CHAPTER 71 JAMESON
JAMESON
The Gilded Blade has all three Candidates now.
That thought and variations of it had been cycling through Jameson’s head since the moment their plane had landed, the moment Grayson had called Lyra and gotten that update.
Avery. Eve. And one more—quite possibly Nora.
If the Crucible didn’t start for Avery the moment she was taken, it’s underway now.
Air tasted like dirt in Jameson’s mouth. His blood felt like thorns in his veins. If Avery hadn’t already been fighting her way through trials that some Candidates did not survive—
She is now.
And if Nora had succeeded at drawing the Omega’s attention, her plan—that plan that Nora had said she’d like to think Avery would come through alive—it was probably gaining steam.
I am a survivor, you know. Avery’s voice came to Jameson, the way it hadn’t on the plane.
He’d tried and tried to hear her, and now, finally, forty minutes into their drive to Queensbright Stables, his brain cooperated.
It was already almost midday in England, hours lost to the time switch and the flight, but finally, he could hear her.
And he could imagine himself replying, I know.
You need to be careful, the Avery in his mind warned. No matter what I negotiated for—
I know, Heiress.
In Jameson’s mind, her voice took on a wry tone. You do not excel at being careful.
“And you do.” Jameson hadn’t meant to say that out loud, but he did, just as Queensbright Stables came into view. From a distance, it looked more like a sprawling, historic university campus than a place to board thoroughbreds.
Lady Monoceros, it had turned out, had been purchased the year before, sold as part of Avery’s divestiture of large chunks of the Hawthorne fortune—sold, it had turned out, to a duke.
For his duchess, no doubt, Jameson thought—and this time, there was no reply from Avery in his mind.
Steeling himself against that loss, Jameson concentrated on their current task.
He gave it a ten percent chance Zella would show up while they were poking around, but Jameson Hawthorne had been playing worse odds all his life.
Charming their way into a tour of the world-class facility proved easy enough, the way most things did when your last name was Hawthorne.
Convincing anyone to leave them in the vicinity of horses valued at upward of twenty million dollars apiece, however, proved almost impossible.
Fortunately, Xander was a master of distraction, Grayson had a way of making people follow orders they never even realized he’d issued, and Toby had spent years being invisible and slipping around unseen.
Soon enough, they were in.
Lady Monoceros was a magnificent filly, a rare white thoroughbred—fitting, given that she’d been named for the Woman in White.
Jameson suspected the horse had been his grandfather’s last love letter to Alice.
The old man had acquired—and named—Lady Monoceros not long before his death.
A second horse had been acquired at the same time, as part of the same deal—Thamenold, an anagram for the old man.
Thamenold and Lady Monoceros.
Tobias and his Alice.
Jameson and his partners in crime searched the horse’s stall first but didn’t hit paydirt until they coaxed the Lady into showing them the bottoms of her feet.
Three of her four horseshoes were engraved.
Jameson set aside the obvious logistical questions, such as How many times have her shoes been changed since the old man died?
and How many spare horseshoes did he leave behind and What superstition convinced anyone to continue using them this long?
None of that mattered. The only thing that mattered was the words:
ALIKE, A QUAINT SLAYER
WON’T LOVERS REVOLT NOW?
WHOLE HEART, I CAN.
Jameson knew immediately—immediately—once he saw the last line what this was. Avery Kylie Grambs, rearranged, was a very risky gamble. And whole heart, I can—that was an anagram for Alice Hawthorne.
Jameson glanced at Xander. “I need a pen and something to write on.”
Xander obliged, pulling four pens and a notebook shaped like an armadillo out of his pockets. “I live to serve.”
Jameson took one of the pens and the notebook and wrote the entire puzzle down before translating the last line. “Whole heart, I can,” he told the others. “Alice Hawthorne.”
“Jamie.” Grayson took the pen and started to work on the first line: ALIKE, A QUAINT SLAYER. As Jameson watched, Grayson pulled letters out of the phrase, scratching them out as he went to keep track.
A-Q-U-I-L…
Jameson saw exactly where this was going. Once Grayson had pulled out Aquila Reyes. There were only seven letters left in the line. Jameson stared at them. K, A, I, N, T, L, and A.
“Lyra’s middle name,” Grayson said quietly, “is Catalina.”
“Katalin?” Xander looked up from the armadillo notebook. “With a K.”
Katalin Aquila Reyes. Alice Hawthorne. Jameson knew then: These words might have looked like a poem, but this was a list.
“There are always three,” Jameson said hoarsely. “Alice Hawthorne.” The Woman in White, the Monoceros, the Judge. “Katalin Aquila Reyes.” A relative of Lyra’s, obviously. The Omega? And…
Jameson focused with everything he had on the one remaining line: WON’T LOVERS REVOLT NOW? Jameson had only started trying to anagram it when he realized—
“No.” Toby pushed his way violently out of the stall, leaving Jameson and his brothers staring at the words.
Xander was the one who said it. “It’s a palindrome.”
Jameson bowed his head slightly. “It’s the same backward as forward.”
This was a list. This was the Gilded Blade. There were always three Ascendants.
Alice Hawthorne.
Katalin Aquila Reyes.
And Hannah, the same backward as forward.
Jameson sprang out of the stall, intent on chasing Toby down, then screeched to a dead halt, because Toby hadn’t gone far—and he wasn’t alone.
Jameson had given it ten percent odds that the duchess would join them. He hadn’t foreseen even a one percent chance of Toby holding a knife to Zella’s throat.
But maybe he should have.
Hold it together, Jameson tried to telegraph to Toby, just a little bit longer.
“Would now be a good time to call in that favor you owe me?” Jameson asked Zella.
“Now would be the ideal time to see what you can get out of me without wasting that favor.” Zella didn’t seem overly concerned about Toby—or the knife.
“I was Alice’s choice for the last Crucible, you know,” she said lightly.
“She found me when I was quite young, plucked me from unfortunate circumstances, trained me herself. She saw to it that I was sent to the best schools—all before the Crucible was ever called.”
“You’re saying that my mother chose you as her Candidate five years ago.” Toby’s grip on that knife never wavered, as his vocal cords strained against his throat. “You’re saying someone else chose Hannah.”
“Am I?” Zella sounded exactly as she had the first time Jameson had ever met her—That Duchess, chatting over champagne.
“Where is Hannah?” Toby demanded. “Where is the Watcher? Where are my daughters?”
Daughters, plural. Avery and Eve.
“A change has been brewing,” Zella said in that same champagne tone, seemingly unconcerned with her own mortality and just how close Toby was to the edge. “There are factions within the Blade, some more dangerous than others, but Alice is Alice. She always has a few cards in reserve to play.”
The art of the cascade, Jameson thought. “Tell us,” he ordered.
“There are limits,” Zella said, “to certain immunities. And there are consequences to breaking certain rules in this game.”
This isn’t a game, Jameson thought as Toby, a man on the verge, put pressure on the blade at Zella’s throat, barely cutting her skin.
“Toby,” Grayson snapped.
“Ashes,” Jameson told his uncle, and when he went to take the knife from Toby’s hand, Toby didn’t fight him for it, because in so many ways, the two of them were the same.
“Where is Hannah?” Toby asked the duchess again, his voice deadly soft and broken.
Zella looked straight into Toby’s wild green eyes. “I can’t tell you that.” She paused. “None of us wants this year’s Crucible to be deemed a failure. A wholesale failure.”
Calla had failed, and Calla was dead. A wholesale failure. Jameson felt like an iron glove was squeezing his heart. Not just one Candidate—but the whole thing. Avery and Eve and—
“Don’t ask me for that favor quite yet, Jameson,” Zella told him. “You might, however, consider asking the new Proprietor of the Devil’s Mercy for one.”
New. Jameson registered that—and the implication. “Rohan? He’s the Proprietor now?”
“I dare say you might find an ally in him, once you tell him who the Omega chose as her Candidate.”
“Nora,” Grayson said immediately.
Zella shook her head. “No, Grayson.”
Three Candidates, the dreaded chorus in Jameson’s mind was back. They have all three.
Avery.
Eve.
And… Jameson realized suddenly that there was only one person Rohan had ever given any signs of caring about. Savannah.