Talia, Linden, and I had been in the Tomes attic for hours, breathing in the magic-suffused air and reading by the dreamy, consistently late-afternoon light that slanted through its windows no matter the actual time of day. Since Mondays tended to be quiet, my father had taken one of his rare days off and flipped the shop’s sign to closed, so there was no one around to disturb us. Rowan had declined to join our research session, trusting Lin to fill him in later on anything we turned up; allegedly he was busy with work, but I had a suspicion his absence had more to do with a desire to avoid being in close quarters with even a friendly Avramov.
It suited me just fine, given how upbeat I was feeling, so hopeful and optimistic I would have resented anything killing my vibe. I could feel the cleared fresh air between Lin and me, breezy and open as new spring; room in which she and I could find each other again. And I kept thinking back to last night, to the candle and my bespelled little flame. Every so often I’d test it, surging a little magic into my fingertips, letting the heat build inside my hands like tangible potential.
And each time it held steady, ready to realize my will, excitement glimmering inside me like a horde of fireflies trapped in my chest. There was no question that after years without it, my magic was fully, reliably back.
I was a real witch again.
Then there was Talia, the willowy length of her stretched across the dumpy old couch like some sexy sylph wandered out of myth, her shining hair flowing over its arm. We’d been trading heated little glances all afternoon like passed notes. Every time I looked over, I’d find her already looking back at me, a hidden smile tugging at her pillowy lips.
Taken together, it was all extremely fucking distracting in the best of ways, and the reason I couldn’t bring myself to be bummed by how little of use we’d managed to dig up.
“Shouldn’t these be, like, a little less crass?” Linden wondered, still engrossed in Savannah’s lurid artistry. “I mean, not that I’m gonna shed any tears over the Blackmoores’ maligned dignity or anything. But I always thought Harlows were supposed to be, you know. All bookish and dispassionate.”
“I can’t decide if I feel attacked, or like you haven’t even met me,” I said, though I was also taken aback by the, shall we say, lighthearted approach some of my ancestors had taken to chronicling the Gauntlets. Many of the records read nothing like the bloodless academic drone that I remembered hating in parts of the Grimoire; apparently not all Harlows were cut from Elias’s cloth. It gave me a weird feeling, acknowledging their humanity that way. Like they weren’t all the severe, humorless, hidebound monoliths I always imagined when I thought about the line of forebears that wound into my past.
As if maybe I hadn’t considered how much room being a Thistle Grove Harlow left for individuality.
“I guess she figured, who was ever going to read these anyway, particularly while she was still alive?” I continued.
“Or she was such a cast-iron badass she just didn’t give a fuck,” Talia offered from the couch.
“Also possible. Besides the comedic gold, did you find anything else?”
Talia swung her legs to the floor, sitting up to dangle her forearms between her thighs.
“Nope. Except that the combatants had to wrestle a whole-ass hydra for the strength challenge the time Savannah arbitrated, and then pry the token out of its mouth.”
She said the last a little wistfully, as if racing Rowan and Gareth across the lake severely paled in coolness compared to squaring up against a sea monster conjuration.
That she hadn’t stumbled across anything more useful wasn’t all that surprising; the upshot of our research was that the governing spell that manifested the Gauntlet challenges was wildly inventive and unpredictable. And speed seemed to be of the essence in any challenge, not just the eponymous one, with the combatants always racing against one another to complete their given task.
But that was where the similarities ended. Sometimes the scions competed to reach the same challenge token first, like Talia, Rowan, and Gareth had done at the lake with the gilded rose. Other times, the spell devised completely different, parallel courses with no overlap. The combatants might need to be underwater, underground, or airborne; facing down toothy creatures or cataclysmic weather or mind-bogglingly bizarre terrain. There’d even been a strength challenge in which the ground turned into a quicksand of salted caramel, forcing the combatants to dive deep into the gooey mass to retrieve the token and then somehow extricate themselves. The Arbiter that time, Nathaniel Harlow, had waxed poetic over how mouthwatering that challenge had smelled.