Jameson saw exactly where this was going. Once Grayson had pulled outAquila 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 aK.”
Katalin Aquila Reyes. Alice Hawthorne.Jameson knew then: These words might have looked like a poem, but this was alist.
“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’sthe same backward as forward.”
This was a list. This was the Gilded Blade. There were always three Ascendants.
Alice Hawthorne.
Katalin Aquila Reyes.
AndHannah, 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 mewithoutwasting 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 fromunfortunatecircumstances, 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 choseyouas her Candidate five yearsago.” 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 andbroken.
