Chapter 42
Chapter Forty-Two
Emmeline
Emmeline’s nails dug so deeply into Lola’s arm she thought she’d pierce skin. All throughout the arena warriors coughed and spluttered. Skin paled and veins darkened, they clawed at their throats, the tables.
“No, no, no,” Emmeline whispered, her eyes locked on Roremar, waiting for it to hit him, too, an impending explosion she couldn’t look away from.
She’d begged the stars to help him survive this, and she prayed now that they’d answer.
Lola swallowed, voice shaking as she tried to reassure both of them. “We knew it would be poison.”
“Not like this,” Emmeline said. Her attention snapped to Lola, but her friend’s eyes were watering, shooting between Emmeline and her brother.
Her brother who had just ingested poison.
“I thought—I—” Emmeline stammered as she looked around.
A few of the councilors in the box looked appalled, but many went on eating and drinking as if the men dying in the arena were of little concern.
They cast her questioning glares as she floundered.
She could already hear them, raising questions about her sanity once again.
Even Aldryn Falliare, Roremar’s own uncle, only looked on with mild curiosity. He reclined in a wide chair, elbow propped on the arm, watching.
What made them all so callous? Was it simply because they thought themselves better for not needing the status and security entering the tournament provided? Because of their proximity to the Chancellor, they thought they already had a hand on her magic?
Emmeline turned back to the arena and kept her eyes on Roremar, studying him as he did the table before him.
His hands didn’t shake any more than Cyren had told them to expect—a side effect of the attack two nights ago, not the poison.
Sweat gleamed on his brow—but that could have been from the sun overhead—and he favored his right side. But his stare was alert.
“I thought they’d have to identify a poison and risk drinking the cups they deemed safe. I thought he’d have a chance to use his mind first,” Emmeline whispered to Lola. “Not”—a man in the first row vomited across his table, his weight falling against the creaking wood—“this.”
This threw them all into the deep end with manacles around their ankles.
Emmeline’s heart pounded. Roremar’s hands flitted over his table, eyes scouring the supplies and the rest of the arena as he tried to put together the pieces.
“Why isn’t it hitting him?” Emmeline asked.
“I don’t know, and I don’t care,” Lola muttered. To her brother, she added a whispered plea. “Come on, Rore.”
Seeing Roremar down there now, Emmeline hated how she had to push him away. Hated that she couldn’t have him the way she was meant to.
But she’d promised the stars. Help her save him, and she’d relent.
The indecent chatter of the box grated on Emmeline’s ears. She fidgeted, twisting her opal ring around her finger.
“They’re all like Valyrie,” Emmeline muttered.
“What?” Lola inclined her head without looking away from Roremar, who still showed no signs of the poison overcoming him. He was looking at Rian a few tables over, trying to communicate with his ally.
“All of them,” Emmeline whispered, waving at the box. “They’re as uncaring in this affair as she was when she crafted her own tournament.”
“She could only have the strongest win hers, though,” Lola pointed out.
“True,” Emmeline agreed.
Though, something about her reading in the Angel’s seeing chamber nagged at her. With Roremar getting attacked, she’d barely had time to review the reading of Valyrie devising the tournament in the past. Now, her memory flashed through everything she’d been shown.
The first trial—the duel—and the poison challenge after. The woman who had dropped nightshade in another’s cup, that cruel, familiar laughter she’d released as they died.
She ticked through the deluge of fortunes, remembering what other symbols the competitors had borne.
Out of the twelve who remained at the end, along with that faceless woman, she could remember a helmeted man, one presenting the Angel with a bag of coins, and a third toasting an overflowing glass of wine.
Her eyes raced around the arena as she ticked off each name.
Anphrosia.
Arenothos.
Serchus.
Dryvius.
“Bloody realms,” Emmeline swore.
“What?” Lola asked.
Emmeline replayed the rest of the memory. The power pouring off Valyrie as she read, an overwhelming amount that desperately needed a place the go.
The figures rising at the end, all their faces obscured.
The original races hadn’t been to select a guard for Valyrie.
“It was the Fates,” Emmeline whispered, her skin prickling and magic pounding through her veins.
She could practically see it unfolding over the arena.
Valyrie ripped power from the stars, giving the winners some of her very own magic that had been painfully overwhelming her.
“This entire tournament. It wasn’t a guard Valyrie was forming.
It was how she chose the Fates. They were warriors when they entered, as common as anyone else. ”
Lola inhaled sharply. “You mean, the Fates were made from Starsearchers?”
Emmeline nodded. “That’s why the scroll has so many references to the spectrums of their magic. And the translation of sanctuary…I bet it was referring to the seeing chamber I saw below ground where Valyrie devised the entire tournament.”
No one knew for sure how the Fates were created. There were countless stories like the Fates’ Dawn. Some legends suggested they were ripped from the stars by the Goddess of Fate and Celestial Movement. Others argued it had been from Valyrie’s own bones, sacrificed to form her henchmen.
The truth was, they’d been warriors. No better than the Starsearchers they now toyed with.
“What does that mean for today?” Lola asked, eyes trained on her brother. Below, men fell. They screamed as invisible forces attacked their minds.
Emmeline couldn’t see how Rocarri would know the full extent of the original tournament. Her magic was unique enough, she felt safe in betting she was the only person who’d seen that past fortune of Valyrie.
Still, it was possible Rocarri had put some pieces together based on items he possessed like the Endasi scroll. Lola had said there were rumors his predecessor had hoards of valuable information in his vaults.
“Rocarri must know the Fates are connected to this tournament. That’s why he’s so fanatically obsessed.
He wants something out of it.” The memory of the gleam in his eye during the duel twisted Emmeline’s stomach.
The Chancellor clearly was overly infatuated, for more than her power.
After all, he didn’t get to claim her magic at the end of this. He was giving her away.
What, then, did he get?
Lola inhaled. “Could he be creating another Fate?”
“No…he couldn’t.” Emmeline’s skin chilled. Could he?
She looked at the Chancellor, his silver-trimmed robes glistening in the sunbeams like he was a star himself. He had secrets, and likely far more than they’d once expected. But would he go as far as to try to create a thirteenth Fate? There had to be another logical reason.
What was it he had implied after the first trial?
“The duels,” Emmeline hurried as the pieces clicked. “What if it wasn’t only about strength? Rocarri said it himself: When the men killed needlessly, their minds could warp. What if that was Valyrie’s intention?”
A splintering echoed through the arena as a competitor fell on his table. Another tried to rip greenery from the walls, shrieks vibrating the stone.
“What do you mean?” Lola asked.
“The first trial wasn’t only to prove strength. It was about hardening the competitors into the brutal beings Valyrie needed her Fates to be. It was about cracking their morality. Losing the humanity that made them mortal.”
“So, they’d be primed to manipulate Starsearchers through fortunes,” Lola guessed.
“And then, in the second trial, with that part of them severed, she began manipulating their magic. Before that, all readings came from Valyrie herself, so she likely had intimate knowledge of each participant. She’d have wanted to test their personal strengths and weaknesses so she could exploit their magic if they won the trials. They were poisoned…”
Emmeline recalled the beads of wispy starlight that had floated around the arena in the reading, seeping into Valyrie’s open palms. “The poison took something from them. It tied those who survived it to Valyrie somehow. Maybe it started the process of them becoming Fates.”
“She was creating the first Fate ties. That could mean the theory about Rocarri creating a Fate is correct.”
“It could, but if that’s right, Valyrie didn’t use poison in the literal sense.
It created a connection between her and the competitors that she then used to turn them into Fates.
The second trial wasn’t about the poison—not at its heart.
It tested who was mentally worthy and created connections to manipulate… manipulating Fate ties—”
Emmeline scanned the arena again, the men, the items on their tables.
The rubies on Roremar’s chalice glinted, richest wine red.
Her stomach fell to her feet. “Oh, burning starfire.”