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“Bracken,” I echo, a look of horror slacking my face. Second to General Caspan. The beast whose threat shudders my bones and chills my insides.

Then, as though fingers snap in my mind, I remember how often he looked over his shoulder at Melantha on the stands at the first passage; I remember the disdainful glares he threw Aleana’s way, all the contempt he carries for Daxeel—both children of the female he had, children who are not his own.

“Before the first passage could even begin…” She shakes her head. Fine strands of inky hair fall from her stern braid. “It was only the first ceremony when evate found me. I was looked upon by a general, a warlord with a reputation that frightened even me. Like other warlords, he came to assess the contenders. Once he found me and experienced evate, I was thrown in the dungeons beneath the streets of Kithe for the entire length of the Sacrament.”

I finish my tea, as smooth as lukewarm water pouring down my throat, but with a kick of the poppies that will ease me to sleep soon.

And I hang on her every word.

“Morticia had to take my place,” she sighs, and a weariness pinches her nose. “She was my second.”

Like me, Morticia signed as a second.

The pattern of it flutters my lashes with a faint flicker of surprise.

I never knew that about Morticia, that she competed in the Sacrament at all, let alone as a second to her sister.

Finally, Melantha starts on the bread slices she earlier painted black with the fume-ish smelling spread. Her sharp teeth sink into the cooked dough so easily that it almost seems to melt.

“Morticia was never like me,” she tells me after a firm swallow. “She fought in the Sacrament to survive, not to win.”

She’s like you.

That’s what she’s really telling me.

“It was at Comlar she met her litalf husband. They fell in love,” she adds with a look I can read only as distaste and arrogance. The racism of her judgement oozes from her like pus from a festering wound—and it aims right at me. “He saved her life in the first passage. At the end of the second, she ran off to be with him in Licht. I was released from the dungeons to find that the litalves had won the Sacrament, and I became a prisoner again. In marriage. In motherhood. In evate.”

“You couldn’t compete the next century?”

Her eyes narrow on me. “One can only sign their name once.”

I know this, so I deflate on the chair with a hint of shame that I even asked at all.

“Why are you telling me this?” I ask, hushed, and stare down at my plate. We both know she doesn’t feel any need to bond with me, to confide her past horrors in my pain.

With Melantha, there is agenda.

“When Agnar approached me in the throes of evate, I rejected him. I claimed my heart to belong to another. We were not alone when I shamed him.” Her eyes gleam. “The shame of slights are carried by all fae. But to dark males slighted bytheir evates…”She exhales a breath wrapped in tension, and I have this awful sense that maybe,maybeshe worries for me. “That slight cannot be controlled by their wants and desires. It burns the soul, chars a piece of it—then that mark festers, it rots, and itconsumesthe bond.”

I do not eat more of my snack. The ham has warmed in the air of the kitchens, the cheese has started to sweat on the plate.

But I am hooked by the awful terribles she tells me.

“Evate is a curse.” She pushes aside her plate. Her jaw rolls before she plants her elbows on the table, brings her hands together in a clasp, then levels her stare with mine. “It stole me from the Sacrament—but to you, perhaps it saved me. Ask yourself, at what cost?”

I bite down on the inside of my cheek before I ask, “Are you warning me of your son and his cruel nature?”

“I am warning you of evate; of ownership and possession and primal rage that you think you understand, but you do not.” Her eyes flash, pits of tar caught in lightning storms. “I warn you that whatever move you think you are making, Daxeel sees it before you make it. He herds you, and you think your steps are of your own accord. He corners you, and you think you stand there willingly. That you drag my Aleana into this,” she spits the words with a curl of her lip and her voice drops to something gravelly, “is where my threat lies.”

Before she can elaborate on her sickly daughter, my intentions with her, I grunt a huffy sound and push away the empty teacup. “With respect, Melantha, my friendship with Aleana has little to do with Daxeel.”

“Little, but not nothing,” Melantha snarls, and her bones go rigid beneath her skin, like she’s about ready to pounce on me.

That is a fight I will lose, fast.

I fight the urge to roll my eyes, to sass. “I saylittlebecause I met her through our shared connections—” I’m silenced.

Melantha slams her hand down on the bench.