“There’s no trick here, you have my word,” the Blair assured him, and Alistair didn’t like the tight, careful way he spoke, as though his words were a snare. The Blair made a piss-poor liar.
“I’m. Not. Interested,” Alistair repeated.
The Darrow raised his hands. The Blair clenched his fist of spellrings. The Payne reached her hand forward, her jewelry glowing brighter.
“If you’re not our friend, you’re an enemy,” the Blair warned.
“That’s how I know you’re full of shit. There are no friends here. Only people you kill now, and people you kill later.”
Alistair still had a fair climb between him and his Landmark. Not that he had any desire to flee. He summoned the magick from one of his cursestones, and soon the air tasted of smoke.
An enchantment, white and smoldering, whizzed past him. It was a death curse of some sort, so bright it was blinding. Alistair momentarily lost his balance and stumbled back.
The Blair howled a battle cry and charged forward, and Alistair added more power to the Warrior’s Helm. But within moments, his shield cracked. It wasn’t the result of any curse flung at it, or his three shots of whisky. It had broken on its own, like flimsy tissue paper acting as glass.
A broken spell? Alistair thought. No, professional spellmakers didn’t make mistakes like that. This could only have been sabotage. His grandmother had demanded all of Alistair’s tournament enchantments from the spellmakers in town and they couldn’t refuse, so this was their act of rebellion.
Suddenly, a phantom pain shot across Alistair’s shoulder, extending down across his heart. He could feel his skin tearing from a curse. It wasn’t a fatal wound, but he did cry out. He couldn’t even tell which of them had cast it.
The Grieve wasn’t the only champion Alistair had underestimated. The three of them possessed powerful curses. Alistair needed to counterattack—but how many of his had been tampered with? They could be worthless, like the shield. Or worse, they could backfire.
But he had no choice.
He squeezed his hand into a fist, channeling the magick within the ring on his third finger for the Dragon’s Breath. Then he raised his fingertips to his lips, and blew. An eruption of fire burst from his mouth, as menacing and scorching as true dragon breath. The air filled with heat and smoke and crackling. Alistair stood before the wall of fire that separated him from his competitors, wondering whether to attack or retreat. Even when they launched a dowsing spell, the flames never extinguished. If anything, they continued to grow, hungry and wanting.
Alistair walked into the flames, and they parted for him and trailed at his feet like a cloak. His fingers were poised over a new cursering that stored the Winter’s Scorch, and he licked his lips. Lethal magick surged inside him, writhing and slimy as leeches. He could almost feel teeth grazing his skin from the inside, looking to suck spirit from flesh.
The dowsing spell stopped at once, but Alistair hadn’t finished casting the curse. It struggled inside him, wanting to escape. But as he stepped past the fire and into the clearing, he saw that he was alone. The others had already fled, perhaps using Here to There spells.
Unable to contain it any longer, Alistair lifted his hand and let the curse free. It spewed through the air, gray as ash, in coils and wisps through the wind. It rushed through the forest, and the trees—in only a span of moments—withered and shrank. The moisture from their trunks seeped into the earth, and they twisted like burnt paper. Their leaves turned brown and dropped onto the grass below. The crows within them cawed and took to the sky, leaving the ruin behind.
As he’d feared, a piece of the curse remained inside him, and Alistair groaned from a terrible pain in his stomach. A well-crafted curse wasn’t supposed to have a rebound, but clearly the spellmakers had laced all of their gifts with such traps, despite his grandmother’s certainty that their fear had kept them in line.
How many of his enchantments were compromised? A few of them?
All of them?
He couldn’t depend on any of the spells he possessed. He would need to make his own. All the other champions had begun the night loaded with protection, weapons, and survival spells, but he was empty-handed.
Vulnerable.
After his pain lessened, Alistair wiped the spit on his lips away with his sleeve. He turned around, snapped his fingers, and the flames vanished. The night was quiet and dark once more, and he trudged his way up the mountain, to a dragon’s lair to call his own.
BRIONY THORBURN
Loyalty is meaningless in the context of the tournament. But that never seems to stop people from forming alliances to prolong the inevitable.