The Cloak hovered and glowed red at the quarry’s bottom, its high magick unaffected by the spell occurring around it.
Alistair opened the duffel bag and carefully slid it over the Cloak so as not to touch it—he didn’t want to accidentally claim it himself. He shivered. The water down here was dreadfully cold and frightfully still.
When he zippered the duffel bag closed, the red light was gone, and he floated in total darkness.
Until two golden eyes appeared centimeters from his.
A light coursed through the leviathan’s entire body, electricity zapping through its fins. Its scaly form changed from black to a blinding white, its veins alit like a glimmering web. It opened its jaw wider than Alistair stood tall, revealing not hundreds, but thousands of teeth.
The monsters can’t hurt you when you’re a monster, too, he told himself. But his thoughts were frantic. His heart pounded. His spell, so powerfully constructed, was impossible to stop.
If he was truly a monster, then why was he so afraid?
The leviathan lurched forward and swallowed him whole.
BRIONY THORBURN
The Traitors’ Tournament is only spoken about in whispers. All seven champions refused to fight one another, believing they could outlast the curse. They survived a month—until Carawen Lowe cracked and slaughtered them all.
A Tradition of Tragedy
Briony followed Finley as they raced through the forest. Cursefire whirled through the underbrush behind them, and Briony still felt the lingering clutches of Alistair Lowe’s illusion spell. She’d always been particularly susceptible to their effects, and right now she couldn’t stop thinking about those fins breaking the grimy surface of the lake, the monster’s leering eyes and gaping maw.
Neither of them stopped until they’d left the woods behind and both their Pick Up the Pace spellstones were drained. Finley crouched behind a rocky outcropping at the edge of the moorlands, and Briony joined him a moment later, both of them too winded to go any farther without rest.
“We were two against one.” Finley’s voice was so soft and low that chills crept up Briony’s spine. “And we still failed.”
“And now he has the Relic.” Briony was in excellent shape, but her heart pounded in her chest. From panic or overexertion, she could no longer tell.
It’d been a week since the tournament began, and she’d spent all of it patiently trying to win over her new alliance. She’d earned Carbry’s loyalty after helping fight off Gavin, but Elionor’s still eluded her. Bringing back this Relic would’ve strengthened their trust in her—and given Briony something to test her theory with.
She could scream. A whole week had passed and she had nothing.
“It’s not defeat,” Finley said, speaking quickly—and mostly to himself. “There are five more Relics to fall, and the Cloak won’t protect him from the Sword. If we—”
“You already had the Sword, and he still beat us.” She kicked angrily at the rocks scattered around their feet. “The Cloak will make him unstoppable.”
Every moment that passed made the consequences of their loss more real. Alistair had been a brutal opponent even without high magick. Now it was only a matter of time until he hunted Isobel, or Gavin. Or came for all four of them at once.
And then everything Briony had done to Innes would be for nothing.
“It doesn’t have to change the plan,” Finley said. “The wait will just be a little longer. But that’s okay—we have the defenses we need.”
“Plan?” Briony echoed, remembering what Carbry had talked about on her first day at the Monastery. “You’ve been hinting at some grand strategy for the last week, but you still haven’t told me what it is.”
Finley peered at her with a reluctance that Briony hoped wasn’t suspicion. It looked like it could be something else. “Our alliance means that we have numbers on our side, but we agreed to wait to attack until all of us have claimed a Relic. It means biding our time, but then we’ll be strong enough to take everyone else out together.”
Briony understood the concept of consolidating power. It made sense, and it aligned with her own plans of collecting Relics to test her theory. But there was still so much she didn’t understand about breaking the tournament’s curse, and she didn’t want to share her own ideas with Finley without proof.
“It’s a good plan, but why Carbry and Elionor?” Briony asked. “Isobel is stronger than them, and we both know it. And Elionor can be—”