“Ah,” Reid spoke, his voice slurred but unmistakably cold, “it’s you. Princess. What a pleasure.”
“I need your help,” she said, her voice tight with panic as much as her wounded pride. And she hated when he called her that. “I stole a curse from you, but something went wrong as I crafted it, and I can’t use magick anymore. I can’t even feel it.”
Reid nearly lost his balance, and he had to clasp the edge of a nearby table to steady himself. “You stole … a curse from me? What curse?”
“The Reaper’s Embrace.” Her face burned.
“That’s from my family’s oldest grimoire,” he said, aghast. “I should’ve known a Macaslan would try something like that. The Reaper’s Embrace isn’t even a good weapon in the tournament. It’s a contingency curse—it weakens the mark based on the mark’s own actions. It feeds on hatred and darkness, so the victim gradually loses their life along with their innocence. Not exactly a good choice for—”
“Reid, I am begging you.” Isobel didn’t know how to make him listen to her. She had nothing to offer him.
Perhaps it was the desperation in her tone, but he sobered in both senses of the word. “Your sense for magick is blocked, and there are only two ways to fix it. You could reattempt the curse, and do it right this time. Assuming you know what you did wrong. And if you mess up again, you could die.”
Isobel had no idea what her mistake had been. “What’s the other option?”
“A Null and Void spell of a higher class. It’ll wipe the curse clean from you.”
“But the Reaper’s Embrace is already class ten, and no one with high magick is going to undo it for me!”
“Then you have a problem.…” Reid shrugged and offered her his drink. “Here. You can have the rest.”
“I … No thank you. I don’t—” Isobel told him, moving away just as the last of the Slaughter Seven, Elionor Payne, joined her family in the crowd. The attendees applauded. The banquet was over. The champions would now have time to receive any last-minute advice from their families, and to say goodbye, before they made their final preparations for the tournament and headed to the town’s limits. To wait for the sun to set and the Blood Veil to fall. To wait for the tournament to begin.
Isobel had barely an hour.
An hour to come up with a plan.
An hour to fix what she’d done wrong.
An hour to save herself.
An hour wasn’t enough time.
BRIONY THORBURN
We’re raised to call them champions, but I would argue there’s a better word: sacrifices.
A Tradition of Tragedy
While the families filtered out of the square, the sun was slowly starting to bleed into the horizon, a harbinger of the Blood Veil that would soon engulf the sky.
Briony Thorburn lingered behind in the elongated shadow of the Champions Pillar.
She’d worn her best dress—and makeup, which she rarely touched—but she felt awful. Dark circles rimmed her eyes, and her stomach burned with the frustration of her own failure. She’d been up all night poring over Innes’s books, searching for clues eight hundred years of champions had missed: that the tournament’s curse could really be broken. That her sister didn’t have to die.
There was still time, she told herself. Innes might not be killed tonight.
Across the square, Reid MacTavish slunk away from a throng of fellow spellmakers. Briony darted out of the shadows and cut him off as he turned a corner into an alley.
“We need to talk,” she said.
Reid took her in, raising his eyebrows. He smelled of liquor. Briony resented anyone who’d enjoyed the party tonight, knowing the horror that followed it.
“Do we?” he asked.
“I did what you said. I read that book. I skimmed at least a dozen books—”
“Wow. A dozen books. How impressive.”
He tried to brush past her, but Briony put her hand on his shoulder.
“Just because this curse has never been broken doesn’t mean it can’t be. I need to save my sister, and you know about curses. So you’re going to tell me how to break this one.”
Her words sounded like a threat. But she didn’t care. Reid was the only other person who seemed to understand this, and if intimidating him was the way to get his help, so be it.
Instead of arguing with her, he seemed to snap to attention at her words. He shot a glance down the alley, as though making certain they were alone, then he steered her farther away from the reporters who still crowded the square. The dumpsters around them reeked.