“All three of you?” Gigi searched the old woman’s eyes, as if the answer were somehow hidden behind those remarkable violet irises of hers.
“There are always three,” Helena said, and suddenly, Gigiknew. Avery had disappeared first. Then Eve.
There are always three.
“Three… Candidates?” Gigi said, and then at least half the neurons in her brain fired simultaneously.We were, all three of us, so very young.“You were a Candidate?”
That made sense, didn’t it? It was the only thing that made sense. Helena knew about the Gilded Blade because she had been where Avery was, where Eve was. She’d saidyes.
“A lifetime ago,” Helena confirmed. “The year was nineteen fifty-one.” She pulled another card from the deck and turned it over—and another and another until the final suit made an appearance.
“Hearts.Love.” Helena’s violet eyes closed, and she lifted a hand to her neck—to Calla’s necklace.The fleur-de-lis.Helena pulled the pendant from beneath her blouse and closed her fingers around it. “Love,” she whispered again, and theachein her voice stole Gigi’s next breath.
“You gave that necklace to Calla.” Gigi paused, just for a moment. “Who gave it to you?”
Nora had said that symbol didn’t belong in this town, which raised the question: Wheredidit belong?
“Vega.” Violet eyes slowly opened. “We weren’t allowed to use our real names in the Crucible. I knew her only as Vega.”
Vega. Another Candidate in 1951.
“You remind me of her,” Helena told Gigi. “You and your sister both. Two sides of the same coin. Vega before and Vega after.”
Before the Crucible. And after.“Savannah and I are nothing alike,” Gigi said.
“We were all very different from one another to start—Vega, Andy, and me. As different as any three young women could possibly be.Before.”
“Before you were forged,” Gigi filled in. “The Crucible—it’s a competition?” There was no time for an interrogation like the present.
“Yes and no. There are trials. Some you must complete alone, others together.”
Gigi thought about Avery—and Eve. “But in the end, only one person wins?”
“Only oneascends,” Helena corrected, finally letting go of her fleur-de-lis.
“And the necklace…” Gigi stared at it. “It was Vega’s?”
“Vega came from a certain family, a very old family. A dangerous one. She was a light in the darkness, Vega—and so very dangerous herself.”
Helena was using the worddangeroustoo much for Gigi’s liking, and she couldn’t help thinking about Nora telling her to run away, about Nora telling her that she’d never survive.
“What happens to the Candidates who lose?” Gigi asked. Helena was here. She was alive. That had to be a good thing, right? If all Avery had to do waslose…
“‘Spin, spin’,” Helena murmured, “said the spider to the web.”
Talk cryptic to me, Gigi thought.I can take it!This time, she didn’t let that phrase go unremarked. “The person whoascendsat the end of the Crucible, they become the Watcher.” Gigi paused. “A spider?”
That seemed like a rational enough guess.
Helena neither confirmed nor denied that interpretation, so Gigi pressed on. “And the other two who areforged… if they’re not the spider, they’re the web.” It made sense—a sudden, unmistakable, horrible kind of sense. “And the spider, it talks to the web.”
“Spin, spin,” said the spider to the web.The Gilded Blade, it wasn’t just the ones who ascended. The ones in charge. The ones who issued invitations and warnings.
Helena was part of it. She didn’t just know about the Gilded Blade. She was one of them.
“You would have done quite well, I think, with proper training,” the old woman told Gigi. “I can see why the current Watcher might have chosen you—or tried to.”
I said no, Gigi thought,and I was warned that the Gilded Blade has ways of taking care of messes. And you are a part of the Gilded Blade.But it was too late for caution now. Gigi had been born messy. In for a penny, in for the whole shebang.