She took off the wreath and set it on the table in front of the Grimoire, giving me a grudgingly respectful dip of the head. But I could see the challenge blaze to life in her pale blue eyes, the way her hand lingered on the circlet before she withdrew.

As if she was saying, Don’t get too attached, my girl. Me and mine will be having this back.

Rebellion surged up in my throat, a revolt so hostile and potent it almost felt like it hadn’t come entirely from me. No, ma’am, you won’t, I thought back at her. Not if I have any say in it.

As Igraine rejoined the throng, I slid my fingers down the page, where more words had resolved. “I call now upon the combatants of the seventh Gauntlet of the Grove. Scions of Houses Blackmoore, Thorn, and Avramov . . . you may approach.”

The three of them stepped out from the crowd’s lip, moving to stand in front of me. Gareth wore a pair of titanium vambraces like some kind of modern knight errant, and flowing robes in the family’s traditional onyx and gold. Allegedly the colors of Morgan le Fay herself, though it was beyond me how the Blackmoores might know the favorite colors of an Arthurian sorceress who’d lived a thousand years ago, if she’d ever lived at all. I guess they figured what the hell; not like there was anyone around to prove them wrong.

Gareth must have known that it would be me, but the sickening recognition on his face as the pieces fell fully into place—Arbiter Harlow, Emmeline Harlow, the “new” girl from the Shamrock Cauldron—was immensely satisfying all the same.

Next to Gareth, Rowan Thorn stood swathed in a druid’s moss green and brown hooded cloak, holding a hazelwood staff in one strong hand, a tiny wren perched on its tip. He was much taller, broader across the shoulders, and even more handsome than I remembered, with his hair in waist-length locs and a sprinkling of freckles across the wide bridge of his nose. He shot me a closed-lipped smile, his hazel eyes warm as he tipped the tiniest of winks, as if to say, It’s on.

And then there was Talia.

Her cowl was pushed back, hair twisted away from her face and piled on her head in a gleaming mass. Under a mulberry cape, she wore a bell-sleeved charcoal kirtle with a plunging neckline; the Avramov garnet winked in the hollow of her throat, above the silver corvid skull pendant that nestled against her cleavage. She was all strong jaw and winging cheekbones in the firelight, her eyes ghostly pale against the shadows that played across her face.

She looked like a daughter of Lilith, the kind of succubus you’d want creeping into your bedroom at the dark of the moon. And she smiled at me like a secret, the slightest curve to the corners of her mouth.

Even caught up in the mantle’s heady magic, I couldn’t make myself stop looking at her.