The only things they knew for certain were that the Ascendants were truly gone; that the head and heir of the Kyrie line were gone; that there was no threat to any of them now.
And no way for anyone to access the web of the Gilded Blade.
Beside Jameson, Avery picked up that poem of Alice’s again.
“What are you thinking?” Jameson murmured. Avery had been quieter than usual, since the Crucible. He hadn’t pushed, but now—she needed him to push. “Tahiti, Heiress.”
The code word between them meantno secrets. It meant stripping down and baring it all.
“I keep reading Alice’s words,” Avery whispered, “and thinking about the Gilded Blade and the Crucible—because it wasn’t all horrible. The Crucible.”
Jameson heard what she hadn’t said. “You aren’t just talking about the Crucible.” There was a reason she kept reading that poem, written by Alice back when she’d still believed in the mission of the Blade. “You’re talking about the Gilded Blade—the idea of it, its purpose.”
Jameson suspected she was thinking of Libby and a man who’d once blackened her eye. But also quite possibly about men like Vincent Blake—or even Tobias Hawthorne. About lives ruined and wars waged and voices silenced.
“Hundreds of years ago,” Avery said quietly, “the Gilded Blade found a way to seize power in a world where women had none. So much of it was horrible, but it wasn’t all horrible. The idea that a group of women working together could change the world, one cascade at a time, smaller changes begetting bigger ones, empires made and toppled…”
“The price of wheat,” Jameson murmured.
“It needed to end,” Avery said. “The killing. The Crucible. Judgments rendered and carried out, the Kyrie and the Hand—it needed to end. But I just keep thinking that at the very end of the Crucible, after Eve fell, after I’d won, Alice took my hands in hers, and she told me thatthere was always another door for those who knew how to look for them, and then she said that my story was always meant to be a different kind of fairy tale.”
Avery had found the other door—the trap door. She’d found the path forward, the way to survive. It was the rest of Alice’s words that lingered in Jameson’s mind now.
A different kind of fairy tale.He wasn’t sure at first why his mind latched so strongly on to that phrase.Fairy tales…Jameson thought back suddenly to all those Saturday morning games, when the old man would begin by laying out an array of seemingly random objects, all of them with a purpose in the game. He thought about the fact that it was Alice who had, in truth, taught the old man to play.
Fairy tales.
“What is it?” Avery pushed Jameson lightly back against the fireplace, a familiar spark returning to her eyes for the first time since she’d gotten back. “I know that look, Jameson. You figured something out. You know something.”
Jameson smiled, and almost on cue, Avery’s phone rang.
Jackson, some sixth sense in Jameson whispered.Eve.
“Answer it,” he told Avery. “And also: You’re right.”
Chapter 104
JAMESON
Jameson had always been decent at making conversation. Jackson Currie, on the other hand, was not.
“Anyone ever threatened to shoot you if you hurt that girl?” The old fisherman was a hermit and fond enough of his shotgun that Jameson would have given it decent odds that the man had named it.
“Not in so many words,” Jameson replied. “But I’d rip my own heart out to spare hers.” He fixed his gaze on Avery in the distance, where she stood side by side with Eve.
Living, breathing, game-playing Eve.
It was killing Jameson to let Avery do this alone, but Avery’s speech at the funeral hadn’t just been a gambit to draw Eve out. Avery had meant every word of it, which was why she and Eve were standing side by side, next to a lighthouse that overlooked an isolated cliff, putting Toby to rest.
Scattering his ashes on the wind.
“Damn kids,” Jackson swore. His voice was gruff, and his eyes were very much not, and Jameson had the distinct sense that Jackson wasn’t talking about Avery, Eve, or himself.
Damn kidswas Jackson’s idea of a eulogy.
Hannah and Toby, Toby and Hannah. Separated in life. Together now.
Jameson’s eyes stung, and he looked down at the leather book in his hands, a bequest of sorts from the kind of Hawthorne man Jameson aspired to someday be. Someone had once given Toby this book on the streets of Seoul, with the program for Hannah’s funeral tucked inside.
