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“Sure. I’ll keep an eye out,” Dan said.

Tempest looked around the room again. He had the distinct impression she was calculating the distance to the far wall and how fast she could motor there to get away from him.

“You’re entered as a single again,” he said, noting her Team Trivia in a Teacup badge.

“Yes.”

“Me too.” He peered down at his own Read the Room name tag.

“I know,” Tempest said. She looked him in the eye directly for the first time and he felt something. Tiny pricking stabs of guilt. She was just so vexatiously earnest. “Break a leg, Dandelion.”

There were no big surprises as the tournament kicked off. None other than the early elimination of team On Your Knees.

Despite the ring fitted with a spark stone, Vance and his newly recruited teammate were knocked out of the competition when his overeager partner started blurting out the answers and ringing in without him. Vance did not look amused. Dan watched his teammate flinch as Vance kicked him in the shins, under the table.

And once again, Dan and Tempest both made it to the final round.

There were no buzzers or leaderboards tonight. Nothing half so fancy. One moderator, a shared table with a wall between contestants, and a stack of index cards to record your answers if you preferred to write them down. They were instructed to keep their cards face down until the mod rang a brass bell to call time.

Tempest tossed her coffee cup in the trash and squared herself in front of the pile of cards in front of her. She took a few deep breaths and signaled she was ready to begin. Dan did the same. As much as he intended to win tonight, he knew that this could still go either way. It would all come down to who was more well equipped in the final categories.

He needed to stay vigilant. He couldn’t let that clever witch beat him again.

Clever witch, clever witch. Her closeness was distracting him and making him twitch.

The moderator, a mushroom-shaped man who looked like he was a perfect candidate to represent the lollipop guild, pulled a golden envelope from a wicker basket. He read the category out loud.

“For our final round of trivia this evening we’ve got a real crowd pleaser. Let’s see how our last two quizlings do as they do battle, testing their knowledge about folklore couples and fated pairs in mythology, literature, and oral tradition.”

Did he just call us quizlings?

Tempest met Dan’s eye and he knew, just knew, that she also knew the term quizling was another word for a traitor. They both repressed their smirks.

This did not bode well for the quality of the questions to come.

He looked down awkwardly at his blank card. Beside him, Tempest stared at hers.

“First question,” the moderator said. “In which Shakespeare play does a character bite his thumb as an act of provocation?”

“Romeo and Juliet!” Neither of them bothered to write that one down.

“Which biblical figure had his strength stripped from him by which notorious woman with a pair of shears?”

“Sampson and Delilah!” They both called out the correct answers again.

“Which pair of Babylonian lovers, separated by a wall, inspired Shakespeare’s most famous tragedy?”

“Pyramis and Thisbe!” These were too easy, Dan thought. If this was as hard as the questions were going to get, they would be here all night.

“Which elderly couple, in Ovid’s Metamorphoses, were transformed into intertwining trees so they would never be parted?”

“Baucis and Philemon!” This at least was a bit more obscure. But not too obscure for Tempest.

They moved through all the questions in near lockstep, shouting out their answers at the exact same time, revealing answers written on cards that matched up as perfectly as the couples whose names they were calling.

This kept happening, until the final question in the bonus round came.

“In the earliest recorded variants of the Orpheus myth, predating the Virgilian tradition, what was the outcome of Orpheus’s descent?”