I took a deep breath in through the nose, then exhaled. “Better than nothing, I guess.”

  A rumble moved through the crowd, then the Fae started shushing each other, sending a ripple of hisses through the room. I had expected the man who had announced the other trials to get up and speak, but it was Invidia who stood up from her chair and looked around the room, as if she was seconds away from addressing the court.

  She locked eyes with me, and I swallowed hard, hoping she couldn’t see the lack of a necklace around my throat.

  “Lords, ladies,” she said, “Nobles of the Kingdom of Spring, welcome to the final event in our coveted Favoring. Today, our valorous contestants will be asked the ultimate question; what is a Fae without their magic?”

  A round of applause moved through the room, but it didn’t last long; not while Invidia remained standing.

  “In a moment,” Invidia continued, “Powerful magic wards will be erected around this room designed to prevent our brave ladies from accessing their magic. When they have been stripped of their powers, they will need to use their strength, their agility, and their mettle to remove themselves from their bindings, climb the structure at the center of the hall, and retrieve the ribbon hanging from the bottom of the skylight. There will be only one winner today… and given that contestants are so evenly matched, she who wins today shall become Spring’s Favored daughter.”

  No magic.

  This was it. My chance. Without magic, the playing field was going to level out—well, at least as far as Petal and Violet were concerned. Isolde was more than a physical match for me, and she was already looking at me like she wanted to knock me out the first chance she got.

  “Now, without further ado,” said Invidia, “Let the trial commence!”

  Another explosion of applause moved through the room, followed by cheering and hooting. Several Fae stood out of the crowd, taking a few steps toward the center of the grand hall. They looked at each other, then cast their eyes around the grand hall, and with their hands stretched up and out, they worked magic.

  I saw wispy trails of green, and yellow, and gold leave their fingertips, little balls of light trailing through the lines, following them. The magic spread quickly through the grand hall, reaching the walls and cascading up and around them like water would.

  The magic strings linked, and danced, and wove together, creating a tapestry of light that was so intensely beautiful to look at, I almost forgot where I was for a moment. There was a bright flash, then, and the lines of light settled into place, creating something like a grid around the grand hall that stretched all the way up to the ceiling.

  “Avery,” came Rell’s voice, only it was a little distant. “Avery, can you hear me?”

  “I can hear you,” I said, “What’s wrong?”

  “My Astral form just got kicked out of the room. I thought I’d lost the connection completely.”

  “Are you ok?”

  “I’m fine. What about you?”

  “I feel a little tingly, but no different than usual.

  A ripple of something like fear and excitement pulsed through the crowd. I could feel it. The Fae were all looking at each other

  “That’s good, it means the anti-magic field isn’t affecting you.”

  “How is it that we’re able to speak, then?”

  “I’m a Sprite, and our magic is different.”

  “So, what does that mean?”

  “It means no one in that room can do any magic. I think you have a real shot at winning this thing, now.”

  I scanned the room, feeling that pulse of anxious excitement bounce through me. The Fae were watching us, and they expected a show. Petal didn’t seem like she was moving, Violet looked like she was struggling with her restraints, but Isolde—Isolde had twisted herself into a pretzel and was already slipping free of the ropes tying her to the pole.

  Shit.

  She wasn’t wasting any time drinking the atmosphere in. She had been told to begin, and she had done just that. Using my fingertips, I felt around for the knot keeping my hands tied. Lucky for me, I had dainty hands and skinny fingers that were perfect for picking and fiddling with exactly something like this.

  It took a moment or two for me to find the right rope to pull, but once I started to tug on it, the restraints began coming loose, and I was able to move my wrists. Violet was also fumbling around with her fingers, trying to do what I had done, but she wasn’t having as much luck. Petal, meanwhile, had her eyes turned up to the skylight and seemed to be miles away from all of this.

  I still couldn’t figure out why she was even in the Favoring.

  Isolde broke out of her restraints and was the first to start racing toward the scaffold in the middle of the grand hall. I watched her start climbing, and my heart sank as she seemed to rise, and rise, and rise, but then something happened, and she lost her grip.

  My heart surged into my chest. I couldn’t understand what had just happened. It looked like the scaffold had rearranged itself directly under Isolde’s hands, and she’d failed to grab hold of it. She had managed to use her feet to stay attached to it, but she was stuck in a weird angle, her back arched away from the scaffold.

  The crowd took in a collective breath, then cheered with Isolde as she grabbed hold of the scaffold once more. She tentatively tried to make another move, but I realized now, the rungs were moving, trying to keep away from her. The whole structure started to look like one giant set of roots, each intermingling with one another to create the structure we had to climb, only it wasn’t static anymore—it was moving.

  “That’s great,” I said, as I shrugged out of the ropes that were keeping me tied up. “Just great.”

  “You had better hurry if you want to win,” Petal said. “Isolde is already much too high.”

  “Don’t you want to win?”

  “No thanks, I’m okay. But you go. I think you need it more than I do.”

  “I’m not gonna argue with that,” I said, and with a quick glance at Violet, I dashed toward the living scaffolding and grabbed hold of it.

  The roots were thick, and sturdy. I was able to climb them quickly, rising high above the crowd and getting close to Isolde, who was still struggling with the roots. When she saw me catching up to her, she grabbed a root, pulled it loose, and used it to swing over toward me with a look in her eyes that told me I had to duck, or move, or do something because that woman was about to knock me the hell off.

  I scrambled to the left, going around the structure as quickly as I could, but the roots started doing to me what they were doing to Isolde. It felt like the higher we climbed, the more it would try to throw us off it, as if I needed more problems right now.

  Isolde, somehow, missed my arm as she swung past me. She had tried to grab hold of it, probably so she could pull me off the structure entirely. When she swung back around, I was ready for her. I grabbed hold of a root, then used my feet to kick off the scaffold, letting her slide underneath me.

  “You can’t win this one, Kadeera,” she said as her momentum died off and she settled on the scaffold a few feet away from me. “I’ll make sure of that. Or, you can give up, and I won’t hurt you.”

  “You’re going to have to get over here and make me give up,” I said, as I grabbed another root and pulled myself up further.

  Isolde grunted and came toward me, skittering across the surface of the structure like a spider-monkey.

  I grabbed hold of it tightly with one hand and just barely managed to duck under her powerful right hook. Her fist went into the body of the thing we were holding onto with so much force it broke some of its roots clean in half.

  Another punch went my way, and I pulled away from it again, only this time it skimmed past my face only by inches. As bits of this shifting column of knotted roots went flying past my face, I spotted something; someone in the crowd, down below us.

  It wasn’t Violet, or Petal that caught my eye—but Thea.

  She was standing by the main doors to the grand hall, just on the other side of them, and it looked like there was something behind her; a light, a kind of warm, orange glow that pulsed and heaved like it was alive.

  Time itself ground to a crawl, but not because I had made a conscious effort to heighten my reflexes. Not that I thought I could anymore; whatever gift Arcadia had given me was as much suppressed as the magic of the Fae around me.

  The orange glow behind Thea grew in intensity and then curled around her like a mantle, like a wave. Fire. A wave of fire. The flames bowled over her and pushed through the magic wards erected around the grand hall, bursting into the room and immediately starting to rise into the air. I realized then, as the blood drained from my face, that the flames had burning, yellow eyes and even a mouth.

  “Rell?” I thought, in the short time I had to think. “What the hell is that?”

  “Get out of there, Avery!” Rell shrieked, “Get out of there now!”

  Thea shut the door to the grand hall, the gathered Fae sucked in another deep breath of air, and when the flying flames roared, tongues of fire billowed out of it in all directions, setting the entire grand hall alight.

  CHAPTER 18

  The grand hall had turned into a tinderbox, fires bursting to life all around me. I couldn’t think, I couldn’t breathe, and I couldn’t move. Isolde, who a moment ago had been trying to throw me to the ground, had also stopped moving entirely. She, like me, was just staring at the fires erupting inside of the grand hall.

  Like the sound of a shockwave after a blast hits, the screams of the Fae reached my ears with a delay. It was chaos. Total madness. Several of them were scrambling toward the main doors leading back into the house and the outer doors that opened to the courtyard, but the doors were all shut, and none of them would budge.

  Other Fae took to the center of the room and put their hands up, as if to try to bat the flames away with magic, but their magic wasn’t working. In the insanity of what was unfolding around us all, it was as if they’d forgotten that they had cut off their own ability to do magic.

  They were trapped here.

  We all were.

  The Sprite that had started the fires roared again, and as it swooped past me, the heat from its body seared the little hairs on my arms. It was like being licked by an inferno, and it stung. I recoiled from it and grabbed hold of the tower of roots in the center of the room, holding tightly to keep myself from falling.

  Then it hit me.

  The main routes out of here were blocked, but they weren’t all blocked. Turning my eyes up, I saw the skylight hanging above the grand hall. It was all glass, a perfect dome with a couple of iron supports. Enough to keep it from falling, but not enough that it would stop someone from squeezing through them to get to the roof.

  “The roof!” I shrieked at Isolde.

  But Isolde wasn’t listening. Her lips were parted, and in her eyes I could see the reflection of the flames that were starting to catch on the fixtures and the walls. I reached for her collar with one hand and shook her hard to make her look at me.

  “Isolde,” I yelled at her.

  She blinked at me, and I saw a little clarity return to her eyes. “Why is this happening?” she asked.

  “I don’t know why it’s happening, but we need to get out of here, and there’s only one way to do it.” I pointed up.

  “The roof,” she said, as she turned her eyes up at the ceiling. “That’s perfect!”

  “Not if we don’t get moving right now; those fires are going to keep spreading, and that Sprite is only going to make more.”

  Isolde grabbed steadied her hold on the roots and started to climb. “Then, let’s go!” she said.

  I grabbed her foot. “Wait a second, what about all of them?! They’re sitting ducks down there!”

  She looked at me, then looked down at the chaos beneath us. The temperature was already starting to rise, as were columns of smoke. Anything that could catch was already ignited, and the few things that couldn’t catch easily didn’t look like they’d last long before going up in flames.

  We didn’t have much time, but if we didn’t do something to help the Fae below us, they were all going to die.

  Every last one of them.

  “Right…” Isolde said, “Right, yes, we should help.”

  “Were you going to let them all die?” I asked.

  She hesitated. “No… of course not.” She climbed back to my level. “Why aren’t they already climbing?”

  “Because those Fae have never had to do anything for themselves. Magic is all they know, and without it, they’re useless.”

  Isolde frowned. “You speak of they, but those are your people.”

  I shook my head. “Right. Of course.” I looked down, stuck my fingers in my mouth, and whistled loud enough to catch as much attention as possible. “Hey, everybody!” I yelled, “What the hell are you waiting for? Start climbing this thing and let’s get out of here!”

  The Fae who had looked up at me seemed to question my words at first, glancing at each other as if to find out whether they should do what I had asked. At least, that was what I thought. When the Fae got moving toward the massive root-scaffold thing in the center of the room, they weren’t helping each other—they were doing everything they could to get to it first.

  I saw some of them shove each other, smash each other with their elbows, fists, with their feet; whatever they could. A couple of Fae fell over, and nobody helped them up—they were trampled on and stomped on by the others that wanted to make sure they got to safety.

  Invidia was among those who didn’t care about the wellbeing of her fellow Fae. In fact, she seemed to have a glare only for me as she grabbed hold of the roots and started to climb. My stomach churned when I locked eyes with her; eyes that looked to be full of rage, and anger, as if I had somehow wronged her.

  “They’re starting to climb,” I said, ripping my eyes away from Invidia and turning them on Isolde, but Isolde was already climbing, and clearly couldn’t care less about what I had to say. “What a charmer, that one,” I said to myself.

  “Hey, less chit chat, more climbing,” Rell said into my mind.

  “Rell, you sound distant and you’re breaking up,” I thought, “Is everything ok?

  “It’s the anti-magic thing. Forget about it and start climbing, or Isolde is gonna grab that ribbon and win the Favoring.”

  “Dude, the building is on fire. I don’t think anybody cares about the Favoring.

  “You’d be surprised. Now, start moving.”

  I secured my footing and prepared to get climbing, when I noticed something. Petal. She was still down there, still tied to the pole. Violet was gone, she was probably already climbing the root structure, but Petal… nobody was helping her; not even people from her own House.

  “Hey, isn’t someone gonna help her?!” I yelled at the storm of incoming Fae, but none of them seemed to care.

  “Don’t do it,” Rell said, “She wouldn’t do it for you.”

  I sighed. “I know, but I’m an idiot.”

  “Avery!”

  I had serious protests against what I was doing, but I also couldn’t stop myself from climbing down as fast as I could. The flames and the smoke were rising, making it difficult to see and to breathe. The heat was also starting to become a little too much to bear, but I had seen Petal down there, and if I made it out and had left her to burn to death—at the stake, I might add—in the grand hall through my actions, I would’ve hated myself for the rest of my life.

  “You’re a serious idiot,” Rell said into my brain. “How are you planning on getting to her and getting out before the fire kills you?”

  “I don’t know. I haven’t figured that out yet.”

  The fire Sprite came back for another pass, swooping by the central structure to try and catch some of the Fae as they tried to flee. I heard several of them scream as their clothes caught fire. One of them lost his grip on the root scaffolds and went screaming past me to hit the floor with a loud thud. He was on fire, and he wasn’t moving.

  That was the fate that awaited me if I slipped up even once.

  “Rell, buddy,” I thought, “Any help here would be hot.”

  “Now isn’t the time for puns, Avery,” Rell said, “Anyway, do you think I’m sitting on my ass eating chicken?”

  “Bacon, actually.”

  “I’m on my way to help you get out, but I don’t know how much help I’ll be.”

  “You can start by dealing with the fire Sprite that’s killing Fae.”

  “You want me to fight a fire Sprite?”

  “You’re too small to pull anyone to safety. If you can help us deal with it, then please, I need you.”

  “Alright, I’m almost there.”

  I let myself drop to the floor with only a few feet to go. Already the air down here was thick, and hot. I was starting to sweat and cough, and the flames and the smoke made it difficult to see where I was going.

  I had to guess where Petal was, and I had to climb over a couple of unresponsive Fae bodies to get to her, but when I did, I started pulling at her restraints as quickly as I could. Petal wasn’t weeping, though. She didn’t seem afraid, either.

  “Don’t worry,” I said, “I’m going to get you out of here.”

  “I’m not worried,” Petal said, “I’ve seen all this happen”

  “Seen it?”

  “Yes, in my dreams. I’m something of a fortune teller.”

  “Wait, you knew this was going to happen?”

  “Not in as many words. I knew there would be a fire, and I told my Lord as much, but I was forbidden from saying anything, so I kept quiet.”

  I was struggling with the ropes tied around her wrists, but I kept going, doing my best to ignore the smoke and the heat closing in on me. “Telling someone could’ve saved lives, Petal,” I said, “People have died today.”

  “I know. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for anyone to die… just like I didn’t mean to know you’re not who you say you are.”

  I was moments away from releasing her, when I stopped. “You what?”

  “I saw you in my dream. Well, not you… you looked different in my dream. Like a human, with those round ears they have? I knew you would save my life, so I kept your secret too. I’m good at keeping secrets.”