Page 128 of The Lure of Wolves and Whispers

“She’s staking her claim.” My hands shake. All of her attendants—their eyes are the same pale crystal as hers, their hair just as white-blond and knotted with elaborate, tiny braids.

Cymreans.

“Yes,” Talon bites out, and snatches two glass cups from a servant moving slowly through the crowd past us. “She is.”

They mutter a strange, haunting string of syllables undertheir breath, and the rolling scrape reminds me of when I tried to sound out the runes of the ogham marking in the margin of the book Wolf gave me. Close to Eireician, but too far removed to understand.

I take the cup they pass to me and drop my voice. “Was that Old Eireician?”

The tendons down their forearms cord, one hand brushing over the gauntlet sheath and the tiny knives I know are hidden there. “It was. Why?”

While Old Eireician, when spoken and written in the common alphabet, isn’t forbidden like ogham is, the ancient tongue is rare all the same. It’s a near-dead language only mages and those with the time to learn it understand—so the idea nudging at the edges of my mind is probably useless.

Keeping my voice low, I try out the syllables of the phrase in the book Wolf left me, never taking my eyes off theirs.

Talon’s brow furrows. “Where did you learn that?” Their eyes take on a flinty edge.

“What does it mean?” I push, bringing the glass to my lips again.

Talon rubs a hand along their red-gold stubble. “That’s a tricky bit of interpretation.” The copper of their shorn hair glows in the candlelight. “Even in the last Assay, there was debate among the mages about it. You know the motto of the Assay?”

Of course I do. It’s shaped everything I’ve done here.

“Only one will survive.” The wine sends bursts of tart berries across my tongue.

Talon nods, the simple black mask across their face hiding any tension at the edges of their eyes. But I see the way one hand moves to their sword hilt.

As if what they will say next is treasonous.

“Well, the Old Ones had a more… aspirational definition of what it means tosurvive. They believed every hardship raises us up into the people we’re meant to be. That survival as a concept is impossible to separate from the growth we should take from every setback.” Talon draws in a steady breath. “So, they used the same word forsurviveas they did forrise.”

In the shimmering heat, the crackle of bonfires snaps and hisses through my racing mind as I piece the implications together. “But that would mean…”

Only one will rise.

That would mean the most central tenet of the Assay is wrong.

That forcing us to fight to the death is achoiceby each High King.

A choice to be cruel. To waste so many young lives. And for what? To show that they could, and that no one will challenge them?

“Do they know?” I breathe out the words, and don’t have to say who I mean. The High King and High Queen. The Seven Families. All the noble daughters, and the other nobles.

“It was one of the first schisms between the Martyr and the High King, twenty years ago. The choice to keep needlessly wasting so many lives. When the prince’s mother died and the High King ordered yet another Assay under the same rules,andlet a Cymrean compete…”

“How could they’ve let her in?” The haze of the bonfires shimmers in the dark.

Talon’s scarred hands grip tighter on the wine cup.

“You know the High Queen was the Cymrean ambassador’s daughter?”

I nod.

“Well, since she had been born here while her father was serving in the post, and one of the Seven Families had no daughters, the High King overruled his advisors and let her in. Fang has always said he thought the possibility of a Cymrean queen would mean they’d help protect him against the mages. He despised the Martyr.”

That sounds just like what Wolf had told me—about the Martyr interfering in politics and the High King interfering with the mages.

“I think that was the first real thing that infuriated the noble families in the uprising. That made them see they had to be willing to force change.” Talon’s gaze shutters just as Cash’s eyes flicker to me from across the rippling heat, and my head swims. “The Martyr always believed that there’s a better way for this isle, even if it takes sacrifice. It’s why the Whisperers are still fighting for that dream, after everything it’s cost us.”