“You can’t finish it like this, Rowan,” Talia grunted, watching him struggle, her own face frighteningly pale. “Stop being a stubborn ass and just let go.”

Rowan threw a glance over his shoulder at Gareth, who was still loosing spells left and right, shrieking with fury as each burst evanesced as soon as it struck the ring.

“He’ll hurt you,” Rowan said through clenched teeth, echoing my own fear. “Talia, it’s not worth—”

“He won’t. Just. GO.”

She said the last with such forceful conviction that it rattled something loose in him. With a reluctant nod, Rowan let his part of the antimagic spell lapse—and with much more power abruptly available to him, he also managed to tie off the Disanimating Curse, turning the dragon from scaled, sinuous flesh to gaudily painted wood and plaster in a breath.

Knuckling sweat off his forehead, he reached up to lever open the dragon’s jaws and touch the token glowing in its maw.

“Third victory goes to House Thorn!” I thundered as the glow spread through his limbs, flaring in the bright white of his sudden grin. “Houses Thorn, Blackmoore, and Avramov must now compete once more, to break the tie!”

“This is bullshit!” Gareth bellowed, his face turning almost maroon.

Then he thrust both hands, spitting and sparking with so much magic it distorted the air around them, right into the barrier, wrenching with all his strength.

Without Rowan to fortify his end, the antimagic buckled at the assault . . . then split apart, with a sound like some cosmic-sized piece of paper rending in two. Released from bondage, the bright plume of Thorn magic whipped around, searching for somewhere to spend itself, before leaping into a nearby planter—which shot up into a riot of green, bursting from a decorative shrub into something like a banyan, sprawling and leafy and many-trunked, its former container scattered around the roots in shards.

And the long filament of ectoplasm slingshotted back to its origin—burying itself fast in Talia’s chest, with such force that it swept her off her feet and slammed her into the courtyard’s wall.

28

Then They Must Forfeit

Talia!” I cried out, the Arbiter’s booming octaves and my own fear turning the word into an aural cataclysm.

The very air around us seemed to tremble, until the assembled spectators clapped hands over their ears, some of them stumbling and falling to a knee. With an effort, I cut myself off, afraid I might fracture a new fault line in the ground under my feet, or set off some tectonic catastrophe beneath the town. The last thing we needed was an actual earthquake tonight.

Then I was in the courtyard in many fewer steps than it should have taken, like the puss in boots, the world blurring into streaks around me. My colossal Arbiter’s form should have been too big to pass under the covered drawbridge or through the double doors, but large-scale magic like the mantle’s spell did funny things to matter. I shot through the same hallways I’d seen the combatants traverse, my head just clearing the ceilings—before I tumbled out into the courtyard, where I’d seen Talia slither down the wall and collapse to the ground.