26
Sly Cantrips and Tricky Spells
Places from the past are usually much smaller than you remember when you return to them years later, shocked that they’d ever managed to command so much space in your brain at all.
This was not the case with Castle Camelot.
The keep loomed against the night, so broad and imposing it could have served as a real fortress, the black-and-gold Blackmoore pennants strung from its corner towers snapping in the wind. The whole thing looked like a middle-school “elements of a medieval castle” diagram come to life in all its cheese-bucket glory, complete with ramparts, a drawbridge, and a parapet walk, along with lots of other intimidating bits for which I’d never learned the proper names. Floodlights set at its base illuminated the rough-hewn facade—as if it was some painstakingly preserved historical monument, instead of a construction built circa 1998—flinging bars of green, blue, and pink onto the stone, their reflections caught by the rippling black water in the moat.
Now that I was here, I’d expected to feel some twinge of Gareth-related pain, from any remnants of teen Emmy that might still have been haunting my subconscious. But Gareth and I had spent more time together roaming the grounds of his family’s Tintagel estate, several miles down the road, than here—and it turned out all I felt was pissed. The castle had clearly been added to extensively since my day, as the Blackmoores churned the profits from their mini empire right back into expanding it.
It made me even more furious with them, this irrefutable proof of how they were flourishing as they turned the screws on the other families.
And I was more than a little preoccupied with Talia, whom I hadn’t seen since that night at The Bitters, two days ago. Now she stood in front of me, flinty-eyed and meticulously composed, with Gareth and Rowan flanking her, waiting for the challenge to begin. I’d thought about texting her dozens of times—okay, it was more like in the hundreds—in the past few days. But what was I going to say to her to bridge the rift? What was I supposed to offer to get us back to where we’d been, when I still wasn’t sure what I even wanted for myself, much less for us?
Tonight, I thought grimly even through the mantle’s euphoric glow, was really going to blow.
In front of me, blazing words materialized on the Grimoire’s open page. With an effort, I shuttled my emotions as far to the side as they would go, letting the Arbiter rise to the fore.
As you draw closer to the wreath, consider ye its weight and fit;
To become its rightful bearer, you must now demonstrate your wit.
Have you bent to the wisdom of your elders, to each sly cantrip and tricky spell?
Consider them query and answer both, and they shall serve you well.
I puzzled over the words even as I pronounced them with the Arbiter’s booming authority, the customary light flaring from the Grimoire and knitting itself into a token at the final, dying echo of my voice. We all waited with held breath to see which way it would flit; the Blackmoores’ holdings were huge, swathes of acreage extending in three cardinal directions from where we stood. Castle Camelot and all its attractions were only the beginning to their vast private estate.
But the token zoomed off toward the drawbridge without hesitation, the keep’s towering double doors creaking open of their own accord to let it flit through.
Which meant Castle Camelot itself would be tonight’s playing ground.
The combatants wasted no time; they raced off toward the drawbridge at a sprint, Rowan taking the lead. As I recalled, he’d run track in high school all four years just like Lin, and he still had a solid stride. Behind me, the crowd of spectators shifted impatiently, clearly wanting to follow, even as the doors slammed closed once Talia disappeared across the threshold. I flung my arms out in a barricade, following the mantle magic’s prompt.
“No one else shall pass,” I boomed, “until a victory is called.”
After a moment of disgruntled protest that they’d be denied admittance to the final, and arguably most exciting, challenge, I heard the rustling of robes and low chant of incantations, as those who knew how—and happened to have the proper equipment at hand—summoned up scrying charms to let them spy beyond the walls.
One had apparently been built into the mantle magic’s spell; as I instinctively closed my eyes, I found I could extend my sight beyond my body, my awareness whizzing out in front of me like some kind of incorporeal drone.
For a precariously queasy minute, this disembodied vision made me feel like I might hurl, and I hunched over a little, taking a few deep breaths that sounded like the rushing of a gale.