Instead, I slipped under into a pool of blissful heat, lapping against me in all but the few places I hadn’t been able to properly reach with my magicked hands. There was a patch of blistering cold right between my shoulder blades, and another under my left armpit where I clearly hadn’t lingered long enough with the spell.
But it was nothing I couldn’t handle, at least for as long as it would take to reach the sunken tokens.
I breached the water with a gasp, air icing my cheeks, then breast-stroked toward the spot where the blue glowed like a watercolor wash, my unprotected back and armpit burning with chill. I couldn’t even begin to think how it would have felt all over me, without the protection of the spell; my heart would probably have seized up and then given up the ghost. Despite having been born and bred in Illinois, I was decidedly not built for such severe cold.
Once I reached the spot, I gulped a breath and dove down hard, kicking my feet until I reached the submerged tokens—two floating thistle flowers, just like the one tattooed on my arm, little floral weapons with their bristling heads and leaves like spikes.
So, Rowan or Gareth had beaten me here, I thought with a sinking heart as I reached out to touch one. Which meant that someone else had already won—or that one of the other two hadn’t thought to save this place for last.
As soon as my fingers closed around the thistle’s stem, the portal spell yanked me back to Castle Camelot.
I materialized, gasping and dripping, exactly where I’d left—outside the castle walls with Gareth and Rowan to either side, Delilah looming above the three of us like a human skyscraper. The other two combatants wore matching stunned expressions, as though they were just as surprised as I was to find themselves back here.
“The hell,” Gareth said with a grimace, looking around. “But I didn’t—”
“Talia,” I said anxiously, turning to search the crowd that was still gathered behind us for any Avramovs; I didn’t see a single one. “Is she . . . are they all still in there, with her?”
“Combatants,” Delilah tolled, wrenching my attention back to her. “Present your palms!”
Gareth and I held up our right hands, Rowan his left. Blue light drifted from our palms, reassembling into gathered tokens that lifted to hover in a circle above each of our heads. Craning my neck, I could see that Rowan had collected Alastair’s hawthorn berry, Elias’s feather, Margarita’s garnet, and the Lady’s Lake thistle—but not Caelia’s rose. Gareth also had the berry and the garnet, as well as Caelia’s rose—but he was still missing Elias’s quill and the Lady’s Lake thistle.
Only I had five.
Only I had them all.
My jaw fell open at the realization, just as the tokens above our heads circled one another faster and faster, until, with an explosive flash of sapphire blue, mine merged into a silver wreath, while Gareth’s and Rowan’s vanished into wisps.
A chorus of gasps echoed through the crowd, as the newly minted wreath floated into Delilah’s waiting palm. A smile touched her titaness’s mouth, and she spread her hands ceremonially.
“Tiebreak victory,” she trumpeted in clarion tones, “and victory of the seventh Gauntlet of the Grove . . . goes to House Avramov, by virtue of their Harlow champion!”
* * *
“I still can’t believe it,” I said, my fingers wrapped around a mug of hot cocoa.
I sat in the living room with my parents, tucked up on the couch with my feet swaddled in a pair of my mother’s fuzzy socks. Beyond the window, the sky was approaching dawn, filaments of pink and rose gold threading into the pearled gray like glinting embroidery. There had been no question of sleep once we got back from Castle Camelot, and so we’d held vigil together for Talia; the banishing had taken all night, and apparently still wasn’t over. Though the Avramovs couldn’t have missed Delilah’s booming proclamation of my/their victory, they’d all been too wrapped up in the ritual to pay it much heed at the time. I assumed we would be the first to hear, when they were done and Talia was fully restored.
Which she would be, I told myself, over and over; I wasn’t letting in any negativity on that front. If I’d learned anything from the Instagram witches I followed, it was the power of manifesting hope against all odds.
And when she recovered, I hoped she would still want to talk to me—because I couldn’t wait to share with her the sweet, sweet moment in which Gareth’s face had finally registered the magnitude of his crushing defeat.