Brielle collides with the wall behind her, and suddenly there is silence. Stillness. A ringing, like tinny bells in her ears. She groans as she gets to her feet and finds the room in splinters. Dreska crouches by the door, eyes fixed on the middle of the room, furniture in pieces all around them. And Nova is unmoving, pulsing oddly, a glow to her fur that lingers for a moment. She seems to have grown, now bigger than a cat ought to be, and the figure lying next to her …
‘Inesh?’ Brielle whispers, moving towards the witch. ‘Inesh, can you hear me?’
The girl uncurls, blinking into the room, and Brielle finds a witch with brown skin, a tight coiled weave of dark red hair and startlingly blue eyes. Her hand whips out to grab Nova. ‘What did you take from me, creature?’
And Brielle grins, heart calming to a patter as she kneels beside her. The witch stiffens, head swivelling slowly to meet Brielle’s gaze.
She’s like you were. All tangled thorny magic. Fearless.
‘You’re right, Nova,’ Brielle says quietly. ‘She is like me. I believe we have found a new hunter for our coven.’
Nova flicks her tail and begins to stalk away.
‘Nova?’ Brielle calls after her. ‘You and I are going to have a chat. Set some boundaries, expectations …’
Of course. A hunter managing a creature.
‘That’s not what I meant.’
But you are right. One not as strong as I, not so used to being a witch’s familiar, may have taken too much. May have become too greedy. Those creatures are no longer familiars, and their greed can lead to death.
Brielle releases a breath. ‘Just tell me next time? No more secrets. But what you did … You saved her.’
You’re welcome, Brielle.
When they emerge from the house, it’s daytime, a thin streak of grey rising up on the horizon. Brielle squints, tracking the progress of a hawktail as it soars towards thetown. Hawktails, messenger birds, provide an expensive but dependable service. And she’s fairly sure it’s flying towards her. She braces herself as it circles, then she holds out her arm for it to land.
‘Aren’t you a beauty,’ she murmurs, catching the jade and violet flecks in its black wings as it lands. She unfastens the message tied round one of its legs. Ripping open the letter, her tiredness from the long night dissolves, forehead pinching as she races through the news it contains. Then she bunches the message in her fist, throwing her arm up in anger. With a cry, the hawktail ascends, leaving her at once.
Turning to her three unlikely companions – a familiar, a witch in training and a hunter in training – she sizes them up, finding three sets of fierce eyes, all resting expectantly on her.
‘We return to Ennor,’ she says, dropping the message in her pocket, ‘as swiftly as we can. Pack your things and make ready for the journey home. My friends are in danger. Clarus for Inesh, to bind you as a hunter, will have to wait.’ She turns, muttering to Nova. ‘And if that hawktail can find us with a message …’
Then we are too easy to find.
i hear them long beforeI see them. The baying crowd, restless for entertainment. Crying out for blood. For a victor.
Pulse thrumming in my veins, I take step after step. With each footfall, each moment as we pass through a tunnel, towards a window of daylight, I sink deeper within myself. This is who I am, who I’ve always been. A girl, one of the seven who swam out on the rope from Rosevear, going into a storm.
Except today it’s an arena and there is no rope to lash myself to, no safety net, no Agnes or Kai or Bryn. Just me, fierce and ready, walking out to meet the first Trial. I glance to my right, catching Kell’s eye. He’s walking beside me, dressed as we all are, in breeches and a fitted vest, no weapons, no artifice. He nods and I nod back. Our only aim in this first Trial is to survive. The ruling council may want us to be victorious, but we cannot win, cannot free ourselves and Agnes, if we are dead.
My hair is braided, snaking down my left shoulder, much like the female contender, Fey from the Spines, just ahead of us. Behind us are Sember and Heath, the contenders from Skylan with whom we have made a deal. We’ve done all we can. We protect them; they protect us. And now messages are on their way to Ennor and Egan so our people know we’re alive. When we get out of this tunnel, when the Trial starts, I just need to find a weapon. And then I can ensure we all make it through the first Trial with beating hearts.
I hold up my hand to shield my eyes as we emerge from the tunnel, the sun glowing like an old god in the sky. Between the fractured rays of sunlight beaming through my fingers, I see the crowd, a wave of them surrounding us, stacked up in rows, all facing towards a sunken arena. In the centre, the huge oval-shaped space is filled with water. It tumbles, as though to imitate the sea, a ship listing on its side in the centre, rocks crowding around it. Did the ruling council engineer this as the first Trial to show me, their champion, off to the crowds? I would not put it past them. If everyone here only knew … It’s tantamount to cheating.
For a moment, I’m sure we can do this: we can survive. This Trial is nothing compared to the storms around Rosevear, the nights I’ve swum out with the seven, lashed to a rope, a breath from death, into the tide. They may want to show me off as their competitor, the symbol of the lion of Arnhem, roaring in victory, but to me it only means that we will not die today.
But then …
There’s a flash in the water – scales, like iridescent plates of armour – there for a heartbeat and gone in the next breath.
‘Did you see that?’ I murmur to Kell. ‘In the water?’
He shakes his head, eyes darting everywhere. I notice how pale he’s become. ‘Mira, I have to tell you something, before—’
‘Ladies and gentleman!’ a voice booms across the arena, and we all fall silent. ‘The day is upon us, the first of the infamous Trials!’
A roar rises up around us and I cover my ears.
