without meeting her gaze, croaked, “Guilty.”
Briony took a step back, unable to understand. Alistair had set her free. He’d believed her.
“Why did you kill her?” she asked. “I thought we were agreed. We’ve proven that we can break this curse. Finley and I united the Sword and the Cave. They’re both gone now—and the tournament is changing.”
“Oh, come on,” Gavin said, pausing to push back his blood-soaked hair. “I don’t see any proof—”
“You must’ve seen the Blood Veil flicker. We did that.”
“That was you?” Isobel’s voice was raspy with disbelief.
“It was,” Finley said, turning away from Elionor’s body to stare at all of them. “Briony is telling the truth. The curse will break if we can repeat this on the other Landmarks. And then no one else will have to die like this. Ever.”
Briony watched this information pass over all their faces. Isobel looked shaken, her gaze fixed on Elionor’s blood pooling between the cracks in the cobblestones. Alistair looked relieved. Gavin’s shoulders were tense, his broad frame hunched, like he could not separate his mind from the battle.
But it was Hendry who spoke. “Is that why I’m here?”
“Maybe,” Briony answered. “Maybe as the tournament breaks, so do some of its rules. Maybe we could all interact with our families now, if we tried.”
The thought made her swallow. Hard.
“I think we’re all more concerned with figuring out why he isn’t dead,” Gavin said.
“Dead?” Briony echoed.
Hendry stretched his head up and pulled down his collar, revealing a gruesome red gash stretching across his neck. Briony instantly recoiled, disturbed.
“I watched you bury the ring in the Castle last night,” Gavin said.
“I buried it to release its magic,” Alistair snapped. “How could that reverse—”
“I don’t think that’s what you did,” Briony said, trying to think all of this through. “If the high magick of the curse is falling apart, then maybe … maybe when the magick in the ring dispersed inside the Castle Landmark, it got sucked into the magick of the tournament. And when that magick unraveled a little more, it produced Hendry. Like a side effect.”
Alistair rubbed one of his bloodshot eyes, then peered at the Champions Pillar. He looked utterly wretched. “When I buried the ring, there were two cracks. Both on its front, with the names. And now there’s four—three on its front, one on its back.”
The Pillar had cracked when Briony had slid the ring off Innes’s finger. She hadn’t realized it had happened three times more.
“The last one just happened now,” Alistair continued. “On the back. The side with the stars. That one’s from what you did, isn’t it?”
“So it was already breaking?” Finley asked, furrowing his brow. “That … that can’t be right. We united the Sword with the Cave. What else could be breaking it?”
Briony remembered, with a sudden, sickening rush, the other words that Reid had told her the night of the tournament’s beginning. Words that, in her hurry and panic, she had ignored.
“There must be two ways to break the tournament, just like there are two ways to drain the enchantment from a cursestone,” Briony spoke, bile rising in her throat. “You can take it apart safely, matching each Relic to each Landmark one by one. Or you can do it the other way.”
“The cursestone breaks.” Isobel breathed. “And everything inside it is destroyed.”
“So we could all die?” Finley’s voice hitched just the slightest bit. “Everyone who’s left?”
“I … I think so.” Briony shuddered. “I didn’t know any of this was real until an hour ago.”
Finley still looked shaken, but he nodded. “I guess it makes sense that this would be dangerous. But we need to do everything we can to make sure that doesn’t happen.”