Last snickered, covering her mouth with her hand.
Primus sighed. “The Bard heir is scared a creature will hurt him. He is weak.”
Luvic stepped forward, meeting me in the middle of the circle. The conjurers were at his back; all of Hell Gate was at mine.
He studied me for a moment, almost as if he were asking if I was certain this was what I wanted to do. I didn’t have a choice, though, did I?
“Feel free to conjure anything you like,” Jagger said in a gloating tone. “As long as you do your best to kill her.”
Last clapped her hands, and I don’t know if she was cheering for my death or for Luvic’s.
Luvic raised a single eyebrow. Ready?
I tilted my chin. Ready.
I sent my mind outside of myself, into the place where I untied illusion. Beneath me was the endless expanse of power that could unlock and untie a thousand knots. If I let it out, it would rage through Hell Gate like a flash flood. Maybe it would untie all illusion for miles around, just like Finn’s solange had done at the closing ceremony.
Luvic twisted his hand. A giant wall of water rushed at me. It was swarming with snakes, and the current roared, threatening to suck me in and devour me.
Overhand and bowline knots, chain splice and back splice—I unraveled the knots without conscious thought, moving on pure instinct. The second the illusion disappeared, Luvic threw another.
A lake of lava.
Unraveled.
A rainstorm of bullets.
Gone.
A river of swords.
Untied.
A storm of poison.
Swept away.
Every illusion Luvic conjured I plucked from existence a millisecond after it was born. He began to sweat, breathing heavily. That low, rumbling jackaltooth growl started low in his throat.
When he conjured a giant, three-headed sea monster and it flickered into nothing before it had a chance to roar, the conjurers began to mutter among themselves.
Then, with Jagger’s will pushing me, I stepped forward, swaying in my heels, and slammed the flat of my hand into Luvic’s nose. His head snapped back, and blood bloomed, dripping down his face.
Last laughed. She twisted her hand and threw a morningstar at my head. I yanked the clove hitch free, and the morningstar disappeared. She made a delighted noise and went to conjure again but stopped when the Clark narrowed his eyes.
Luvic tugged his white handkerchief free and pressed it to his bloody nose. “Enough?” he asked the conjurers.
“Not quite,” the Bard said. He twisted his hand and conjured a creature of nightmares.
If you took every culture’s bogeyman and combined it into one dark, hateful thing, then this would be the result. It was the thing that ate children, sat on people’s chests and gave them nightmares, and cursed farmland. It was a hundred Prusik knots, blood knots, and eye splices.
Before the games, it would’ve taken me an hour to unravel it—maybe longer. Now, as the sister of the Ward, it took less than a blink.
The nightmare was there. Then it was gone.
The hall was silent.
It was the exact same feeling that had consumed the Bard mansion after Finn defeated Primus with solange. They’d realized what a threat he was and decided to kill him.
