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The man took the cup eagerly and brought it to his lips.
“Varis,” Odessa whispered. “He hates Avriel. He’ll be one of the strongest challengers.”
Something was happening.
Varis had not passed the cup to the next competitor. Instead, he was staring down at it with a strange expression.
The man across from him, with short fiery orange hair framing his face and red scales covering both his arms like smoldering coals, said something that sounded sharp and impatient.
“That’s Brasad,” Odessa murmured, sounding almost amused. “Hot head.”
In more ways than one, from the look of it.
“What’s happening to Varis?” I whispered.
Odessa said nothing, but I had the impression that whatever occurred next wouldn’t surprise her.
The chalice fell from Varis’s hands to the stone table with a clatter, then rolled off the edge and to the ground.
Varis was next to fall. He toppled like a sapling, first leaning one way, then the other before crumpling to the floor.
There was a murmur of excitement from the crowd.
The Queen Regent stepped forward calmly and stooping low, picked up the chalice.
Then, stepping back to the head of the table, she moved her eyes briefly from Lyrastra to Draven to Rhea and finally to Avriel.
“Some contenders are simply too eager to wait for the games to begin,” she said finally, smiling calmly up at the spectators. “Who can blame them?”
There was laughter and a smattering of applause. I heard no protest.
Along the row beside me, Odessa, Crescent, Gawain, and Hawl were silent.
“I don’t understand,” I hissed to Odessa. “What just happened?”
She spoke without looking at me. “One of the first four must have poisoned Varis.”
“Which one?”
“Who do you think did it?”
“Not the prince,” I said stubbornly. He might be an infuriating bastard, but Draven would never stoop to a poisoned chalice just to eliminate a single competitor.
He would meet them head on and take pleasure in destroying them brutally but fairly.
“Probably not,” Odessa conceded. “But any of the others.”
“What if there’s still poison in the cup?” I whispered, as the Queen Regent filled the chalice from a tall silver flask and then walked down the row and carefully handed it to the sixth contestant.
Odessa shrugged. “Then I hope they’re prepared.”
“Prepared? For poison?”
Odessa nodded briefly. “Shhh.”
The sixth contestant was a lithe woman draped in midnight blue satin robes. Her skin was a beautiful onyx with an iridescent sheen like the scales of a fish, and her hair swam around her face like the shades of the ocean reflecting the night sky.
“Malkah,” Odessa offered.
