And Raihn didn’t hesitate—didn’t look away from me once—as he answered, “No,” and kissed me.

I had never so dreaded nightfall.

It came nonetheless. I was expecting the little thread of shadow in our room, Nyaxia’s beckoning hand, but the sight still made my breath burn in my lungs. When it appeared, Raihn and I rolled out of bed and put our armor back on without a word.

Before we left the room—left it for the final time—we stopped and looked at each other.

“It has been a pleasure, princess,” he said.

I watched his lips curl. Mother, those perfect lips.

I thought about kissing him one last time. Thought about winding my arms around his neck and never letting go. Dragging him back to bed and refusing to leave. At least we’d die happy when Nyaxia struck us down.

I did none of those things.

I didn’t know how Raihn could possibly call me brave. I was a fucking coward.

“It’s been…” I shrugged. The smirk crinkled my eyes without my permission. “Tolerable. I guess.”

He laughed. “There she is,” he said, and opened the door.

Angelika and Ibrihim were already waiting with the Ministaer. Ibrihim did not look at us. Angelika’s typically hard face was even harder than usual, her eyes sharp as daggers as she watched us approach. They were rimmed with red.

The curse? Or had she spent the last day weeping over Ivan’s death?

The door appeared as it always did, with little fanfare. The Ministaer wished us luck and ushered us through. Ibrihim went first. He could barely walk. His wings hung down behind him, broken dead weight.

Next, Angelika.

And then it was only us.

Everything I couldn’t say threatened to drown me. Words weren’t enough. Yet without my permission, just before we crossed the threshold, I grabbed Raihn’s hand—squeezed it hard, hard, hard—and oh, Mother, I couldn’t let him go, I couldn’t do this.

Our steps slowed. No one else would have noticed it, this split-second of hesitation. But for me, a million possibilities lived in that moment.

Fantasies. Fairytales. Useless dreams.

I smashed them on the marble ground, pulled my hand away, and walked through the threshold.

CHAPTER FORTY-SIX

The crowd’s shouts were barbaric and bloodthirsty, like the hungry roar of wolves as they tore their prey apart.

The stands were packed. From this distance, the audience was visible only as a wave of people, hands raised in fists, screaming for violence. Above them, the wings of the Rishan, bloody feathers pinned open, were reduced to mere dots of death.

I took this in only for a moment, before I had to roll out of the way of a streak of fire.

Not Nightfire. Fire.

I barely managed to move in time. Heat singed the tips of my hair. My clumsy roll slammed me against a wall—no, not a wall, a door, bolted shut. I leapt back to my feet and turned.

The arena had been divided up. I was in a smaller enclosure, the door behind me locked. No Raihn, Ibrihim, or Angelika.

Instead, three figures circled me, two men and a woman. All three of them had empty, glowing black eyes and blank faces, wearing tattered robes that seemed like an insulting parody of religious garb. The string of fire had cut directly across my arena, leaving me scrambling to avoid the blazing path.

It came from the figure on the right. Flames surrounded him, crawling up the flowing ribbons of his robes. A crooked, tarnished crown fit poorly on his head, a chipped white circle mounted upon it.

The woman beside him wore a gown of pink, spattered with black and red. A flower circlet sat upon her stringy red hair. Two wilting roses had been shoved into her eyes. In her hands was a bow, cocked with a luminescent arrow of rusted thorns.

And at last, the final man—tall and slender, shirtless to reveal a scarred body half-marred with decay. His chin lolled, mouth gaping and blackened.

Gods, I realized.

False mimicries of them.

This was the final trial. It represented Nyaxia’s ultimate rise to power. In a fit of rage and grief over her husband’s death, she had turned upon her former brothers and sisters. She had fought her way through all twelve gods of the White Pantheon—and she had won.

The woman raised her bow and let her shot fly. It moved faster than air should have been able to carry it. I barely managed to dodge it.

The arrow—rusted steel, shaped like the thorny stalk of a rose—buried itself in the sand two inches from my nose. The sand around it blackened and smoked.

I kept running. Behind me, steady thunk, thunk, thunks trailed my steps, growing ever-closer as arrows struck the packed sand.

The one with the fire had to be Atroxus, the god of the sun and the king of the White Pantheon. And the arrows… that had to be Ix, goddess of sex and fertility. Her arrows were said to plant seeds in wombs, though I was fairly certain that wasn’t what they were going to do to me.

These were puppets, after all. Not the real gods, but parodies intended to mock them.

The third, though… I racked my brain. He wore no crown, carried no weapon—

The air split in two. The high-pitched sound made my muscles seize without my permission. I tripped over my own feet and landed hard in the sand. Pain erupted through my shoulder as one of Ix’s arrows grazed my flesh, opening a smoldering tear in my armor.

Fuck. That sound. It paralyzed me. Turned my mind inside out. I forced my head up to look at them—at the third figure, whose blackened lips gaped like a fish.

As if singing.

Kajmar. God of seduction, art, beauty… and music.

His song stopped as abruptly as it had begun. I seized the moment just in time to avoid another encroaching wave of fire. Atroxus did not move, instead hovering inches above the sand, hands open as if in prayer and flames pooling around him in expanding waves. But Kajmar and Ix both jerked and danced across the enclosure, as if dangled on strings held by some invisible puppet-master, their limp feet dragging along the ground.

I called upon the Nightfire, and was grateful when, fueled by my adrenaline, it bloomed easily to life in my hands. But I struggled to use it with precision—I couldn’t shoot it at Ix or Kajmar, not when they were moving so fast, and my sloppy attempt to send a surge of it to Atroxus simply withered and died beneath the strength of his far more powerful wall of fire.

Another screech of Kajmar’s song nearly ended me as I took an especially ill-timed tumble. Fire nipped at my heels. I had to fight to drag myself three inches, just out of its reach.

The moment the sound released me, I was running again, pain disappearing beneath the pounding of my heart. Everything narrowed to the steps I needed to take to stay alive.

Who was I going after first?

I couldn’t get close to Atroxus; he would need to come later. And Ix’s arrows had been a problem, but only because Kajmar’s voice stunned me.

I needed to get rid of him. It was too dangerous to allow myself anywhere near the others so long as he could freeze me at any moment.

I had nothing but blades. So that meant there was no strategy to this next part. I just had to run.

My gaze locked to Kajmar, who danced in erratic fits and starts across the room. I readied my blades, braced myself, and sprinted for him with everything I had.

I didn’t notice the smell until I got within two strides of him, but once I did, it was impossible to ignore. It was putrid, wringing my stomach into knots and forcing bile up my throat. He was half-decomposed. Thick paint smeared his face, cracking over slackened muscles.

He was a corpse.

And not just a corpse, but one I recognized. It was the Rishan man Raihn had killed the first night of the Kejari. Our own fallen rivals, dragged back for one final fight.