As soon as I saw it, I finally remembered what Gareth had shared with me, on a long-ago sunny day when we lay together under one of Tintagel’s many weeping willows, clouds rushing above us through its drooping leaves. Caelia Blackmoore had wanted her bed preserved in her final resting place, Gareth had said, with rose petals sprinkled over it; so her spirit always had somewhere to return to where it could dream sweetly, even after death.

It was an oddly beautiful image, the idea of Caelia’s spirit settling down onto the bed, hands clasped over her chest, the ghostly skeins of her golden hair spreading over the pillow. There was something both haunting and morbidly romantic about it—just the kind of tantalizing tidbit to share with your secret Harlow girlfriend, whom you were about a month away from ditching.

Now it struck me more that the Blackmoore matriarch must have been a righteously self-indulgent hedonist who just really loved her bed, something I could understand on a deep level.

Unlike with the scrying mirror, there was no hint of presence here, no willful waft of Caelia herself. Just the all-encompassing silence of the crypt, along with the faint keen of the stubborn wind that wedged its way through the chinks—and the glow of the two blue roses that hovered just above the pillow, their thorns curved and petals perfectly formed.

So, Rowan hadn’t been here yet, that was something—though I had no way of knowing how many of the other tokens Gareth had gathered up by now. For all I knew, he could be ahead of me; at the lake already, maybe even back at Castle Camelot with all the tokens in hand.

I reached for one of the roses, its light filtering into my palm, the thought of the scant time I had left trickling through my head like sand through an hourglass.

Then I closed my eyes and thought myself to Lady’s Lake.

30

And the Victor Is . . .

Just like Talia had said of me, Lady’s Lake was beautiful by moonlight.

The full moon swam in the black silk of its surface, along with blurred reflections of the ice-chip stars, twinkling like sprite lights sunk below the depths. There was a hovering sense of such enormity, of a wild, vast magic, that it stripped your breath away from your lungs. This hallowed sky, and its watery twin; this jewel of a lake upon a hilltop, and the shining town down at its base, where all the magic eventually ended up like a cascade.

As above, so below. Just like all of us witches had learned since we were small.

I could see the hazy spill of blue somewhere under the water a few yards off the bank, about three or four feet down. But I’d still have to swim out to it, and then dive deep into the lake—which, by now, was bound to be blisteringly cold. Rowan had swum it once already, for the first challenge, but it would have been a little warmer then; and Rowan probably also had at least one solid exothermic spell up his sleeve.