After his family had told him what they’d done, Alistair had locked himself in Hendry’s room and punched a hole in the wall. It’d hurt a great deal—Alistair was horribly clumsy—but he hated to see the room like that. Clean, the way Hendry had left it. Still smelling of pastries. As though his brother could stroll back in like nothing had happened.
Alistair twisted the cursering around his finger. His chest ached, as if his very heart had turned to stone and weighed down upon his lungs and bones. He didn’t remember the last time he’d cried. But after a night miserably hoping this was one final, heartless test, he wasn’t in the mood to shed tears.
He was in the mood to spill blood.
His mother leaned over and rested her hand on his. Her touch was ice. Alistair immediately wrenched his away, wishing he could conjure a stake and pierce it through her heart.
“I know what you’re thinking, Al.” His brother’s nickname for him sounded crude on her lips.
“No,” he said darkly. “I don’t think you do.”
“Hendry died for this family, for the tournament. Don’t let his death be in vain.”
Alistair wanted to laugh bitterly. He wanted to stand up and scream. Hendry hadn’t died. He’d been murdered. His family thought that the Lamb’s Sacrifice would make Alistair stronger, but without Hendry, Alistair was weaker. Without Hendry, Alistair was lost.
“You loved him,” Alistair whispered. All these years, he struggled to believe her affection for Hendry had been a farce. Even the Lowes weren’t that cruel.
Or maybe they’d only doted on Hendry because they’d always known his fate.
She stiffened, but her voice, as always, remained steady. “I love this family.”
“And me?” He immediately regretted the question. It was too loaded, too vulnerable.
He turned away from her, fixing his attention instead on the party around them, roaring with music and raucous laughter. The banquet took place in the town’s center, by its most ancient landmark, the Champions Pillar. It was a calling place to raw high magick, a central point for the seven other identical pillars that held the Landmarks together, although only the Lowes—as the last tournament’s victors—could see the glittering red dust of high magick suspended in the air, winking and flickering around the party. It was beautiful. It was also hideous, a reminder of why they were gathered here tonight. This was the power the Lowes killed Hendry for, that Alistair would kill six others for.
It disgusted him.
All Alistair needed from his mother was a simple, one-word response. Instead, she gave him a question.
“Are you not this family’s champion?”
Alistair stood abruptly, and his thoughts veered to the Grieve champion in the square, taking their encounter as inspiration. He flicked his wrist, and the Shatter and Break cursering burned as some of its power drained—power he’d intended to save for an opponent’s bones, but instead would gladly waste on his own spite.
His mother’s glass of wine shattered, merlot splattering across the white tablecloth. His grandmother, uncle, and younger cousin tsked with disdain.
All those years he’d sought to please them. Now his aspirations made him sick.
When Alistair did fight—and win—he wouldn’t do it for his family. He would do it for his brother. Hendry wouldn’t have wanted Alistair to die, too.
“It’s funny.” Alistair glared down at his mother. “For years you told me stories about monsters. But all along the monster was you.”
He stormed off in the direction of the bar.
The bartender eyed Alistair warily as he approached. Even in a good mood, Alistair had a threatening look about him, like an apple likely rotten at its core. And Alistair’s current mood was lethal.
“Three shots of whisky,” he told the bartender, and the man immediately poured them. Alistair knocked back all three in a row, then coughed until his eyes watered.
Someone standing next to him laughed. The man wore a plum-colored shirt, and he reminded Alistair of a toadstool.
“You’re the Lowe boy,” the man said, spitting out his family name. “Congratulations.”
For all of Alistair’s life, he had been one of the Lowe boys.
It was such a little phrase to set him off, but he couldn’t help it. Alistair cracked his neck and summoned the same curse. Shatter and Break. The man’s pointer finger snapped, his bone splitting cleanly in two.
The man wrenched his hand away and swore violently. The person beside him, a young man wearing smudges of eyeliner and a necklace of broken spellrings, bit his lip to hold back a smile.