CHAPTER 56 GIGI #2
“The world has always been full of men who fancy themselves kings,” Helena said.
“Destined to rule—over their fellow men, certainly, but also in their own homes. And though a king is one of the most powerful cards in the deck, there are games in which a single king can be defeated by a pair of lowly twos.” Helena rearranged all the cards that were face up, gathering them by suit.
“In poker, a flush beats a straight every time.”
“Strength in numbers.” Gigi thought about family lines, about the forging of Candidates.
“Strength in numbers,” Helena repeated. “History tells the tale.”
History. Gigi thought about Saint Adelaide—one of the most powerful women of the Middle Ages.
“Exactly how old is the Gilded Blade?” The hairs on the back of Gigi’s neck stood up. “How big is the web?” Helena didn’t answer, and Gigi thought her heart might break through her rib cage. Centuries of spiders. Centuries of webs. They could be anywhere—everywhere.
They could be anyone.
And it made no sense whatsoever that Helena Thorp was telling Gigi any of this. “I firmly believe that you are not going to kill me,” Gigi declared firmly and/or hopefully.
“Only the Hand may take a life, and only with the assent of the Judge,” Helena said, like that was supposed to be comforting. “And I notified no one when you returned here last night.”
“Why?” Gigi said.
“Because you remind me of her,” Helena said softly. “Vega. Not the Vega who ascended, but the Vega who was raw. A light in the darkness, despite the way she was raised. You remind me a great deal of Vega, before.”
Before the Crucible, Gigi thought. Before either of you had been forged.
“More than twenty years, she’s been gone.
Each time a Crucible was called, I knew.
As Vega went from Watcher to Hand to Judge, I knew.
And when it was her last cycle, when she made the call, her final call—I knew.
” Helena’s hand crept back to the fleur-de-lis at her neck.
“That is how it works, you see, how it has always worked. Watcher to Hand to Judge. Lily to Omega to Monoceros. And when the Woman in White is ready to greet death, when she has determined that she can judge no more—that is when the cycle begins anew.”
“She died.” Gigi tried to wrap her mind around that, even as she catalogued every other piece of information Helena had just parted with. “Your Vega died years ago.”
“She came to me on the eve of her last Crucible.” Helena’s voice went hoarse. “To say good-bye. My Vega.”
“You loved her,” Gigi realized. “You and she, you were—”
“We were forged in the Crucible, Vega and I. She was my enemy, my rival, my everything. As part of the trials, you’re told that only one of you can survive in the end.
They make you believe it. But to survive, you need one another.
As the end of our Crucible neared, the trials became competitive once more.
” Helena’s eyes closed, her grip on the fleur-de-lis tightening.
“I believed—fully believed—that I would have to die in the last trial for Vega to survive.”
“And you would have.” Gigi could see that, plain as day.
“Yes,” Helena said, her voice electric. “A thousand times yes.”
You loved her. Gigi felt her own eyes tearing up. “And the third Candidate? Andy?”
“There are years when all three Candidates survive, and years when they do not.” Helena stood suddenly and walked briskly over to the family portrait Gigi had examined the day before.
Andy didn’t survive, did she? Gigi bit back those words as she came to stand beside Helena. She waited for the old woman to say something—anything.
Helena raised a hand to that portrait, to her then-young sons.
“Giving birth was a trial of a different sort for me.” The subject change should have felt abrupt, but it didn’t.
“My body did not want to cooperate,” Helena continued, “but I tried and tried again—four sons, and I named the last Severin, because giving birth to him severed my chances to ever have a daughter. I waited for three generations for a girl to carry on the family line, for a daughter who might someday bring Vega back into my world, however briefly.”
“The girl who would be queen,” Gigi said.
“Vega gave me this necklace, bearing her family’s symbol, an ancient symbol of the Blade, in nineteen fifty-one.
We both waited—for decades, we waited, but Calla was barely more than a babe when Vega made her final call.
” Helena shook her head. “She came to me, my Vega—to tell me good-bye, to tell me that she’d done what she could to secure the future.
To begin a great cascade to make the kind of world we always wanted to make, Vega and I. My Vega.”
This is it, Gigi thought. She told me about the Crucible because after all these years, she needed to tell someone about Vega. Her Vega.
And now it couldn’t have been clearer that the old woman was done.
But Gigi wasn’t. “Where does the Crucible take place? How long does it last?”
“You ask the wrong questions.”
“What do you want me to ask?”
“Ask me if your Watcher is my Calla. Ask me if my great-granddaughter survived.”
In the back of Gigi’s mind, she could suddenly hear the Woman in Red’s voice: I am not Calla Thorp. There is no Calla Thorp.
Calla is no more, and I am no one by design.
And Zella—Zella had told Gigi that Calla was long gone.
“Did Calla survive?” Gigi asked.