CHAPTER 56 GIGI
GIGI
At nine on the dot, Gigi stepped into the parlor to find Helena Thorp sitting at a high, round table that hadn’t been there the day before. On the table, there was a deck of cards, beautiful, ornate playing cards like none Gigi had ever seen. She took the seat opposite Helena.
“The game of War,” the old woman said. “Do you know how to play?”
An auspicious beginning. And not at all concerning on a metaphorical level! “I know the game,” Gigi said. “Highest card wins. And if you tie—”
“Yes, quite.” Helena dealt Gigi a single card, face down.
“Pretty sure I’m supposed to get half the deck,” Gigi commented.
Helena flipped a single card over for herself: a six. “Diamonds,” the old woman said, tapping a finger to the card’s suit. “A symbol of wealth. Formed under pressure. And when set in a ring and placed on a certain finger, the stone can bind a woman to a man.”
“Or another woman,” Gigi said helpfully. “Or—”
“Your card,” Helena cut in. “Flip it.”
Gigi flipped the card: the seven of spades. I win. Something stopped Gigi from saying that out loud or claiming Helena’s six of diamonds as her own.
The Thorp matriarch tapped Gigi’s winning card. “A spade is a blunt instrument, useful for burying things that need burying.” Helena pushed her card to Gigi, who picked up her own as well—a deck of two.
Helena dealt again, and they played a second round in silence. On their third round, a new suit showed up.
“Clubs,” Gigi said. When Helena said nothing in reply, Gigi filled the silence herself. “Puppy dog feet. That’s what I called the suit of clubs when I was young.”
Gigi, Knox, and Brady had been the Clubs during the Grandest Game.
“Young,” Helena echoed, sounding suddenly ancient, like she was speaking across decades, across eras. “We were, all three of us, so very young.”
“All three of you?” Gigi searched the old woman’s eyes, as if the answer were somehow hidden behind those remarkable violet irises of hers.
“There are always three,” Helena said, and suddenly, Gigi knew. Avery had disappeared first. Then Eve.
There are always three.
“Three… Candidates?” Gigi said, and then at least half the neurons in her brain fired simultaneously. We were, all three of us, so very young. “You were a Candidate?”
That made sense, didn’t it? It was the only thing that made sense. Helena knew about the Gilded Blade because she had been where Avery was, where Eve was. She’d said yes.
“A lifetime ago,” Helena confirmed. “The year was nineteen fifty-one.” She pulled another card from the deck and turned it over—and another and another until the final suit made an appearance.
“Hearts. Love.” Helena’s violet eyes closed, and she lifted a hand to her neck—to Calla’s necklace. The fleur-de-lis. Helena pulled the pendant from beneath her blouse and closed her fingers around it. “Love,” she whispered again, and the ache in her voice stole Gigi’s next breath.
“You gave that necklace to Calla.” Gigi paused, just for a moment. “Who gave it to you?”
Nora had said that symbol didn’t belong in this town, which raised the question: Where did it belong?
“Vega.” Violet eyes slowly opened. “We weren’t allowed to use our real names in the Crucible. I knew her only as Vega.”
Vega. Another Candidate in 1951.
“You remind me of her,” Helena told Gigi. “You and your sister both. Two sides of the same coin. Vega before and Vega after.”
Before the Crucible. And after. “Savannah and I are nothing alike,” Gigi said.
“We were all very different from one another to start—Vega, Andy, and me. As different as any three young women could possibly be. Before.”
“Before you were forged,” Gigi filled in. “The Crucible—it’s a competition?” There was no time for an interrogation like the present.
“Yes and no. There are trials. Some you must complete alone, others together.”
Gigi thought about Avery—and Eve. “But in the end, only one person wins?”
“Only one ascends,” Helena corrected, finally letting go of her fleur-de-lis.
“And the necklace…” Gigi stared at it. “It was Vega’s?”
“Vega came from a certain family, a very old family. A dangerous one. She was a light in the darkness, Vega—and so very dangerous herself.”
Helena was using the word dangerous too much for Gigi’s liking, and she couldn’t help thinking about Nora telling her to run away, about Nora telling her that she’d never survive.
“What happens to the Candidates who lose?” Gigi asked. Helena was here. She was alive. That had to be a good thing, right? If all Avery had to do was lose…
“‘Spin, spin’,” Helena murmured, “said the spider to the web.”
Talk cryptic to me, Gigi thought. I can take it! This time, she didn’t let that phrase go unremarked. “The person who ascends at the end of the Crucible, they become the Watcher.” Gigi paused. “A spider?”
That seemed like a rational enough guess.
Helena neither confirmed nor denied that interpretation, so Gigi pressed on. “And the other two who are forged… if they’re not the spider, they’re the web.” It made sense—a sudden, unmistakable, horrible kind of sense. “And the spider, it talks to the web.”
“Spin, spin,” said the spider to the web. The Gilded Blade, it wasn’t just the ones who ascended. The ones in charge. The ones who issued invitations and warnings.
Helena was part of it. She didn’t just know about the Gilded Blade. She was one of them.
“You would have done quite well, I think, with proper training,” the old woman told Gigi. “I can see why the current Watcher might have chosen you—or tried to.”
I said no, Gigi thought, and I was warned that the Gilded Blade has ways of taking care of messes. And you are a part of the Gilded Blade. But it was too late for caution now. Gigi had been born messy. In for a penny, in for the whole shebang.
“You wanted a daughter.” Gigi tried to make the piece fit. “You waited for a girl for generations. Because you were hoping she’d… ascend?”
“It was my hope that Calla would be chosen for the Crucible, but I never assumed she would ascend. After my own Crucible, I was placed into the Thorp family specifically because of this family’s history with the Blade.
It was the Blade who sent the Thorps from New York to Louisiana in the wake of the Civil War.
It was a woman in the Thorp line who bought up what would become St. Adelaide Parish and razed the local plantations to the ground to remake this place as something new.
By nineteen fifty-one, however, the Thorp’s female line had died out, so I married in.
And yes, I raised Calla with an end in mind, and when she was of age, I told her the truth of the legacy she was due to inherit and sent her to Europe for further training. ”
“Europe,” Gigi repeated, her mind going suddenly to Nora, who had obviously had a lot of training.
“What part of Europe?” There was no reply.
“Northern Europe?” Gigi paused. “Iceland?” Gigi thought of Calla’s necklace, which had been Helena’s once and Vega’s before that.
She thought about Vega’s very old, very dangerous family, about Nora’s reaction to the version of the fleur-de-lis that Brady had etched into the dust-covered floorboards.
About the fact that Nora had been promised a spot in the Crucible by someone.
“You sent Calla to Vega’s family?” Gigi said. “Or did you send her to Vega?”
“By the time Calla was of age, Vega was no more.” Helena brought her hand back to rest on the deck of cards.
“It is not unheard of for one of the Ascendants to train a Candidate in the years leading up to the Crucible, but such things are rare and reserved primarily for Candidates who do not have the blood. For those who come from an existing family line, training must be found elsewhere.”
How many families? How many lines? What kind of training? Gigi forced herself to slow down. “And Vega’s family—”
“Theirs is a special role in the Blade,” Helena said quietly. “One I knew about only because of Vega. Their training methods can be quite brutal.”
Gigi thought again of Nora—how fast she was, the fact that even Rohan said she fought like an elite, those sentimental knives of hers. Is that what happened to Calla? Gigi thought. Is that what made her the way she is now? Those brutal training methods?
Out loud, Gigi opted for another question, one that might tell her more about the way the Gilded Blade operated. “If Calla was due to inherit your line with or without the Crucible,” Gigi said, “why would you have wanted her to be chosen for it, if not to ascend?”
“Surviving the Crucible, it would have made Calla.”
“Surviving.” There it was again, the suggestion that the Crucible was something that unworthy Candidates did not survive.
But Gigi didn’t want to believe that. “But everyone survives the Crucible—or almost everyone, right? One person wins, two lose, all are forged, spider, web, etcetera, etcetera. Right?”
“The individual is not the only thing that is forged,” Helena said. “Those who come through the Crucible alive—they are bound together in ways that I cannot describe. Whether the Crucible lasts a week or a year, it leaves you as sisters on a level far deeper than blood.”
“Sisters,” Gigi repeated, and her brain made the leap with lightning speed. “Zella. If she and Calla were sisters, once upon a time, then Zella was a Candidate, too.”
And that means she’s one of them. Gigi’s mind went to Savannah, who’d been headed for London—for the duchess. Savannah and Rohan and Brady—they don’t know.
“This is wrong,” Gigi said, unable to hold the words back. “You know that, right? The Crucible, the Gilded Blade—all of this is wrong.”
“Is it?” Helena looked down at the deck on the table and began drawing cards, one after another until she came to a king. “Do you know what this is?”
“The king of diamonds,” Gigi said. Her heart was racing, and it wouldn’t stop.