As she’d feared, her father had been overly optimistic to expect an alliance with Reid.
Still, unwilling to give up so easily—especially after her father proclaimed such confidence to the evening news—Isobel scanned the room for some other topic of conversation. Her eyes fell on a paperback at the corner of his shelves, the spine worn from excessive use.
“A Tradition of Tragedy,” she read, fighting to keep her voice bubbly when the words left a sour taste in her mouth. “You don’t see many Ilvernath locals with that.”
“An Ilvernath local wrote it,” Reid pointed out.
“A Grieve wrote it,” she corrected. That hardly counted; the Grieve family was a joke.
“Do you disapprove of them airing Ilvernath’s dirty laundry?”
Isobel knew she should be playing polite, but it was hard to rein in her opinions where that book was concerned. “It’s disrespectful. And just when all the publicity settled down, the Blood Moon showed up. Now the city is crowded with even more protestors shouting at us, reporters bothering us, cursechasers gawking at us—”
“You’re one to talk. I saw the show you gave out there for that reporter.”
Isobel tried not to cringe. “Well, it doesn’t mean I approve of us being a spectacle.”
“Every twenty years, we send seven teenagers into a massacre and reward the one who comes out with the most blood on their hands,” Reid said flatly, still facing his work. “You should be more concerned about us being despicable.”
Isobel would never have expected to hear someone from the city’s most reputable cursemaking family criticize the tournament. The MacTavishes had made a living off causing harm to others, pushing the boundaries of their country’s strict cursemaking legislation. They were among the few besides the competing families who’d known about the tournament before the book’s release. This might have been business to them, but it was tradition, too. Something to be proud of.
At least, that was what her father had told her last winter, when her relatives had named her champion.
What do you mean you don’t want to? he’d scolded, despite her tears. It’s your duty, Isobel. So what if the media found out a little early? Finally, we have a champion who can make this family proud.
“Then why are you making me that curse?” Isobel asked Reid, shaking away the unpleasant memory. “You know I plan to use it in the tournament.”
“I never claimed not to be despicable, too.”
This struck Isobel as an unsettling answer, but before she could press him further, he added, “You’re not the first champion to visit me. I’ve already met with Carbry Darrow and Elionor Payne. Carbry’s family knows more than anyone about past tournaments. Elionor delayed attending university specifically to become champion. And whoever wins the Thorburn title will have beaten scores of competitors before the tournament even starts. Yet you’re the one the newspapers rave the most about. Why might that be?”
It was because after the media latched on to Isobel, her family started selling them stories. Photographs of her casting complex spells. Report cards from as far back as primary school. Even quotes from her father about what it was like to raise a gifted child.
“Because I’m capable,” Isobel answered.
“Every champion announced so far has been capable.”
“I’m top of my class. I’m a better spellcaster and spellmaker than any of them.”
Reid didn’t respond.
She tried hard to find something else to talk about, some other reason to linger in the room. A yellowed grimoire rested on the opposite end of the counter. Curious, Isobel opened it to a random page, to a recipe for a death curse called the Reaper’s Embrace. She’d never heard of it before. She traced her fingers across the faded instructions, squinting as she deciphered it.
The text claimed that the curse killed its victim gradually … and definitively. The enchantment ranked at the highest class of all spells and curses—class ten. Isobel already owned countless mid-class death curses her family had bought for her for the tournament, but they were easily defended against with shield spells. Powerful curses were hard to come by, even for the right price.
“A locket with a spellstone embedded inside. How old-fashioned,” Reid commented. “Where did you get it?”
“My mother gave it to me.” It had been passed down on the other side of her family, most of whom lived in larger cities down south. Sometimes Isobel forgot that a world existed outside of Ilvernath, a world full of enchantments and stories of its own.