There had been two boys there that night, one with soft, elegantly sculpted features, the other angular and sallow, like the sun and its shadow had gone out for a drink. He hadn’t caught much of their conversation, but he’d heard enough to know who he was eavesdropping on. Even before he saw the picture in the papers the next morning.
Gavin had glared at Alistair Lowe and his brother from the back of the pub and wondered what it would be like to have someone in his life like that. Someone who knew him. Someone who saw him.
Someone who would celebrate when, not if, he came home.
* * *
He awoke sprawled out on the floor, the torches lining the walls around him burning low in their sconces.
Gavin groaned and propped himself up on his elbows, his entire body aching.
He could tell from the lack of light streaming in through the windows that the sun had yet to rise. And the careful, steady heartbeat of magick in the room meant his Landmark’s wards hadn’t been disrupted.
But when Gavin tried to get to his feet, pain surged through his arm, sending him toppling over onto the floor. He lay there, hissing tortured breaths, until he regained his facilities enough to yank up his shirt sleeve.
His tattoo was changing again.
While he’d been unconscious, ink had seeped from the edges of the hourglass in strange, spiraling patterns. His arm throbbed where the purple and green ink bled into skin. Gavin stared at the hourglass, nausea roiling in his stomach. The top was definitely emptier than it had been the last time he’d checked.
Using his body as a vessel was supposed to make him stronger.
“Bastard,” he muttered, picturing Reid MacTavish’s smug face. “This isn’t what I signed up for.”
But deep inside, he wondered if he had. After all, he’d agreed to turn himself into a vessel for his own enchantments, even though he knew it would come with a cost.
He groaned and rolled into a fetal position on the throne room’s cool marble floor. Everything was terrible, and he was tired.
He saw now how empty all his delusions of grandeur had been. Gavin might’ve won the Castle, but he was king of nothing at all.
For now.
He pushed himself up on shaking hands. It didn’t matter how much pain he was in.
Time to venture out of the Castle and claim his kingdom.
ALISTAIR LOWE
The average length of the tournament is twelve days. The shortest in history lasted forty minutes—that victor was Sylas Lowe.
A Tradition of Tragedy
As Alistair crept through the woods in the dead of night beneath the crimson glow of the Blood Veil, still drunk, he had the strange sense that he was dreaming. He’d traversed these paths in his reveries, his dark hair tangled with leaves and bramble, his eyes glowing through the forest like a nocturnal creature. But it wasn’t the trees or the cricket chirps or the scent of damp earth that gave him this feeling.
It was the fear.
Grins like goblins. Alistair’s breath hitched as he spotted an unusual curl of branches on the oak in front of him. He wrapped his cardigan tighter around himself and shivered.
Pale as plague. He stepped over the narrow trickling of a creek.
Silent as spirits. He sped up his pace.
They’ll tear your throat and drink your soul.
Those last words he heard in his mother’s voice. As children, Alistair and Hendry had huddled by the fireplace in the living room, wrapped in their dead father’s too-big flannels and listening to her stories. Back then, their mother’s mood swings had been sharper, her laughs louder, her smile warmer, her cries shriller. Like Hendry, she felt everything fiercely and all at once.
But her favorite emotion was fear.
“You were both born in July, one year apart,” she’d whispered. “We always left the windows open in the summer. Sometimes I wonder if that was a mistake.” She’d lurched forward and grabbed Alistair by his scrawny shoulders. Even at that age, they knew he’d be their champion. And so every new haunting tale was a lesson. “Sometimes I wonder if the monsters stole one of my children away from me in the night, and his soul still haunts these forests. Sometimes…” She looked out the window thoughtfully. “I still hear a baby crying when I walk through those trees.”
At seven years old, Alistair had been more afraid of the story than he should’ve been. “What if they did? What if one of us is a monster?” Of course, Hendry wasn’t a monster. He’d always been asking about himself.
His mother had cackled. “Then one night, the monsters will return to claim you. They’ll feed the human bits of your soul to the earth and drag you into their caves.”