“I understand.”
“That’s a funny way to say thank you.”
Gavin locked eyes with him. “I’ll say thank you after I have proof it’s made me stronger.”
“Go ahead then,” Reid said. “Test it.”
Gavin concentrated on the spellring on his right thumb. Matchstick, a cheap knockoff of a Flicker and Flare. The light within the stone faded. Then, power coursed through him, strange and new, and he understood immediately that this magick was unlike anything he’d used before. He opened his palm, and a huge flame roared to life above it, tapering nearly up to the ceiling before flaring back down. It was far bigger and stronger than a class two spell should have been.
Gavin stared at it for a long, unblinking moment, then closed his hand into a fist, snuffing it out. A moment later, his shoulder began to ache, and the spellstone refilled itself with that same odd magick.
Gavin’s life magick.
“It worked,” Reid said softly. Gavin tore his gaze away from his hand to see Reid admiring his handiwork, clear pride etched across his face. “It actually worked.”
“Did you think it wouldn’t?” asked Gavin uneasily.
Reid shrugged. “Does it matter? You’re in one piece, and your mind seems … well. About as fine as it was when you walked in here.”
As he spoke, a throbbing pain shot through Gavin’s arm. He turned his head, grimacing as he saw a few grains of sand trickle into the bottom of the hourglass.
“This better help me win the tournament,” he growled.
Reid looked at him sadly. “Winning. Right. That’s all you want.”
“That’s all there is.”
Fifteen minutes later, Gavin barely remembered getting his coat on and leaving the curseshop. All he could feel was the beat of his heart, and all he could see was the dark, swirling form of the hourglass, of those grains of sand tumbling, one by one, warning him that he had done something that could not be reversed.
BRIONY THORBURN
Seven Landmarks for seven champions … if everyone survives long enough to claim one, of course.
A Tradition of Tragedy
The evening before the tournament, Briony Thorburn trekked out to the moors to mourn her fate.
More specifically, she’d gone to the Tower, one of the seven Landmarks scattered throughout Ilvernath’s surrounding wilderness, where the tournament took place. The Landmarks were powerful strongholds, each imbued with unique high magickal enchantments. Briony had spent years honing her strategy—which Relics she would risk everything to collect, which Landmark she would claim on the tournament’s first night …
It was a strategy that would never come to pass. Maybe she should’ve felt relieved about that, but all she could muster was bitter disappointment.
“The Tower,” Briony read from A Tradition of Tragedy, one of the several books she had spread out around her. “Once twenty-one meters tall, this Landmark served as a sentry post to spot invaders.”
The Tower was hardly so grand now, merely a heap of rock atop a hill of scraggly heather and tall grass. Until the Blood Veil fell tomorrow night like a crimson shroud draped over the city, each of the Landmarks would be little more than rubble, weathered down in the eight hundred years since the curse’s inception. The high magick of the tournament would transform them from ruins to fortresses, as though pumpkins enchanted into carriages.
“The Landmarks surround Ilvernath at seven points … each powered by a pillar of high magick in its center.…”
Briony knew the stone the text was referring to. Jutting out from the ruins’ center, the massive pillar was the only part of the Tower that retained any degree of splendor. Briony was leaning back against it now, like a broken throne.
“The Castle bears the strongest defensive enchantments.… The Crypt is warded against intruders.… The Cottage contains a collection of survival spells that—”
Wrung out from taunting herself, Briony pitched the paperback across the ruins. It splashed into a puddle, and she didn’t care enough to retrieve it.
She hadn’t come here to punish herself. After talking to Reid MacTavish, she’d thought that reading A Tradition of Tragedy might make her see the tournament in a new light, help her find some sort of evidence to prove to the elders that they’d made the wrong decision letting Innes become champion.
Instead, the book only infuriated her. It twisted the heroic stories she’d been raised with into a lurid cautionary tale. According to its author, Ilvernath’s curse was so abominable that it had earned itself a place among the ranks of such others as the Soul-Eaters’ Curse in the sewers of Ucratsk, or the Lament of the Lost that had plagued a small town called Carsdell Springs.