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“What did we miss?” Rychel asked, her keen eyes darting down to the room before.
“Vespera...” Odessa began.
“We heard,” Crescent interrupted, a look of distress crossing his face. “That much we’ve heard.”
“Selwyn has sent to the menagerie,” Hawl’s deep voice boomed out. “Why?”
“We’ll know in a moment,” Odessa replied. “Here they come.”
The Queen Regent’s two courtiers pushed through the doors, carrying something between them.
My eyes widened. “A verdantail.”
The pretty deerlike creature was wriggling against its captors, shaking its antlered head back and forth frantically. I watched as it raised its emerald-green furred head and made a plaintive flute-like sound.
The hairs on the back of my neck stood up.
The creature and courtiers disappeared through a hidden door near the queen’s corner.
A few moments later a panel opened in the stone door of the room where the competitors waited down below and the little green verdantail tottered in.
Selwyn stared at it for a moment, then crossed over and picked it up.
He stroked the small deer’s fur gently for a moment. Then reached for something strapped to his back.
My breath caught in my throat. It was a sharp hunting knife–like the one Draven usually carried at his hip.
With a swift stroke, the knife swept below the little deer’s dainty chin.
Selwyn stepped closer to the mirror, holding the deer aloft as its heart’s blood trickled down onto the glass surface.
The blood cleared. The mirror clouded once more, darker red clouds swirling along its surface.
Selwyn cradled the verdantail’s dead body to his chest and stepped through, following Lyrastra’s path.
It was just a deer, I reminded myself, my heart hammering. We ate deer. Crescent had said verdantail were a delicacy here. It was just a deer. We ate animals all the time.
But the mirror hadn’t eaten the deer for nourishment–or demanded that Selwyn do so. It had wanted Lyrastra’s blood. And then it had demanded...
“Did the mirror ask for the verdantail specifically?” I demanded, elbowing Odessa.
She looked at me. “I don’t know. Probably not. It probably wanted some sort of beast, without specifying the kind. But killing any innocent living creature went against everything Selwyn stands for.”
I thought of the large man’s own antlers. Had he chosen the verdantail for its symbolism? Because the deer mirrored himself? “But he did it. He’s killed before. He killed the goblins.”
She nodded. “Yes, but they weren’t innocent. Selwyn is part of a rare group of Siabra who refuse to consume the blood or flesh of any innocent creature. They eat only the fruits of the earth.”
Plants and vegetables, she meant.
“The opposite of Avriel, you mean?” I said hollowly, thinking of Avriel’s brutal gesture of bloodlust as he’d held Brasad aloft then fed from him.
“Pretty much,” she agreed. “Malkah was the same.”
Two gentle souls in a brutal game. “Draven let him go first. Because he knew the mirror would want more.”
“The mirror is a living being. A cursed spirit,” Hawl spoke up. “Once fed, it grows greedy for more.”
“Quiet,” Rychel murmured as she stepped up beside me. “Look. It’s my brother’s turn.”
