My heart beats faster. A sudden tightness grips my chest.Has Selena decided to approve of Griffin after all?
She turns to Griffin next. “Excellent idea with the kissing. The crowd needed a reason to get behind you. You were boring them to tears with the lack of brutality and bloodshed.” She heals a shallow gash on his upper arm and then moves to the bruise darkening his left eye and cheekbone. The skin is split. “Unexpected mercy, romance, mystery… They appeal to even the most fickle and violent of hearts.”
Selena slowly circles Griffin, satisfying herself there’s nothing else. Griffin inclines his head in thanks. She nods back without any irony, which I assume means the Underworld has, in fact, frozen over.
Carver and Jocasta have no injuries at all. Selena moves on to Kato and then to Flynn, smoothing out bruises and cuts. These small fixes take almost nothing out of her, which is good, because next time will be worse.
I lean against Griffin while she works, settling my cheek on his solid chest. He took off his leather armor, and I can hear the low, steady thump of his heart. “I’m offended that you kissed me out of strategy.”
His arms close around me, and ribbons of heat wind through my body.
“It was pure torture.” His eyes glitter like the first stars at dusk as he lowers his head and presses his lips to mine.
CHAPTER 30
GRIFFIN SLAMS INTO ME, LOCKING HIS ARMS AROUND MYtorso. The impact from the full force of his hard body jars the air from my lungs and propels me backward through the pelting rain. He twists, and his back slams into the sodden ground. His grunt hits the top of my head, and then he rolls, ending up like a lead weight on top of me.
Metallic feathers pepper the wet sand where I just stood, their serrated edges flashing in my peripheral vision. The harsh, tinny sound of more feathers sliding loose somewhere above us in the arena grates in my ears. The huge, relentless Stymphalian Bird is about to rain down more blades.
Griffin cages my head with his arms, leaving no part of me exposed. Metal sings, and blades splat into the muck around us. Griffin hisses air in through his teeth, and then something warm starts spreading over my hip.
My heart jumps up and punches me in the throat. “How bad?” I ask.
“Not bad,” he grits out.
Men always say that. I free a hand from underneath him and then carefully run it over his side. His breathing changes when I hit the long, lethal feather. It’s low on his waist and goes straight through the side of his leather armor to plant its sharp tip in the sand. Most of the blade missed. If I were any wider, it would have sliced me, too.
“Bone?” I ask. It’s close to his lowest ribs.
He shakes his head.
I grip the feather between my thumb and forefinger, holding it awkwardly to avoid the razor-edged sides. “I’ve got it. Shift left.”
Griffin slides sideways off the edge of the blade. I leave it in the sand. There’s nowhere I can hold the creature’s metal feather that won’t slice my hand to bits.
Griffin twists his head to search the dull sky. Rain runs in rivers off his face and onto mine. “It’s circling for another pass.”
He pumps up off me, grabs my hand, and we rise together. The dark stain on his side makes my stomach clench, but Griffin looks like he doesn’t even feel it. We run hand in hand, and the crowd, dry under their festive, multicolored, oiled awnings, erupts into wild cheering.
The sight and sound sicken me. The mix of pageantry and violence, so like the daily punishment of life in Mother’s court, turns my stomach in a way little else can. In both places, murder is a sport, and the trophy is prestige, gold, and the fear you put in other people’s eyes.
The audience seems to love us, though, which I suppose I should feel some satisfaction about. Griffin and I became the darlings of the arena overnight—lovers in the Games, northern Magoi and southern Hoi Polloi, Fisan and Sintan, flouting convention left and right. Their unexpected, enthusiastic support, overriding even their initial thirst for blood, proves what Griffin has been saying all along. Thalyriaisripe for a change, and Thalyrians are hungering for a new reality, whether they realize it or not. While old prejudices run deep, especially among the Magoi minority, it took one relatively boring combat for many of the people gathered in Kitros for the Agon Games to conceive of something different and then throw themselves behind it—behindus.
Of course, it would be more gratifying if I weren’t certain they’d love to see us suffer horribly before we ultimately triumph.
I look away from the cheering spectators before I do something rash and rude and search for the Stymphalian Bird against the clouds. The creature is the same color as the knife-metal sky, as fast as thunder, and has been easily keeping Griffin and me separated from the rest of our team. We’ve spent this entire round so far diving out of the path of deadly feathers and sprinting in the opposite direction of where we need to be.
As I sweep the arena for signs of the bird, my eyes snag on the royal box. The Tarvan royal family is in attendance this time, having come the handful of miles from Castle Tarva to neighboring Kitros. No one is smiling in the luxurious, sheltered seats. Unsurprisingly, the royals look downright hostile, and they’re watching Griffin and me with blatant antipathy.
The heavy rain obscures my vision, but something pulls at my gut and makes me look more closely at a woman in the back. She’s young, maybe eighteen. She stares at me, her hair snapping on the damp wind and tangling into a mess. She doesn’t move. She doesn’t care.
Familiarity slams into me like a tidal wave, drowning me in sudden shock. Her hair is the darkest of browns. Long, wild waves fly out from under a circlet woven with what I know must be fat Fisan pearls. Her nose is straight and long, her back stiff, her frame small yet generous. Details I haven’t laid eyes on in over eight years surge out at me, or maybe my mind supplies them automatically, because even from a distance, I know she looks just like me. Thick-lashed, elongated eyes that are a shade brighter than spring leaves. Dark, slashing brows. A firm chin that juts out in almost perpetual defiance. Shoulders that curl inward when she’s scared. And lips that lift naturally at the corners, giving her an expression of secret, closely guarded humor when nothing about her life is funny.
A violent mix of emotions propels something savage through my breast. Looking at that young woman, I suddenly feel capable of the kind of destruction that can tear a world apart. I burn to start with this arena. I physically ache to stop what’s sure to become a bloodbath and to take the look of permanent dread out of one Fisan girl’s eyes. Mostly, I want to rip into myself. I failed her. Utterly.
“Cat!” Griffin shouts.
He’s right next to me, but he sounds far away. I breathe shallowly, in a rapidly narrowing void. My vision tunnels, shadowy around the edges, my little sister imprinted like a pinprick of pain in the blinding middle. Six years my junior, always hiding in Eleni’s room because she was scared of the boys. They were horrid to her. They were horrid to everyone.
