“Has he done this before?”
Her gaze sharpens. “Survived? Plenty of times.” She pushes off the frame. “You should worry about yourself, not him. He knows how to play the game.” Her eyes find mine, sweeping over my face like she’s looking for something. “Although you’re good at that too, aren’t you? Subtlety is your friend here, Kay. Use it.”
She’s halfway back to her cot before I can press her. I sink onto my own mattress, elbows braced on my knees, letting the ache of the day settle in. My hands still feel the phantom weight of the arch’s stone, the strange pull of those gold flames. The trials keep changing their shape, but the part that scares me isn’t that they twist the world around me, it’s how easily they try to twist me.
The barracks have gone still for the night, but sleep will not come. George is a warm, purring lump against my side, his claws kneading the blanket like he’s working out all the indignities of being left behind in Gilded. Every so often, he huffs—a sharp,indignant little sound—and I can’t tell if he’s annoyed with me or the world in general.
I scratch behind his ear. “Yeah,” I murmur, “I didn’t like it either.”
The room smells faintly of oil and metal polish from the armor racks. Across the row, Lyra’s breathing is slow and steady. Elira’s turned toward the wall, a book face down on the table beside his bunk. But Varo’s bed is still empty. No boots under it. No discarded tunic. Just a hollow space that makes my chest tighten. It’s not the first time a contender’s been gone after a trial. Sometimes the healers keep someone overnight. Sometimes the Council calls them in. But this feels different, like the space itself is holding its breath.
And Caziel is gone, too.
The air feels wrong without him. Not tense. Not sulking. Just, absent. Does he know about the trials? Plural? He must. George shifts, stretching a paw across my ribs, and I pull him closer. My eyes trace the shadows along the ceiling, the flicker of torchlight from the hall. Two trials back-to-back. My muscles ache, my head is still full of Gilded’s golden haze, and now the people who’ve somehow become my anchors are nowhere to be found.
The Rite doesn’t take prisoners. And it doesn’t give them back.
CHAPTER FIFTY
KAY
Iwake to the kind of quiet that isn’t peace, just the absence of noise. The barracks always hum—even in sleep, even after a trial. Someone snores, someone mutters, someone turns over too hard and rattles the cot legs. Today it’s a held breath stretched thin over wood and stone. For a few seconds I lie still with my eyes closed and tell myself that’s all it is. Quiet. Nothing to climb out of. Nothing gilded, nothing black, nothing waiting. My hand finds the dip beside my ribs automatically, the warm, familiar weight that has outlasted cities and temp jobs and a thousand small humiliations. Empty. The blanket there is cool.
“George?” I whisper, the word getting swallowed by the rafters. “Not again, you goddamn menace.
No answering chirrup. No offendedmrrp. My throat tightens in a way that has nothing to do with pride or the thin air at this altitude. He wanders. He’s a cat. He has his own agenda. We’ve had this conversation before—well, I talked and he stared and blinked slow like I was an idiot—but he always ends up back pressed against my side by morning. Always. Okay fine, usually.
Not today.
I push the blanket back and sit up too fast. The room tilts like a residual Gilded hangover, like sugar rotting the edges of my vision, and then rights itself. Varo’s cot is squared to within an inch of its life, untouched. Of course it is. It hits me again—how few of us are left. If Icount too long, I’ll start slotting faces into the gaps and then I won’t be able to stop.
I swing my feet to the floor. The stone is cold and real, blessedly rough against my soles. I rub my thumb over the brand at my wrist, the pendant that sits warm as a heartbeat beneath the tunic I fell asleep in. It hums, faint and steady, the way a refrigerator back on Earth sounds when you’ve tuned the rest of your apartment out. The ordinary-ness of it in this place steadies me.
“George?” I try again, louder. Lyra shifts but doesn’t wake. The word dies against the beams like I never said it.
A mean little thought worms into my thoughts,what if this is another trial?Gilded didn’t give me an arch. It didn’t offer a deal. It just… started. One blink and I was already in the middle of a room too big to be real, being told I deserved everything I never asked for. What if Argent is clever enough to wear new clothes? What if I’m already inside it again and the trick this time is making me chase something I can’t catch?
I force air out through my nose until the stinging behind my eyes dissolves. Reality checklist. The air smells faintly of oil and metal polish and the old heat of yesterday’s torches. There’s grit under my heel where someone tracked sand in and didn’t sweep it up. My cheek aches when I touch it, the bruise from Malrik’s hand slightly swollen and tender. I pick at a ragged edge of linen until it gives under my fingers.Real, real, real.
Also real: an empty patch of blanket where a cat should be.
“Okay,” I say to the room that isn’t listening. “Fine.”
I pull on my boots without lacing them, gather my cloak around my shoulders, and step between cots like a thief who’s bad at sneaking. The door sticks the way it always does, swollen in the frame, and then lets go with a sigh that would wake the dead if the dead cared. No one stirs and I refuse to let my mind dwell on that detail. The corridor beyond is cool and shadowed, morning light prying at the high arrow slits and laying thin gold on the flagstones. The castle breathes around me, pipes, wind, distant voices too far to be words.
He’s fine. He’s always fine. He’s survived more lives than I can recall.I’m repeating that like a spell even as my walk turns toward the outer yard.
We’re down to almost nothing now. The corridors tell me as much—no loose-limbed bravado leaning against the pillars, no clatter of a dozen blades being sharpened in chorus. The last trials emptied these walls in a way the first ones didn’t. Obsidian was a cut that I could press together and pretend would heal clean. Cobalt was an ice bath I clambered out of gasping and laughing because I was still here. Viridian pressed a thumb to my worst longing until it bruised. Umbral taught me how heavy a bed can be. Gilded paraded me into a room full of mirrors and told me to smile while I disappeared.
And I survived that last one without a thread.
The thought flashes and leaves a bright afterimage. I want to show it to Caziel the way you show a found feather to a friend.Look? See? I did it.His face the moment before he lets himself be proud of me lives rent-free in my head. The way his mouth softens, and he tries to be stern about it anyway. I look for him without meaning to, down the empty side passage, across the empty landing. Nothing. A shape of absence where he should be. He could be anywhere. He has duties. He’s not mine to summon by wanting.
The yard wakes slow under a sky the color of new iron. Someone is beating dust out of a carpet two balconies over; the rhythm is comforting and rude at the same time. I cross to the low gate that leads toward the training rings, my breath ghosting in front of me, boots scuffing grit that no one will sweep until noon. The pendant hums again against my skin like it’s answering a question I forgot to ask.
“Please,” I tell the empty morning because I don’t have a better audience. “Please just let him be there,”
The path bends around the armory, past the rack where shields go after sessions. I round it ready to catalog every shadow for teeth. There’s a cat on the rail post, the definition of smug. Tail draped, paws tucked, face arranged into a mask that says, “I could have been anywhere, and I chose here. You should be grateful.” He blinks at me once and looks away like I’m late. My knees go loose with relief in a way I’m going to deny later.
