To Avery’s throat.
Rohan read meaning into that in an instance. “This is the final stage of the Crucible. The Candidates are made to believe only one of them can survive.”
“Some years, Candidates are made to believe it’s two,” Zella replied.
On screen, a thin line of red appeared on Avery’s throat, a warning cut. The footage had no audio, but it was clear enough Freya was saying something, issuing a threat to go along with the cut she’d just made, and the person Freya seemed to be issuing that threat to was Eve. That made little sense to Rohan, given what he knew of the long-standing tensions between Avery and Eve, but within moments, Eve was walking toward the dais, her chin held high.
Avery struggled against Freya’s hold as Eve picked up one of the three chalices—the one in the middle, the one Rohan knew instinctively had been marked with a certain symbol. Rohan watched Eve bring the chalice to her lips, watched as Avery screamed and screamed and Eve ignored her and took a single drink from that golden chalice before setting it back on the dais, and then—
And then.
As Eve’s body hit the floor, Rohan reminded himself that the Crucible did not actually require a sacrifice, that the Candidates were only made tobelieveit did.
But Eve didn’t get back up.
Freya pushed Avery toward the dais, knife angling up into her chin, and then a cloaked figure appeared in the shadows behind them. Rohan had time to register only the color of that cloak—black—before the figure in question grabbed Freya’s head between her hands and snapped her neck.
“A Candidate fails the Crucible the moment she draws another’s blood,” Zella said. “It is not the only way to fail, but it might be the most common.”
On screen, there was a flurry of movement, as new figures suddenly appeared: three of them. Like the Woman in Black, two wore cloaks.One red. One white.The third woman wore no cloak at all, her face bare, her hair as pale as Freya’s.
As one, the three cloaked women lowered their hoods. A distraught Avery dropped to her knees beside Eve’s prone form. And still, Eve did not move. Her head lolled as Avery pulled her body into her lap, cradling her.
Sisters.
The Woman in White,Alice, knelt beside Avery, taking Avery’s hands in her own, murmuring to her, comforting her. And then Alice gathered Eve’s body and arranged it just so beneath a magnificent archway.
And then the Woman in White stood. She walked back to the dais and picked up the same chalice that Eve had drunk from. She approached Katalin, the Woman in Black, and began to whisper in her ear. That whisper stretched on and on and on in what Rohan assumed to be a ritual passing of knowledge, and when Alice was done, she stepped back. She lifted the chalice to her lips. She drank.
And crumpled to the floor.
The pale-haired woman, almost certainly Nora’s stepmother, had not shed a single tear for her daughter’s death. She smiled slightly as she bent over Alice’s body, and with a flash of metal, slashed the dead woman’s throat open from ear to ear. As blood spilled onto the floor, Rohan suddenly realized that Avery was no longer visible on screen.
The last thing the camera caught before the worldexplodedwas a blur of motion, Toby Hawthorne throwing himself over Eve’s body in that archway.
End of footage.
“Why show me this?” Rohan said quietly.
“The world will be led to believe only four people died at Vantage,” Zella replied. “That is how many bodies will be released for public burial. One of those will be Toby Hawthorne’s.”
Rohan was not one for mourning. He’d barely known the man, but somewhere, in the labyrinth in his mind, Rohan could hear Toby Hawthorne’s voice saying,If you make it out, if you get the chance—
“And what of the others?” Rohan asked flatly. “There were eightpeople in that room, seven once Avery found her way out.” Per the news, Avery had survived. The others, however…
“One can hardly publicly bury women who died years ago,” Zella said. “But all three Ascendantsaregone, Rohan. The head and the heir of the Kyrie linearegone. I needed you to see that. What once was is no more. This is a whole new world.” She let that sink in. “And in that world, I will need a Factotum.”
It was ironic, really, thatnowthe Mercy was what Rohan had believed it to be all along: a true power, no longer leashed. But the Mercy was also no longer his. It would never be his again, and Rohan found that he couldn’t go back to second-in-command. “Ask Kier.”
“He’s too young.”
“We both know there’s no such thing.”
Zella stared at him for a moment. “Where will you go?”
“Nowhere,” Rohan replied. “Appropriate, is it not? After all, I’mnothingnow.”
“You are not nothing,” Zella told him, “to Savannah Grayson.”
