I glanced up at him again, my heart thudding at the information.
I turned to face the others. “I screwed this up. I didn’t consider this part, and now…”
The red was looking at Carmine. “Syera,” he said, too intent on the king to notice his slip. “He means me.”
I’d gathered as much. Carmine had visited the red’s parents, and I assumed the conversation had gone like:
Carmine: Stop harassing your son’s mate and child.
Them: Only if our son dies in Tiers.
Which blew my mother’s mind. How did someone bring a child into the world, then shun them like that? They felt so ashamed and humiliated by his match that they wanted him gone.
They’d earned a place on my shit list forevermore. Perhaps I could repay all of their acts of pettiness against their son’s family in kind.
I looked at Tsan. “Do you wish to live, or do you wish to join your mate?”
If he didn’t want to live, I’d take the risk of keeping Enp alive.
The yellow gazed at me. His chest rose and fell with whatever he was feeling and thinking. “I would like a chance to achieve what I came for.”
I’ll help you kill the king.
He was a yellow, and I’d have him on my team any day. He was one of the last three contestants of Tiers. There was power in him, if not the obvious kind.
Enp’s power, on the other hand, was very obvious, and had nothing at all to do with the color of his scales. His power stemmed from his love for his family.
“It must be me,” Enp said.
Dread filled me as I looked at him. “Yes, I believe so. To live now, to die in five minutes. That is cruelty in itself. I wish it could be different, Enp.”
“The cruelty is that they were always so cruel, and that they still win,” he said so quietly that I nearly didn’t hear.
His parents. I lifted his chin with my hand. “In this story, they don’t win. And so you have won a prize anyway.”
“I have won more than one prize, thanks to you.” He bowed his head. “You cannot leave the arena without killing me. I am ready. Tell… her… that I love her more than life.”
Tellthemthat I love them more than life. “You can be sure of that,” I said hoarsely.
Rounding him, I drew my father’s blade.
This was not the hardest moment of my life, and I was grateful for those other instances that had built my resilience so savagely. But this wasoneof the hardest things I had been forced to do.
I saw how life could be for Enp. I’d make him warden of the outer realms. With his alliance, slipping his mate in and out of the desert to visit Owu would be so easy. Adeuto would be safer for the extra buffer between enemies too.
But Carmine would not allow me to break the rules of Tiers. He could have. But he would not.
“Goodbye, friend,” said Tsan. “I will watch over her too.”
Enp trembled in his crouched position with his head bent. If he were magus, then I could have soothed him with my magic. But perhaps I could do so anyway.
I allowed my divination power to rise from my center, and I whispered a specific request to the dead.
Not all of them answered, too at peace in their new state. But one did.
The eldest teen boy who had first given me the answer to Owu’s condition formed in the air. He nodded at me, then hovered before Enp to turn his hands palm up in offer.
Enp placed his hands in the ghost’s and stared at the boy. There was no question of where his imagination had gone, or that Enp was pretending this ghost was a real-life version of his own son.
