“I have it,” Alistair managed, handing her the flask. Its glass was smeared with his blood.
She reached for him, but instead of taking the magick she lifted up his sweater. He hissed with pain as the fabric brushed his wound. Though the blood had begun to clot, the skin was still peeled back and torn like crushed moth wings.
“If you carried curses on you, this wouldn’t have happened,” she said flatly. “Let this be a lesson to never make yourself vulnerable.”
Alistair winced but said nothing. He’d completed the test but failed all the same.
“Do you even want this?” he asked, lowering the flask.
“I want you to use it to craft a Vintner’s Plague.” It was a petty curse by his grandmother’s standards, the equivalent of a wicked hangover. But if she wanted it made with high magick, Alistair pitied the intended victim. “We’re expecting guests.”
* * *
An hour later, Alistair winced as Hendry cast a healing spell to sew him back together.
“You’ll have a scar,” Hendry said, his lips a thin, disapproving line.
Alistair shrugged. “I like scars. They make me look threatening.”
Hendry snorted and set his spellstone on the desk Alistair was currently lying across, a number of papers, books, and a spellboard uncomfortably strewn out underneath him. His blood-crusted sweater rested in a heap on the office chair.
His brother flicked a different scar, on Alistair’s right shoulder. “Threatening? This was from running into a wall.”
Alistair rolled his eyes and sat up. He traced a finger over the new white mark running down his midsection, faded as though from an injury years old. “Thanks.” He’d woken Hendry up for this—his brother was uncommonly good at healing spells. It was his only true proficiency. But Hendry never liked to be woken before noon.
Hendry peeked at the open page of the grimoire Alistair had previously been lying on. He frowned. “The Vintner’s Plague? That’s not Grandma’s style.”
Grandma’s style was of the lethal variety.
“It’s what she asked for,” Alistair grumbled. He slid back into his seat and leaned over the grimoire.
“Is it easy to make?” Hendry peered at the recipe.
Alistair hunched over it to cover it up. “Sure,” he answered. He didn’t like to admit it, but he wasn’t much good at spell-or cursemaking. Currently, he was guessing how much magick to use. The higher the class of an enchantment, the more magick it demanded and the fewer uses the stone could store. The Vintner’s Plague should have three or four charges before it ran out.
“Why wouldn’t she make it herself?”
“It’s just a test. It’s always a test,” Alistair answered. “And I keep failing.”
“Al, the standard she’s holding you to … it’s beyond that of any of the other champions. You can cast spells at a level most people never attain in their lifetimes. You’ve proven yourself to be more than enough.”
“If it were enough, she’d stop testing me.”
“She’s only pushing you because…” Hendry bit his lip.
Alistair scoffed. His brother was going to say, because she loves you. But Alistair knew perfectly well his grandmother didn’t love him. To her, he was a champion far before he was a grandson.
That made sense to Alistair, in a sad, practical sort of way. Maybe the other families acted differently, but they, too, primed their champions to die. Because if they sent no one, a random member of their family would die anyway. At least his grandmother didn’t pretend he was anything other than useful to her.
“I know, I know. Blood before all,” Alistair muttered. The brothers had taken their family motto to heart … at least where each other was concerned.
“Are you scared?” Hendry asked quietly, the same question he’d asked Alistair last week at the Magpie.
“No.” But that wasn’t entirely true.
When you grew up raised on nightmarish bedtime stories, when your family members skulked the halls of your home warning you of your death, when you spent nights lying awake and staring at the stars, waiting for the moon to burn crimson, there was never a moment when you weren’t afraid.
“If dying were that bad, no one would do it,” Hendry joked, grinning his usual sunlight smile.
“I’m not going to die.”
“But if you don’t die, you have to live with the other option.”
Alistair thought of dear Aunt Alphina’s grave in their backyard. The last Lowe victor had died by suicide after the tournament, four years before Alistair was born. Alistair needed to be stronger than that. He needed to pass these tests, no matter how challenging they were. He needed to survive this so he could finally imagine a life beyond this estate, to discover if he was anything other than a Lowe, the city’s—and now the world’s—favorite villain.