My mark seizes beneath my collar in hot, angry pulses, protecting me from what’s happening.Craft.He’s trying to use Craft on me.
Furious, I drop the poker of my own accord and go for something more effective.
Jude barely has time to blink before I lunge. It’s good he’s sitting, because his full height would have made it impossible to slip behind him and press my blade to his throat.
To his credit, he doesn’t seem surprised—until the gold of my blade grazes his skin. Players do not fear death. They’re trained in the deathless arts, a Craft that renders them nearly immortal. Except against one weapon—the one I’m holding to his neck.
Something in the way he sharply inhales tells me his skin recognizes the Eleutheraen gold. I’ve imagined holding this very knife to a Player’s throat many times, but my hands never shook this badly in any of those fantasies. We’re facing the mirror, and I don’t like that I look more scared than he does.
RIVEN: “Try that again, and I’ll slit your throat.” I mean it but hope he can’t hear the tremor in my voice.
JUDE: “I’ll have you know I’ve talked myself out of worse.” His breathing is ragged. “Hell, I’ve talked myselfintoworse.” I cut off his laugh by pressing the blade in a little closer, inhaling the sharp scent of citrus and hyacinth that lingers on his skin. “Hurt me and four Players will be ripping the flesh from your bones before you take another breath,” he says, steely. His eyes slide from the knife to meet my gaze in our reflection. “Not that there’s much there. Didn’t I tell you about the food downstairs?”
RIVEN: “Stop. Talking.”
JUDE: “And besides.” His tone softens, the pitch rolling low like thunder. I don’t hear whatever he says next. I don’t even understand the words. I’m too focused on the sudden warmth shivering up my arms and the curious way my knife loosens in my grip. “You aren’t looking me in the eye,” he goes on in a voice that wraps effortlessly around my mind like silk. “Someone taught you that.”
My eyes flash back to our reflection just in time to see his hand, glowing gold with Craft, reach for mine.
Three things happen at once. First, nausea, deep and dizzying, bursts through my head as his hand grazes my wrist.
Second, Jude’s eyes shoot up to mine, dark with confusion.
Third, my blade clatters to the floor as we both scatter to opposite sides of the room.
I panic, eyeing my blade on the ground between us and clutching at my throat, the Eleutheraen mark, hidden beneath my jacket, burning. Jude swears loudly and steadies himself on a marble beam, wrapping an arm around his stomach as if it is persistently trying to expel its contents. He gasps a breath and speaks to me through gritted teeth.
“You’remarked,”he spits, announcing it like it’s a death sentence—which it is.
SILENUS: “Jude?”
He jumps at the director’s voice, his attention snapping to the hallway.
Meanwhile, I make my move and dive for the blade. But when Jude’s shoulders tense, I raise one hand, shoving the knife into my pocket to indicate I do not wish to fight to the death just yet.
And unfortunately, the nearing steps have me rethinking whatever half-baked plan I was harboring. My mind tries to do the math: me, marked. One Eleutheraen blade. A Player who knows both of these things. The director on his way through the door.
My window of opportunity to steal that Script is rapidly closing.
A similar calculation runs clear across Jude’s face. Whatever conclusion he’s come to, I know it can’t be good. He marches forward, grips me by the sleeve, and hauls us both into a run down Mimicry’s purple hall while muttering, “Don’tmake me regret this.”
Act I: Scene IX
The story goes that Players used to capture humans just to drag them around as their own personal audience, sometimes tearing their eyes out to carry in a jar after the humans’ legs finally gave out. And the mortals would go willingly, their minds too blissfully numbed with Craft to notice what was happening. I’m pretty sure Haris would beg for such a fate.
But Iammarked, and I know what’s happening to me. Suddenly, I’m a child again, dragged away by a Player. The thought sends my heels digging into the ground in a panic. Jude stumbles, the alarming strength of his grip nearly ripping my arm from its socket and making my ribs sear with the strain. He spins around. “Do youwantto die?”
RIVEN: “I’m still deciding.”
SILENUS: “Jude?”
Jude hurries faster down the corridor, dragging me along as I curse at him; his long legs are impossible to keep up with. Even through my sleeve, his touch burns and sends my skin crawling. The pinch in his brow tells me it hurts him, too.
There’s a blur of golden lanterns poking out of a dark plum-colored passageway, then a sharp turn, and a mahogany door he shoves open with his shoulder. I catch myself on the wall as we pummel through it.
The door shuts with a creak, like it hasn’t been used in a while.
Pain radiates along my spine as I straighten and take in my new cage: a smaller oval-shaped room, elegant and draped in lush velvets and walls of silvery brocade. Pristine violet drapes are drawn tight above a vanity with a tarnished gold mirror.
