CHAPTER 62 LYRA
LYRA
Lie-ra.
Lie-ra.
Lie-ra.
The name echoed through Lyra’s mind as her gaze locked on the photograph of her father and her uncle and their mother holding an infant in that ratty blue blanket. Alisa had said that Aquila was a maternal last name.
Lie-ra.
Aquila
Vega.
Monoceros.
Lyra could hear herself saying, My name is Lyra.
And her uncle had said: No, it isn’t.
And sometime after that, he’d said: A Hawthorne did this. And then: Don’t be afraid, Lyra Catalina. She will come for you. The smell of blood seeped into Lyra’s nostrils. She could feel it on her feet. And then Grayson’s hand was on the back of her neck, and reality settled back in around Lyra.
Reality was Grayson Hawthorne.
Reality was the warmth of his hand on her skin, the closeness of his body to hers.
Reality was the fact that he’d given dancing back to her and the way that she wanted to dance right now. But Lyra didn’t dance. Or cry. Or give into the memories. She just listened for the sound of Grayson’s breathing and timed the rise and fall of her chest to his.
And then Lyra fixed her gaze on Nora, just as Jameson pinned their visitor to the whiteboard.
“You know something.” Jameson’s voice was a rumble in his chest, somehow rendering the words as both an accusation and a plea.
“Jameson,” Oren warned. With what seemed to be Herculean effort, Jameson let Nora go, his hands dropping to his sides, though he didn’t take a single step back.
“In the grand scheme of things,” Nora said with an eerie sort of calm, “I know relatively little.”
Lyra managed to coerce her lips into moving. “Alice was supposed to choose you.” That was what Gigi had told them.
“You,” Jameson echoed in that same gut-wrenching tone. “Not Avery.”
“We could make you tell us what you know.” Grayson’s calm a match for Nora’s.
“You could try.”
Gigi leapt between Nora and her brother, brandishing her dry-erase marker. “I have some more additions to make to the board!” she announced, adding an asterisk to the timeline between Alice’s first Crucible in 1967 and her second, more than thirty years later.
“Helena said that Vega’s last Crucible happened when Calla was really young,” Gigi explained.
“Timing-wise, that would almost certainly make Helena’s Vega the Judge during Alice’s second Crucible.
Maybe Vega was the one who chose Alice? Or maybe there’s some other connection—between Alice and Vega, between Vega and you, Lyra. ”
The brightest star in the constellation Lyra? It’s called Vega.
Family lines? Lyra thought, but Gigi had said that Vega’s very dangerous family line—Nora’s family line—was in Europe, not Brazil. Lyra’s gaze went to the fleur-de-lis Gigi had drawn on the board, the one associated with Vega’s family.
Just looking at the omega symbol had the phantom smell of blood surging for Lyra once more, but she fought the memory and realized something. Omegas, plural.
“There are two omegas on this symbol.” Lyra walked to the board, like a moth pulled to the flame. “Lily.” She touched the bloom on the fleur-de-lis. “Monoceros.” The bottom point. “Omega.” First one side, then the other. “Omega again.” Lyra’s heart rate kicked up a notch.
“There are always three—but this symbol has four parts.” Lyra whipped her head toward Nora. “Four parts, and Calla’s necklace originated from a Candidate from your very dangerous family line.”
Nora cocked her head to the side and slowly made her way toward Lyra, trailing her hand down the board as she went but never smearing any writing.
Lyra cut her gaze to Grayson in warning. Don’t stop her.
Grayson gave the slightest nod of his head and came to stand beside Lyra instead of in front of her.
When Nora reached them, she said. “Four parts. Three Ascendants.…” Nora took her time with the next part. “And the Kyrie.”
Kyrie. To Lyra’s ears, the word sounded like English but also not.
“Checks and balances,” Nora continued. “And someone must train each new Watcher in the art of death so that she might someday be prepared to take up the mantle of the Hand.”
“To kill,” Lyra said flatly, and then she thought about the greenhouse and all those exotic flowers. “Poison.”
“Not just poison,” Nora replied. “The name Kyrie is derived from the word Valkyrie. Long ago, during the nascent years of the Blade, the women of the family fashioned themselves as warriors. Lethal fighters, trained from birth.”
“An obvious choice, then,” Grayson said, “to train the Watchers of the Gilded Blade to become something much worse.”
The Watcher watches, Lyra thought dully. The Hand acts.
“Someone must train the Watchers,” Nora agreed, reiterating what she’d said before, but this time, she didn’t stop there. “And someone must be in the position to judge the Judge.”
Checks and balances, Lyra thought. Something about those words had the hairs on the back of her neck standing straight up.
Gigi raised her hand. “Nora, out in the bayou, you said something about true believers.”
“True believers in what?” Jameson asked, his voice low and harsh.
Nora didn’t so much as look at Jameson. She addressed her reply to Grayson and only to Grayson in a way that made Lyra think that there could have been something between them once—not that there had been but that there could have been, if things had unfolded differently.
Maybe that had been Alice’s plan, when she’d sent Nora to Grayson.
“Across the centuries,” Nora told Grayson, “there have been iterations of the Blade that favored the art of the cascade and iterations that, like the Kyrie, favored a more direct approach.”
Lyra looked to Alice’s poem, to the last stanza.
Some kings truly need to fall
While others just need guided.
Our gloved hands,
The Gilded Blade,
And none of us divided.
Except Nora was indicating that there was very much a divide.
“It all depends,” Nora continued, “on the Woman in White.”
The Judge.
“What does it mean,” Grayson demanded, “that the Kyrie sits in judgment of the Judge?”
Nora tilted her head very slightly to one side.
“Isn’t it odd that I want to tell you? But that’s the art of the cascade, I suppose.
A nudge here, a nudge there, a ball of snow gathering mass as it rolls down a hill, and suddenly, years later, I’m telling a boy I kissed exactly once all about the fact that the Woman in White is the only one who knows how to access the web.
She’s the only one who knows which families are in the Blade, who knows the current holder and heir of each and every family line.
And thus, the Judge’s power is nearly absolute.
All that influence, all those strings to pull, and she’s the lone conduit.
If the Watcher or Hand even try to follow her or usurp her or circumvent that ancient law, they might well find themselves judged. ”
Lyra thought about Edgar Aquila Reyes, about the fact that he’d killed himself rather than face the judgment of the Gilded Blade.
“But the Judge’s power isn’t absolute,” Grayson noted. Nora had used the word nearly.
“There is a reason Ascendants wear cloaks and veils when they make contact with anyone. There is a reason Candidates are made to choose new names for the Crucible. The identities of the Ascendants—their true identities, the lives they once lived—are not intended to be known by anyone but the other Ascendants and the head and heir to the Kyrie line. Should the Woman in White’s ability to render judgment be deemed compromised, it is the responsibility of the Kyrie line to address the source of the issue. ”
“Can’t kill the Judge.” Nash Hawthorne hadn’t said a word since Gigi had arrived, but he made those four count. “Not if she’s the lone conduit to the web.”
“But the source of the issue,” Grayson finished, “whatever has compromised the Woman in White’s judgment—that’s a different issue.”
“Us,” Jameson said hoarsely. “We’re the source. Alice saved Toby, saved her son years ago. She spared me in Prague. She revealed herself to her husband and allowed the old man to discover far too much. She’s been skirting the line for years, ever since she went back in, and then…”
Then, Lyra thought, I happened. Eve did. Eve had armed the Watcher with what Lyra and Grayson had managed to piece together, and men who knew certain things about the Gilded Blade—they weren’t allowed to live.
“The Judge is called the Monoceros, named for the astrological unicorn, for her judgment must be pure,” Nora recited.
“And if that judgment needs to be purified, it is the Kyrie line who does it. If you look to history, you can see evidence of what the line is capable of every now and then: powerful families destroyed, bloodlines wiped from existence, either slowly or all at once. Dynasties, ended. But the Kyrie are bound by ancient rules, and Alice knows them well. It’s apparent enough that she called the Crucible so that her family’s lives might be bargained for, eliminating the need for her to render judgment at all. ”
Lyra returned back to the first thing Gigi had ever told them about Nora. “You said that it was supposed to be you. Alice’s Candidate for the Crucible. It was supposed to be you, but she had to choose Avery instead.”
“Candidates may only bargain for those with whom they have a close, personal connection,” Nora replied.
“A lone kiss—that would never count. And thus, my mentor, the woman who plucked me from hell, the woman who trained me, she went back on what she’d promised me.
Years of planning wiped out in an instant. ”
“Your plans?” Grayson asked. “Or Alice’s?”
Nora shrugged. “How would I even know?”
Lyra couldn’t help thinking that Nora talked about Alice Hawthorne like the woman’s ability to influence the way things unfolded was unparalleled, like Alice might have her fingerprints on anything and everything, if she left prints at all.
“You said you wanted to tear it all down,” Gigi said suddenly, staring at Nora with saucer-wide eyes. “That was your plan. And Alice, she sent you that cryptic message to tell you that I’d drawn the interest of one of the other Ascendants.”
“And because of you,” Nora replied, “your brother was on my mind, and when I looked him up.…” Nora caught Lyra’s eyes and held them.
“I found you. I cannot help but notice that your name is all over this board—and all over the internet. I have no idea who you are to Alice, to the Gilded Blade, but I need to ask: Have you received any flowers lately?”
The calla lily. Lyra didn’t answer, but Nora’s expression shifted like she had.
“Let’s return,” Grayson suggested, “to what precisely you meant when you told my sister you wanted to tear it all down.”
“The current Omega,” Nora said, addressing her words to Grayson and only Grayson, “cannot be allowed to become the Monoceros. The Hand cannot become the Judge.”
“Why not?” Jameson demanded at the exact time that Grayson said: “Who is she?”
“In my time with the Kyrie, I knew her only as the Lily, cloaked always in red,” Nora said.
“I do not know who she is or who she once was, but I do know she took to her training far too well. I know where her loyalty lies, and I know that the current head of the Kyrie believes that the Gilded Blade can and should be more aggressive.”
It was perfectly clear what Nora meant by aggressive, but Grayson asked anyway. “Tell me about her, the head of your family line.”
“It was never truly mine.” Nora met his gaze. “And she’s the kind of person who murdered her own husband in cold blood years ago when he brought home a little girl he’d conceived with another woman abroad.”
Grayson stared at Nora for a long moment. “And what happened to that little girl?”
“Her stepmother took her in,” Nora replied, “and trained her as one of the Kyrie because that training can be so very brutal—more brutal for some than others.”
Nora pushed up the sleeve on her black shirt to reveal an arm completely covered in scars—dozens of them, and Lyra knew, just looking at those scars, that the rest of Nora’s all-black outfit hid the same.
“Five and a half years ago,” Nora said, “when Alice saved me, when she chose me for a different sort of training, I thought I knew why. Perhaps I was wrong. Perhaps not. But my only chance to do what I set out to do is the Crucible.” Nora did not expand on that.
“The third Candidate—it has to be me.” Nora turned her head to rake her eyes back over the whiteboards.
“And if you’re no longer an option for the Omega,” Nora told Lyra, “it still can be.”
An instant later, Grayson had an arm locked around Nora’s neck.
“That wasn’t a threat,” Nora told him. “It was a request that you keep her here, safe and sound and locked away behind security that will soon be utterly flawless. Do that, keep the Omega from accessing Lyra, and everything can still go according to plan.”
“Your plan?” Grayson asked, releasing her. “Or Alice’s?”
“I’d like to think it’s mine,” Nora replied.
Grayson put himself squarely between Nora and Lyra—and Lyra let him.
“Does Avery live?” Jameson asked, his voice dangerously low. “In your plan—does Avery walk away from this alive?”
“I’d like to think she does,” Nora replied. “And that’s why you’re going to let me walk out of here.”
“You sound awfully confident of that,” Grayson told her.
“You’re free to try to stop me, of course,” Nora replied, but as she slipped from the room and back into the shadows, no one did.