It didn’t really surprise me; Linden’s mother was exactly the kind of person who’d be proud of her son for the sort of symbolic sacrifice he’d just made for Talia, even if it had cost his own family their shot at this challenge.

“Is that so?” Igraine replied, pointedly transferring her gaze to Aspen. “Tell me, are you as convinced as your wife, Elder Thorn? Or do you also wonder why your son has taken leave of his senses to partner with the Avramov?”

“I’ll thank you not to drag our son’s faculties into this, Igraine,” Aspen said through a tight jaw. The terse courtesy had a pronounced tinge of “keep my kid’s name out of your mouth,” an even more implicit “bitch” hovering just beyond. I knew Linden’s father as an easygoing man with a ready smile, freckled and hazel-eyed like his son, always quick to lend advice or a hand. But his close-cropped black hair was flecked with gray now, the lines around his full, wide mouth more pronounced, and he clearly had a much shorter rope for bullshit.

“Just because this outcome doesn’t sit well with you is no call for rudeness,” he bit off. “I’ve got nothing else to add. Gabrielle’s made our position clear.”

“Rudeness?!” Igraine gasped, clutching a fist to her chest like some umbrage-stricken Karen. “I am not being rude, Aspen, but rather appalled at this travesty. This transgression against the very spirit of what the founders intended for this contest.”

“Spending much time chatting up Caelia these days, are we?” Elena Avramov asked, tossing a sheet of hammered-copper hair over one shoulder. She wasn’t literally inspecting her crimson nails, but the semibored detachment on her face suggested that she was buffing them on the inside. There was an indolent ease to her every movement, Big Witch Energy that somehow read like a provocation. “I had no idea you’d taken a new interest in necromancy, how fun and unexpected! You should have said, I would’ve joined you. Next time I’ll bring the vol-au-vents and the scarab blood.”

The Blackmoore matriarch cast her a withering glare. “Unlike some, I don’t need to drag our ancestress from her rest, as if she were some common demon, just to know what she would have wanted.”

Elena rolled her eyes, a tiny, skyward flick. “So a purely self-serving interpretation, then. I would’ve expected sour grapes to be beneath you, Igraine, after all these years of winning. Isn’t rising above it all the vaunted Blackmoore way?”

“Not when my grandson has been cheated of his rightful victory!”

“Cheated?” The blasé act dropped in an instant, fire lighting in Elena’s shimmery eyes. They were a pale jade green ringed dramatically with darker color. Black wisps began to rise off her hands, curling and smoking around her fingers, the same eldritch stuff that had propelled Talia’s ascent over the lake. “Are you suggesting that my daughter didn’t fairly earn this victory for her House?”

“This isn’t a victory, it’s a goddess-damned farce!” Igraine spat, gaze trawling around for more victims until it snagged on my father, who stood next to my mother a good few feet away from the fray. “Ah, James, there you are—our voice of reason! As our record keeper, what is your opinion on the matter?”