Chapter Thirty-One
THIRTY-ONE
When my feet cross the threshold of the candlelit banquet hall, my heart stops.
The thrones are nowhere to be seen.
The dais is torn down.
And climbing up the walls along the edges of the room are trellises of roses so painfully pale it looks like the life’s been drained out of them.
There are no flickering sconces, but bonfires set into vases of pure iron. The shadows and darkness consume even more space than before.
The room smolders.
The only music is a haunting melody from some kind of instrument where the player sits on a narrow bench and plays at a series of black and white keys with both hands. The sweet, dark tones each key produces are mellow and rich, but foreign to my ear.
Talon’s gaze locks on it, a stiff set in their jaw.
“What is that?” I ask, looking around the room.
The trellises of roses block off half the sweeping throne room, condensing the area enough that it already feels packed and full. Still, there aren’t enough nobles here to fill the room.
Hope surges in my chest.
More than half the nobles normally at banquets of the Assay aren’t here.
The ones who are watch each other warily, as if taking stock, as the sweet darkness the musician coaxes from the keys swells.
“That is a piano.” Talon drops their voice as we step deeper into the shimmering haze of the bonfires. “It’s from Cymrea.”
At that moment, the High Queen enters from behind a trellis of white roses, two-pointed golden crown atop her tangle of Cymrean braids, courtiers trailing at her sides in a parade of blatant, unmistakable power.
Cashel stills on the dance floor, sapphire eyes flashing darker than navy, darker than storm clouds as they snap to the crown on his stepmother’s head.
That’s his father’s crown—not hers.
Shocked breaths rustle across the room as the High Queen steps into a pool of firelight, lighting a halo behind her—and there’s no sign of the High King anywhere.
“Your king remains… indisposed,” she says in a voice sharper than a knife.
Not our king. Not her king.
Your king.
That’s what she said.
“She’s staking her claim.” My hands shake. All of her attendants—their eyes are the same pale crystal as hers, their hair just as white-blond and knotted with elaborate, tiny braids.
Cymreans.
“Yes,” Talon bites out, and snatches two glass cups from a servant moving slowly through the crowd past us. “She is.”
They mutter a strange, haunting string of syllables under their breath, and the rolling scrape reminds me of when I tried to sound out the runes of the ogham marking in the margin of the book Wolf gave me. Close to Eireician, but too far removed to understand.
I take the cup they pass to me and drop my voice. “Was that Old Eireician?”
The tendons down their forearms cord, one hand brushing over the gauntlet sheath and the tiny knives I know are hidden there. “It was. Why?”
While Old Eireician, when spoken and written in the common alphabet, isn’t forbidden like ogham is, the ancient tongue is rare all the same. It’s a near-dead language only mages and those with the time to learn it understand—so the idea nudging at the edges of my mind is probably useless.
Keeping my voice low, I try out the syllables of the phrase in the book Wolf left me, never taking my eyes off theirs.
Talon’s brow furrows. “Where did you learn that?” Their eyes take on a flinty edge.
“What does it mean?” I push, bringing the glass to my lips again.
Talon rubs a hand along their red-gold stubble. “That’s a tricky bit of interpretation.” The copper of their shorn hair glows in the candlelight. “Even in the last Assay, there was debate among the mages about it. You know the motto of the Assay?”
Of course I do. It’s shaped everything I’ve done here.
“Only one will survive.” The wine sends bursts of tart berries across my tongue.
Talon nods, the simple black mask across their face hiding any tension at the edges of their eyes. But I see the way one hand moves to their sword hilt.
As if what they will say next is treasonous.
“Well, the Old Ones had a more… aspirational definition of what it means to survive. They believed every hardship raises us up into the people we’re meant to be.
That survival as a concept is impossible to separate from the growth we should take from every setback.
” Talon draws in a steady breath. “So, they used the same word for survive as they did for rise.”
In the shimmering heat, the crackle of bonfires snaps and hisses through my racing mind as I piece the implications together. “But that would mean…”
Only one will rise.
That would mean the most central tenet of the Assay is wrong.
That forcing us to fight to the death is a choice by each High King.
A choice to be cruel. To waste so many young lives. And for what? To show that they could, and that no one will challenge them?
“Do they know?” I breathe out the words, and don’t have to say who I mean. The High King and High Queen. The Seven Families. All the noble daughters, and the other nobles.
“It was one of the first schisms between the Martyr and the High King, twenty years ago. The choice to keep needlessly wasting so many lives. When the prince’s mother died and the High King ordered yet another Assay under the same rules, and let a Cymrean compete…”
“How could they’ve let her in?” The haze of the bonfires shimmers in the dark.
Talon’s scarred hands grip tighter on the wine cup.
“You know the High Queen was the Cymrean ambassador’s daughter?”
I nod.
“Well, since she had been born here while her father was serving in the post, and one of the Seven Families had no daughters, the High King overruled his advisors and let her in. Fang has always said he thought the possibility of a Cymrean queen would mean they’d help protect him against the mages. He despised the Martyr.”
That sounds just like what Wolf had told me—about the Martyr interfering in politics and the High King interfering with the mages.
“I think that was the first real thing that infuriated the noble families in the uprising. That made them see they had to be willing to force change.” Talon’s gaze shutters just as Cash’s eyes flicker to me from across the rippling heat, and my head swims. “The Martyr always believed that there’s a better way for this isle, even if it takes sacrifice.
It’s why the Whisperers are still fighting for that dream, after everything it’s cost us. ”
It’s why I’m still willing to fight too.
Intrigue flashes in the dark sapphire of Cash’s gaze, sweeping over my face, my gown.
But there’s no sign of recognition as his attention returns to the crowd of young courtiers on the dance floor.
Oona lingers near the edge of the group, her sapphire skirt cut shorter in the front than the back to reveal cream trousers, as if she’s expecting to have to fight one of us right here.
Her mask is barely there, thin and silver and making no attempt to hide her identity.
Aisling’s build gives her away behind a thicker, carved bronze mask—I recognize the muscular set of her shoulders where she stands in the glow of one of the bonfires.
And Saraid… her brown silk gown is stitched with gold.
Her mask isn’t a mask at all but what looks like flecks of gold leaf laid out around her cheekbones and eyes.
Cash’s eyes don’t return to me, and I realize… he doesn’t recognize me in the mask.
A shiver climbs up my spine—just as a hand finds the small of my back, and a figure all in black sweeps into the edge of my vision.
Smoke and the familiar scent of leather surround me.
“May I?” a rough voice whispers in my ear, and the eyes that burn beneath a mask of pure black velvet are a smoldering, heart-stopping green.
Wolf.
Old Ones, the feel of his hand at my waist steals the breath left in my lungs. His fingers tighten along the curve there as I bring one hand to his waiting one in answer, and my other finds the broad, hard muscles where his shoulder meets the back of his neck.
You’re out of your mind, I should tell him.
You’re putting yourself in danger.
None of that is what comes out.
“You’re here.”
I breathe the words as Wolf pulls me in so our chests are almost flush, the heat of him rising through the black velvet of his tunic—worn and creased around the edges like it’s been dug out of the back of a closet just for this night.
I can see the rough stubble along his jaw beneath the cutout markings of the velvet mask, but whoever made it shaped the curves and swirls so the branching scar that lies beneath can’t be seen.
A crooked smile lifts the corner of his lips, and my blood heats remembering what they felt like on mine. The loneliness gnawing in my chest eases as his hand grips tighter on mine, the calluses from his weapons rough against my fingertips. “Don’t tell me you missed me, Maeve.”
Old Ones, the way he says my name… it never sounds like that from anyone else.
I’m not sure I want it to.
His feet find the steady beat of the slow, dark melody rising from the piano, so different from the pipe at the First Look that felt like…
fuck, it felt like what I imagine the very heart of this isle to sound like.
Wolf’s hand tightens at my waist beneath the colors of the Seven Families hanging from the rafters.
“Maybe.”
He shakes his head, a low chuckle rumbling in his chest. “Better than before.”
Not even a little.
That’s what I said to him once.
Wolf leads us through the steps with a steady certainty. The music carries a dangerous build, drawing me that single inch closer to him, and his grip flexes at my hip.
The movement is fleeting, but the flicker of longing that skitters behind his mask feels like a flame trailing tantalizingly close to my skin.
“My colors suit you,” Wolf offers, his eyes like embers.
He’s not wrong—these are his colors, the same green as his eyes and a black almost dark enough to rival his hair.